bouillabaisse

noun

1. (countable, uncountable)A type of fish soup or stew from Provence, France.

   “And here's an inn, not rich and splendid, / But still in comfortable case; / The which in youth I oft attended, / To eat a bowl of Bouillabaisse. // This Bouillabaisse a noble dish is— / A sort of soup, or broth, or brew, / Or hotchpotch of all sorts of fishes, / That Greenwich never could outdo; / Green herbs, red peppers, mussels, saffern, / Soles, onions, garlic, roach, and dace; / All these you eat at Terré's tavern, / In that one dish of Bouillabaisse.”

   “First of all they dined together at a delightful little Franco-Italian pothouse near Leicester Square, where they had bouillabaisse (imagine the Laird's delight), and spaghetti, and a poulet rôti, which is such a different affair from a roast fowl!”

   “Further to the east he could see the jetty of the Yacht Club, where one may eat to surfeit of the best bouillabaisse in the world, in some of the best company.”

   “A remarkable bouillabaisse is served up in the little restaurant where I take my meals, that is, lunch, for in the evening I eat only fruit, figs and grapes mostly, in my room.”

   “On the very bridge of the boat, exhilarated, he [Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec] concocted elaborate bouillabaisses, refining his recipes with priestly gravity.”

2. (countable, figuratively, uncountable)A mixture.

   “La Sirène du Mississipi is a synthesis of the work he [François Truffaut] has been doing during the preceding six or eight years, a great bouillabaisse of [Jean] Renoir, [Alfred] Hitchcock, [Humphrey] Bogart, [Antoine] Doinel, [...]”

   “Social psychologists differentiated between "merely desegregated" and "genuinely integrated" schools [...]. The former refers to a mere racial bouillabaisse and implies nothing about the quality of racial interaction that is a precondition to effective learning.”

   “By the mid-twentieth century the avant-garde, the good, the bad, and the fatal in-between [in art] have all become mixed in one indigestible bouillabaisse, and [Dwight] Macdonald has assigned himself the position of pointing out which is which.”

   “The word "megadiversity" has been coined to describe such wildlife bouillabaisses, where many conservationists believe they should focus their efforts.”

   “It's who I am that matters. God, you can see the Indian in me. There are 200 kinds of Indians in Nicaragua—actually, I [Barbara Carrera] call myself a bouillabaisse of bloodlines.”