A Pig in Provence (17 page)

When we renovated the house, the
braise
was dismantled, and the wall was smoothed with a new coating of plaster, leaving no trace of it except in my memory and in a few photographs. Those first summers, though, it was integral to all our meals, because it held the little cooktop.

I made doughnuts often during the summer, using a recipe from the gray cookbook, so-called for its cover, which I had
brought with me from California when we first moved to France. A volume of more than a thousand pages, it was a gift from a family friend for my tenth birthday. My mother dismissed it, calling it too grown-up for a little girl, but that was exactly why I liked it. I still have the book, but the cover is long gone and the pages are frayed and stained. It’s been my lifelong friend and has crossed the Atlantic Ocean twice and survived many moves. Even now, I keep it on a shelf in my California kitchen and turn to it for my favorite brownie recipe or a quick reference on how to make a fresh cherry pie.

From it, I taught Ethel to make raised doughnuts, one of my childhood favorites. That day Ethel kneaded the dough on the wooden trestle table in the middle of the large room. After greasing a bowl with lard—true lard that Marie had rendered during the winter when she and Marcel slaughtered the annual pig—we put our dough in it, covered it with a cloth, then set it on the red-tiled windowsill to rise. When the dough was ready, we rolled it out on the floured table and used upturned glasses to cut circles. Sometimes we used knives instead and cut squares of random and irregular sizes, just for fun.

Ethel, who was then just about the same age as I was when I made my first doughnuts, especially liked the frying part. We heated chunks of white lard in her great-grandmother’s cast-iron Dutch oven that had made the journey first from Texas, then to California, then to France. When the fat was hot, Ethel, standing on a small stool, slid in the cut-out dough. “Watch out,” I said, hovering behind her, wanting to let her do it herself, but also afraid she would be splattered by the hot fat.

“I can do it. I won’t get burnt.”

“Here, let me turn them.”

“OK, but I get to take them out.”

I turned the doughnuts, and when the other side was brown, Ethel lifted them onto plates lined with the paper bags we saved from stores. When all the doughnuts were done, we put them, still warm, in a fresh paper bag and shook them with sugar, sampled a few, then called Oliver and Donald inside to try them.

As promised, Marie appeared a little before seven. Our doughnuts were tucked away, ready to serve. I had set the table ahead of time, and put out
pastis,
water, and olives. I wanted to be free to cook in the fireplace with Marie.

“I love fires,” Marie said as she carefully stacked twigs and then larger pieces of oak in an ever-rising bed on the fireplace hearth. She then lit the bottommost twigs.

“They keep you company. You tend them, take care of them, and they reward you with warmth and companionship.”

Marie and Marcel didn’t have a fireplace, and I suspected that for many years before we bought our piece of the big
mas,
they cooked in what was now our fireplace and then took the food upstairs to their kitchen. Tonight we’d eat in front of the fireplace, something I was sure they’d never done. The month of June had been a cool one so far, and a fire would not be unwelcome.

I had a
pastis
and Marie had
menthe l’eau,
and we chatted while we watched the oak burn down, poking and adjusting the fire until we had a bed of hot coals. Then we threw on the
sarments,
the grape prunings. They smoldered briefly before bursting into flame and perfuming the air. It was time to position the grilling rack on the bricks we had arranged earlier. Everyone was at the table now. Donald and Marcel were having a
pastis
and eating olives, and Oliver, Ethel, and Aileen, Marie and Marcel’s daughter, sipped on grenadine drinks and ate peanuts. Florent, their son, now fourteen and studying English in school, was trying out words such as “feesh” and “waater” on Ethel and
Oliver, while they laughed hysterically at his pronunciation, trying to get him to say “fish” and “water” instead.

Marie and I, hunkered by the fire, did the cooking. The slippery sardines went from their olive oil marinade onto the grill, where they quickly sizzled golden on one side and their eyes turned opaque, before we flipped them over. We grilled the fish in batches, filling a platter and sitting down to eat that batch before cooking another. At first I was carefully cutting and lifting the small fillet from each of the sardines on my plate until Marcel said, “Just pick it up and eat it. Like this.” He held a fish in two hands, like corn on the cob, and ate all but the head and tail.

“Like that,” he said, discarding the remains and picking up another fish, squeezing lemon over it before starting in. I have since witnessed this traditional style of eating sardines many times, none more impressive than at village
sardinades,
sardine feasts, where hundreds of people sit down at community tables to eat their fill of fish hot off the grill, drink wine, and socialize.

Sardines are one of the most important of the Mediterranean fisheries, and the Provençals have devised any number of ways to eat them. Besides being grilled, still my favorite way to eat them, they are also used to make a special
bouillabaisse
and a variety of souplike dishes. Sometimes they are boned and stuffed with fillings ranging from mussels and fish dumplings to spinach and parsley. They’re cooked in white wine, red wine, poached, baked, or fried. They’re combined with vegetables in jellied molds, whipped into
pâté
s, and molded into
timbales.
An accommodating little fish, the sardine is inexpensive, plentiful, and certainly versatile.

The children loved the usually forbidden idea of eating with their hands, and we snacked off the meat, imitating Marcel, leaving the head, tail, and bone behind, like a cat’s meal in a cartoon.
Bread and wine were copious, and at last, when there were no longer any fish, we gathered up the dishes and platters of bones and stacked them on the sink while Marcel set to slicing and passing out the sweet, honey-flavored Charentais melon he had brought with him. Ethel carried our sugar doughnuts to the table and I poured espresso into small white cups as the coals glimmered and darkened. Satiated and happy, we decided to leave the dishes until the morning, and we all went up to our respective beds, shutting the kitchen door behind us.

That summer, and all the summers and years to follow, I cooked mostly out of my neighbors’ gardens and orchards, especially Marie and Marcel’s, and, as often as I could, in the fireplace. Marcel was, and still is, the best vegetable and fruit grower around. Even now, in his mid-seventies, he plants more vegetables than he and all his relatives and neighbors can possibly eat, or than he can sell at the morning markets he and Marie still faithfully attend, as much for the sociability as for the income. You can always spot them—no elaborate refrigerated van, brightly colored retractable awnings, or cash register, just a modest folding table; crates of melons, tomatoes, green beans, asparagus, or peaches, whatever is in season for them; a small metal cash box; and a scale.

At any market in Provence one is sure to find people like Marie and Marcel selling the fruits and vegetables they grow themselves. Their day starts early, sometimes beginning with picking. Next they load their small trucks with the boxes of produce and tables, maybe an umbrella, and drive fifteen to seventy or more kilometers away and set up at the marketplace. By noon, if all goes well, their products are sold, and it’s time to pack up, go home for lunch, have a nap, and go back to work in their fields and orchards.

Some markets, called marchés paysans, are devoted exclusively to vendors who grow everything they sell, often biologique, or organic. In most markets, such vendors are mixed among others who are resellers of purchased fruits and vegetables. Producers like Marie and Marcel are often distinguished by their modest stalls, while the resellers’ stalls have far more elaborate setups that often include lights as well as ample awnings and banks of shelves holding the produce, often not locally grown. At the stalls of the artisanal vendors selling only their own produce, much of it shows variation in shape, size, and color because whatever is ripe is sold. The reseller vendors buy from large farming operations or brokers where products are sorted for uniform size and color before packing and shipping.

Marcel’s tomatoes, for example, are an heirloom variety he has grown for years from seeds that initially came from an uncle who brought them from Italy. They are big, round, and broad at the bottom with grooves that rise to narrow shoulders and a nearly pointed top. The dark red hue fades to green at the shoulders. Compared to the perfectly calibrated tomatoes from large-scale production in Holland and Spain, neatly packed in regular rows in specially designed cartons, Marcel’s tomatoes, stacked into his recycled wooden crates, look like an altogether different fruit. However, as soon as he arrives at the market, customers who know the flavor of his tomatoes line up to buy them, just as they do his melons, or his asparagus, or whatever else he is selling.

Since I first met Marie and Marcel, they have told me to help myself to whatever I wanted from their gardens, so that is what I have done. What a luxury! During those early summers with the children, when gardening and homegrown vegetables were still new to me, I reveled in picking shiny purple eggplants, perfectly ripe tomatoes, dark green zucchini, and long sweet red
peppers to prepare
ratatouille
as Marie taught me. I made tomato
coulis
under her instruction as well, cooking Marcel’s tomatoes down to a thick sauce with garlic, onion, and basil. The beans, whose vines climbed up tepees made from tree branches Marcel gathered from the forest, were long and fat, the best I had ever eaten. These, too, he grew from seeds originally from Italy, saving them every year just as he did the tomato seeds and melon seeds. The potatoes, all dug at once over a day or two in July, usually with me and Donald helping, were kept in Marie and Marcel’s
cave
along with onions and garlic, and I was welcome to those as well.

A favorite summer dish was simply potatoes cooked with beans until the beans were falling-apart tender, seasoned with salt, pepper, and
sarriette,
the winter savory that grows wild in high places. We followed the seasons with Marcel’s fruit, beginning with cherries in early June; moving on to apricots, peaches, plums, and melons; and, just before returning to California in late August, figs.

That first summer back in Provence, Marie also taught me how to cook some of her favorite dishes, including
petits farcis.
I now teach this dish to the students who come to my cooking school, after first taking them to one of the open markets to meet Marie and Marcel and buy the vegetables we need.

Marcel is from Nice, and
petits farcis
are a summer specialty of that city, although they are found all over Provence. Marie had learned how to make them from his Niçoise aunt, and that was the method she taught me. She began by scooping out halves of small eggplants, round zucchini, sweet peppers, and tomatoes. She finely minced the pulp of the eggplant and zucchini and seeded and chopped the tomato flesh. These all went into a bowl with a mixture of sausage and slices of a day-old
baguette
soaked
in and swelling with milk. The mixture was seasoned with finely minced onion and garlic, parsley, thyme, salt, and pepper, and bound together with an egg or two, then mounded into the vegetable shells.

Marie explained to me that now she cooks the
petits farcis
in her oven, but before she had an oven, she cooked them on top of the stove.

“I still do it that way sometimes. They get a crunchier crust,” she told me one day as she poured a thin film of olive oil over the bottom of a large frying pan. She placed the stuffed vegetables in the oil, stuffing-side up, and cooked them gently for about ten minutes. “Now watch. This is Tatie’s trick.” Using a spatula and with a little help from her fingers, she turned the stuffed vegetables and gently cooked them until the stuffing was browned, something I would never have thought of doing. She turned them again, covered them with a lid, and cooked them another twenty minutes or so. The tomatoes were done a little sooner, so she took them out first.

Petits farcis
became a summer standard for us. I made them hot for dinner or lunch, or I packed them to eat at room temperature for picnics at Quinson, Bauduen, or Esparron, the lakes where we went swimming almost every day after working on the house or going to the markets. When we did our own version of potluck with Adèle and Pascal, which we did frequently, Pascal cooked the main dish and I brought a first course, like
petits farcis.

Pascal and Adèle, both in their very early twenties and still at university, spent summers at his parents’ vacation house down the road from us, and we saw them often. Pascal loved to eat good food and to cook, just like his father. Over the years, we’ve cooked side by side many times, stuffing the fresh fish he caught in the rivers, making rich dark sauces with wild mushrooms I
brought from excursions to the mountains, or preparing gratins of fennel or spinach with vegetables from Marcel’s garden.