bouillabaisse

noun

Etymology: Borrowed from French bouillabaisse, from Occitan bolhabaissa, bouiabaisso, possibly a compound of bolhir (“to boil”) + abaissar (“to lower (the temperature)”).

1. 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!”

2. 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.”