"What next?" is the question.

[venta]

Last wednesday I managed to meet up (long overduly) with beckyl and grumblesmurf for a some food and chatting. Being all of a fishy inclination, we went to Fishers on St Clements - I'm not 100% if I've eaten there before, but it's very fine.

Culinary points of note:

* Turbots are not as big as I think they are. Or at least, not necessarily. If they were, I suspect BeckyL would not have been able to eat a whole one. I blame Lynsey Davis for misleading me.

* Amaretto ice cream. This is a good thing.

* Restaurants which have an interesting variety of soft drinks are a very good thing.

I ordered smoked trout for a starter. Not because I prefer smoked trout over the other things offered, but because it was served with...

Brussel sprout fricassee.

Now, the only sensible response to "brussel sprout fricassee" is "what the hell?" and either you're one of the people who'll refuse it on those grounds, or you're one of the people who'll order it on those grounds. I'm in the latter camp. If people are going to put barking things on menus, I'm going to order them. Dammit.

As it turned out, it was quite nice (and very good with the smoked trout). Halves of sprouts, friend in lots of butter and garlic (I think). But... we discovered that none of us knew what a fricassee actually was.

I remember eating chicken fricassee at school (and quite liking it) - a sort of creamy chicken-in-sauce affair, served with rice. Other people seem to agree that that's what chicken fricassee is. The sprouts in no way resembled that.

A handy online dictionary defines it as:

Poultry or meat cut into pieces and stewed in gravy.

Now, that doesn't seem to describe either the chicken or the sprouts. I would have thought that it was something to do with frying, but that doesn't fit the dictionary or the chicken.

So, the question now becomes... what do you understand by a fricassee, if anything ? Knowing the etymology and the dictionary definitions is no help if it doesn't let you accurately assess what you're going to get served in a restaurant. I don't know whether the word is now used very broadly, or whether Fishers were chucking about terms they didn't understand.

In other news, does anyone know how to eat bouillabaisse ? I ordered it, and it arrived with parmesan (grated), crostini dripping with pesto, and rouille (a spicy yellow sauce). I sprinkled the parmesan on the soup, whereupon its flavour was completely swamped by the rich fishiness (which is the best thing to happen to the flavour of parmesan, in my opinion). I dipped the crostini in the soup, which seemed to work quite well. I experimentally dipped some plain bread in the rouille and then the soup, and that was nice. Dipping the crostini in the rouille wasn't practical owing to the excess of pesto.

Should one stir the rouille into the soup? Something else ?

As BeckyL pointed out, the correct way to do it is however I damn well please. It's my dinner and I can eat it any way I want, which is an attitude I wholeheartedly endorse. However, I would also like to know the correct way to do things, if only so's I can ignore them properly.

Oh, and according to a quizlet I just swiped from shrydar's LJ, I am Feel Good Inc, by the Gorillaz. I'm very jealous, because Shrydar himself was Hung Up.

Comments

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Re: fricassée - I'd always understood it to mean (informally speaking) "fried in something wet". A distinct from the style of frying one more frequently uses where you keep everything fairly dry so as to brown the edges of things and avoid accidentally making stew.

However, I couldn't tell you where I got this idea from, so it's in no way reliable.