France and the Alps · Volume 11, Butter, Cider and the Buckwheat Line
Cotriade
Brittany
Illustration
- Time
- 20 minutes
- Researched
- Researched from 72 sources in the brief
From the Breton kaoter, cauldron, and kaoteriad, the cauldron's contents, though its exact regional origin is genuinely disputed even within French sourcing, one account placing it in southern Brittany from at least 1877 with older roots, another dating it specifically to the 16th century Auray area of the Morbihan.
As tradition built it
Serves 4. 20 minutes for the potatoes, then 10 for the fish.
Ingredients
The broth
- 50 g semi-salted butter
- 1½ onions, sliced
- 1 tbsp tomato purée
- 2 litres fish stock
- 8 potatoes, in pieces
- 1 stick celery
- 1 pinch bouquet garni
- to taste salt and pepper
The fish
- 300 g mackerel
- 500 g sea bream
- 750 g hake or pollock
- 4 scallops
To serve
- to serve brown bread or buckwheat galettes
Method
- Melt the butter in a cocotte and cook the onions until golden.
- Stir in the tomato purée and pour in the stock. Add the potatoes, celery and bouquet garni and season. Cook 20 minutes from the boil.
- Add the mackerel, bream and hake and let it barely simmer 10 minutes. Add the scallops 3 minutes before the end.
- Lift the fish and potatoes out with a skimmer onto a dish. Pour the broth, and serve with brown bread or buckwheat galettes.
Notes
The recipe is Paysan Breton's, the Laïta dairy cooperative, and it is a modern cotriade, with stock, tomato and scallops. The plain version this record carried, a kilo of potatoes, 4 to 5 onions and 200 g of salted butter with white wine, water and a vinaigrette for the fish, is the Lorient tourist office's, which the atlas does not build on. No Breton cook's or newspaper's recipe could be reached.
What a modern chef changes
A properly built and clarified stock, fish cooked to their own timing, and a twice-strained broth
Rung 3
Method
- Roast a portion of the bones and trim briefly first, deglaze, and clarify the resulting stock through a chinois for real depth and clarity before the remaining fish is cooked in it, rather than the cloudier, more one-note result of simmering everything together from raw.
- Cook each fish separately, briefest first, following the timing discipline the technique ladder sets out for shellfish and applying the same logic to fin fish, so a delicate wrasse and a firmer conger eel each reach the pot only at the point that gives them their own correct doneness, rather than all going in together.
- Serve the broth first exactly as tradition does, but pass it once more through a chinois immediately before pouring, for a genuinely clean, restaurant-grade first course rather than a rustic one.