Encore Provence (6 page)

Other revelations will follow, but before they do it is worth examining the first part of this miserable litany in more detail. There is no doubt that you can find indifferent food in Provence, but to find it everywhere you look suggests carelessness or a profound lack of local knowledge. This would be understandable in the average tourist, but Reichl is anything but the average tourist. Her working life is devoted to the discovery of good food. She is doubtless extremely well connected in gastronomic and journalistic circles. She surely has friends or colleagues in France who could have told her that in Provence, as in the rest of the world, you need to know where to go. Didn’t anyone give her a few good addresses? Didn’t she ask for any? Didn’t she read the excellent books of Patricia Wells, her counterpart at the
International Herald Tribune
, a food writer with an intimate and informed knowledge of Provence? Apparently not.

The elusive ripe tomato and the absence of lamb—two disappointments that we have never encountered during our years in Provence—might have been bad luck; or they might have been the result of arriving at the market and the butcher too late, when the best has already been bought. August is like that. As for the dreadful supermarket, it seems that again Reichl was either badly advised or not advised at all. Certainly there are supermarkets with factory cheese and plastic-wrapped bread, although I can’t see why this was worth mentioning. Supermarkets are specifically designed to sell mass-produced food, much of which is legally obliged to come in plastic skin. Even so, not all supermarkets are alike. Plenty of them in Provence have fresh cheese and their own bakeries, even if the cookie selection may not be up to the D’Agostino standard.

In fact, most of the serious cooks we know use supermarkets only to stock up on basic commodities. They buy their meat, bread, oil, wine, and produce from small specialist shops, as their mothers used to do. And if they live in or near Avignon, they shop at Les Halles, one of the best food markets one could hope to find, in France or anywhere else. It’s on the Place Pie, right in the center of town; not far, as it happens, from where Reichl was staying.

For twenty-five years, the market has provided a permanent outlet for local suppliers, and the forty stalls offer a stunning choice of meat, poultry, game, breads, cheeses,
charcuterie
, fruit, vegetables, herbs, spices, and oils—and a fish counter more than thirty yards long. Every weekday it opens at six and closes at noon. But parking is difficult in Avignon during August, and perhaps for that reason the market was ignored. A pity.

Never mind. If inspiration or the will to shop falter, there are always the local restaurants. Avignon has several which compare favorably with good New York restaurants—Hiely, L’Isle Sonnante, or La Cuisine de Reine are just three—but these somehow managed to elude the Reichl eye. Instead, we were told about a whimsical menu, read but not tasted, consisting of nothing but tomatoes. (Let us hope they were ripe.) This presumably prompted her remark about mediocre restaurants in major cities. It’s enough to make you despair of keeping body and soul together during your stay in Provence.

But now, disillusioned and faint with hunger, we come to the most extraordinary revelation of all. Here it is in black and white, backed up by the considerable authority of the
New York Times:
“I had been dreaming of a Provence that never existed.”

The sentence hit me with the force of an unripe tomato between the eyes, as you can imagine. Where had I been living all these years? And what about those other misguided writers? The Provence that Daudet, Giono, Ford Madox Ford, Lawrence Durrell, and M. F. K. Fisher knew and wrote about—the Provence that I know—doesn’t exist. It never existed. It is a sunny figment of our imaginations, a romanticized fantasy.

I’m afraid that much of the blame for this monumental deception has to be laid at the door of a native son of Provence—alas, yet another overwrought and fanciful writer—Marcel Pagnol. Reichl is a keen admirer of his, and she shares her admiration with us: “The Provence I am most attached to is that of the great filmmaker Marcel Pagnol. It is a scratchy black-and-white world where men in cafés amuse themselves by hiding rocks under hats and waiting for someone to come along and kick them.”

This, it seems to me, is like expecting contemporary America to resemble a Frank Capra movie set, but I felt that I should make some inquiries, and I cannot argue with the results. In fairness, I must report that hat-kicking, as a crowd-pleasing spectacle, has gone the way of the guillotine. A search through the archives in the mayor’s office of my local village failed to reveal a single recorded instance of hats being kicked in public. When I asked the oldest man in the village bar if he had ever been amused by the kicking of hats, he looked at me sideways, took his drink and moved away. Even in the most remote villages of Haute Provence, where you might imagine coming across the odd, forgotten nest of hat-kickers, you are unlikely to find men in cafés amusing themselves with anything other than conversation, cards, or
boules
. First, bad food. Now this. Another dream shattered.

Nevertheless, there are visitors to Provence who seem able to look beyond fuzzy expectations and derive considerable enjoyment from what actually does exist. Unfortunately, they are tourists, and they are not welcome in Reichl’s world. She prefers places that, in her words, are not quaint and not “touristed.” Tourists, of course, are always other people; never us. We are different. We are
travelers
—intelligent, well-mannered, cultured, a blessing on our chosen destinations, a delight to have around. It’s a common attitude, and one that I have always found condescending and offensive, as well as inaccurate. If you travel away from home for pleasure, you’re a tourist, no matter how you like to dress it up. I consider myself a permanent tourist. Some of my best friends are tourists. Tourism makes an important contribution to the local economy and provides a living for many talented people—several cooks among them—who
might otherwise have to look elsewhere to make ends meet.

Let’s take, for example, the only two good restaurants Reichl was able to find in the whole of Provence: the Auberge de Noves and the Bistrot du Paradou. Both are excellent, as she says, and both are deservedly popular with tourists. Would they be able to sustain their standards if they had to depend on a purely local clientele? I very much doubt it.

There is a final note of disappointment even when describing the favored Bistrot du Paradou. The food was good, the ambience charming, and yet: “I sensed that there was something unreal about all this, an artful attempt to resurrect the spirit of Marcel Pagnol.” Good grief! What could have provoked that? An outbreak of hat-kicking in the parking lot? The arrival of Charles Aznavour for lunch? Or the fact that the bistrot had only been in business for fifteen years and not fifteen generations? Whatever it was, it provided useful support for the theory of a nonexistent Provence.

The next Reichl vacation, so we’re told, will be taken in Italy, that golden land of dreams, and I hope for her sake they all come true: waiters singing snatches of Puccini, lusty peasants treading the grapes with purple feet, glorious meals of hand-knitted pasta.
Buon appetito, signora!

But now, for the benefit of my correspondent Mr. Simpson and any other brave souls who may still be considering a visit to Provence, here are a few good addresses—proof, I hope, that all is not lost. The addresses cover a fairly wide area, and so may involve your spending some time in the car with a map. But the countryside is beautiful, and what you find will be worth the trip. I should add that these are personal choices that have been made in my
usual haphazard fashion over the years. They are in no way intended to be a complete and organized listing. One last warning: Addresses have a habit of changing, so it would be wise to check in the phone book or at the local Syndicat d’Initiative before you set off.

I have never found a more pleasant way to go shopping than to spend two or three hours in a Provençal market. The color, the abundance, the noise, the sometimes eccentric stall-holders, the mingling of smells, the offer of a sliver of cheese here and a mouthful of toast and
tapenade
there—all of these help to turn what began as an errand into a morning’s entertainment.

An addict could visit a different market every day for several weeks, and this selection, which is best read with map to hand, is far from comprehensive. But I think it’s enough to show that there is no such thing as a nonmarket day in Provence.

Here we are on delicate ground. One of the changes that has taken place in the Luberon over the past few years has been an enormous improvement in the quality of the
petits vins
. Small local vineyards are producing better and better wine; perhaps not of the same weight and complexity as the big vintages of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, but well made, easy to drink, and inexpensive. There are dozens of these wines, and that’s the problem. It would take a greater thirst than mine to try them all, and I’m sure that I have omitted several treasures. Further research is being carried out on a daily basis. Meanwhile, here are a few favorites.

Probably the most fashionable Provençal oils are those from the valley of Les Baux, and if you happen to be near Maussane-les-Alpilles just after the olives are gathered toward the end of the year, you can find those oils in the tiny Maussane cooperative. But the oils go quickly, and
summer visitors are likely to have better luck farther north in Haute Provence.

Here, on the outskirts of Mane, you will find Oliviers & Co., a shop that sells a remarkable range of handpicked oils from the Mediterranean basin—Italy, Greece, Sicily, Corsica, Spain—as well as some of the best homegrown oils. Take a baguette into the shop with you, because you can taste before you buy. (Porcelain tasting spoons are provided, but you can’t beat the combination of good oil on fresh bread.) And while you’re there, pick up some olive oil soap, which is said to impart a Mediterranean glow to the complexion.

Every market has its honey stand, and you may one day bump into my favorite honey salesman, Monsieur Reynaud. “My bees,” he will tell you, “have flown in from Italy to make this honey.” This, for some reason, I find very impressive, and so there is almost always a pot of Reynaud honey in the house.

But if you should want to see what the local bees can do, go to the Mas des Abeilles, on the Claparèdes plateau above Bonnieux. You’ll find honey flavored with lavender, with rosemary, or with thyme; honey vinegar; royal jelly; and a delicious honey mustard. As a bonus, there’s a bee’s-eye view of Mont Ventoux and the Luberon.

As with practically everything edible in France, there are pronounced and often noisy differences of opinion about
what constitutes the perfect texture and even the perfect form of your daily bread. The
fougasse
, the
boule
, the
pain fendu
, the
restaurant, pain de campagne, pain au levain
—each has its own ardent lobby. Bakeries are subject to the same highly subjective judgments, and these recommendations are therefore a matter of purely personal taste.