FOOD AND COOKING

Life in Provence combines the earthiness of age-old Mediterranean ways with a very French sense of style and savoir vivre. Its cooking presents this same harmonious blending of country roots and creativity, but has many dialects, from the cowboy cuisine of the Camargue and the fresh fruit and vegetables of the Rhone valley farms in the west, to the seafood of Marseille and the coastal regions, or the lamb and wheat of the Alps foothills. Many local specialties of Provence are now appreciated worldwide: the daube (stewed beef or lamb with carrots and olives) of Avignon, or bouillabaisse, the famous fish medley of Marseille.

Provençal cuisine is also all the different people who cherish it: farmers, fishermen, peasants, market vendors and shepherds, housewives and small shopkeepers, vintners and market gardeners, business people and even bureaucrats-all of whom have their secret sources for the best poultry, sausage or truffles. Gastronomy in Provence is not an occasional restaurant outing, but a day-to-day experience, a convivial celebration of the earth and what it has to offer.

Family life in this region still thrives around the table, where several generations may gather for the elaborate Christmas Eve supper, or a summer banquet of Aioli-that vast spread of steamed vegetables of every hue laid out around platters of poached salt cod and leg of lamb and accompanied by thick bowls of pungent garlic mayonnaise.

Californian chef Alice Waters praised Provence as a place "where eating together nourished the spirit as well as the body-since food was raised, harvested, hunted, fished and gathered by people sustaining and sustained by each other and by the earth itself." What keeps any regional cuisine vital is the constantly renewed flow of energy from these country roots to its more refined manifestations.

A dish like Artichokes barigoule began as a peasant recipe for stewed artichokes with bacon and other vegetables, useful for dealing with a garden surplus when artichokes are still small and tender.
It evolved into a more elaborate, cuisine bourgeoise version, where older, larger artichokes are stuffed and become a whole meal in themselves, needing long, slow cooking. This is the age-old process of upward mobility in cooking.

Today, every young chef in Provence has his or her own version of Artichokes barigoule. But now, in keeping with the contemporary taste for tender produce cooked as little as possible, the dish is once more prepared with small vegetables quickly stewed, like a ratatouille. Today's version is the old peasant dish re-interpreted according to the imagination of each individual chef.

The persistence of country traditions can take surprising forms. The Jouvaud family of Carpentras comes from the town of Flassans on the slopes of Mont Ventoux, where their ancestors were wheat farmers.
In the town, they have established a very successful father-and-son candy business, where, for example, specially grown apricots are prepared in sugar baths in the old-fashioned way, without the chemicals used in the standard factory production.

Today Jouvaud creations appear on the tables of the best restaurants. When a grandson turned six, old Monsieur Jouvaud took him back to the family farm on the mountain. Together the boy and his grandfather cultivated a small patch of winter wheat, together they harvested and threshed it, turned it into flour and made up a batch of madeleine tea-cakes.

The boy was too young to know if he would enter the family business. But at least he knew first-hand where his traditions come from and what they mean.
Professional cooks of course are only the froth which rises to the top of the cauldron, carried by the rich brew of old-fashioned regional cooking as it has been practiced for generations. Grandmother's cooking, this is sometimes called, and today in Provence more and more women chefs, like Reine Sammut in Lourmarin, take inspiration directly from it.

And indeed, in recent years, Provençal cuisine has colonized all of France. Chefs from Alsace, Lille and Brittany are slipping little rougets aux olives in among their local specialties, catering to a clientele more and more insistent on the fresh fish, herbs and young vegetables which have characterized Proven�al cuisine for centuries. Olive oil has replaced the butter and cream of Lyon, the goose fat of Alsace and the southwest, as the most elegant-and above all healthiest-enrichment.

And yet, only a generation ago, Provençal food was scorned as poor peasant fare, while the rich, fat cuisines of Lyon and the Southwest were praised by serious gastronomes. Provence, after all, offered no luxuriant meadowland for livestock. Its scrubby hills, redolent of thyme, rosemary and sage, provided grazing land only for sheep and goats, so that if lamb and mutton were abundant, veal was rare. And if the market gardens of the lower Rhone valley and the Luberon already produced fine strawberries and tasty melons, how could pastry chefs expect to perform their miracles without butter? The Provençal sweet tooth had, for centuries, contented itself merely with fresh and dried fruit, locally produced honey, and almonds-all combined at Christmas into chewy nougat.

Above all, gastronomic snobbery spurned garlic as inelegant at best, dangerous at worst. Whereas garlic has now been proven to be beneficial for the heart, the respiratory and even the digestive system... Concern for health has certainly been one factor in the new food trend down the Rhone river from Lyon to Provence.

What once seemed "poor" now seems "light." Today olive oil makes it possible to indulge while feeling virtuous--an irresistible combination! But there is an even deeper and more compelling seduction to Proven�al cuisine: a return to simplicity, to country fare, to natural flavors. The new ideal is rustic refinement, and the young chefs of Provence are virtuosi in the genre. But which Provence? Each part of this diverse region, from the Rhone to Italy, has its own specialties.

And each part has been depicted by different writers, attentive to the specific character of its terroir.
The Camargue, south of Arles, is the delta land of the Rhone river, where rare birds migrate, where houses made of mud and straw are today surrounded by expansive rice paddies. Here cowboys called "gardians" herd small, tough bulls around groves of wild tamarisk. These bulls are not killed in the local arenas where they fight many times to enthusiastic public applause. But they sometimes end up as a thick bull stew with black olives and a heavy, dark sauce.

Alphonse Daudet, who wrote the classic tales of Letters from My Mill, hunted in this "wild land of marshes and channels gleaming between pasture and clumps of marsh grass." He fed well on "bowls of rich eel soup." In the Camargue, even the cats learn to fish for eel, and everyone loves the local shellfish served with the aperitif.

Further east there is the Provence painted by Van Gogh and sung by Nobel-prize winning poet Frédéric Mistral, "the chain of the Alpilles, girdled by olive trees like a range of rocky Greek crags, looking down on a land of glorious deeds and legends". Mistral grew up in the nineteenth century on one of those vast farming estates dating back to Roman times. Today they are surrounded today by a patchwork of irrigation canals and cypress hedging which protects fields of artichokes, oak-leafed and batavia lettuce, early strawberries, zucchini, tomatoes and eggplant, for the wholesale markets of Chateaurenard, Saint-Etienne and Saint-Rémy de Provence.

The Oustau de Baumanière has long dominated the Alpilles gastronomically. And today the opulent country life of these vivid valleys proves so attractive to footloose cosmopolitans that Saint-Rémy has recently supplanted the Riviera and the Luberon hills as the most fashionable place to live in Southern France.

But do such people live better than the peasants of the rough, wild Alpine valleys of northern Provence? Jean Giono describes the cooking he knew there: "No sultan eats nobler or healthier food than these farmers," says the author of Le Hussard sur le Toit. " They produce everything which finds its way to their table, everything is exquisitely fresh. They are connoisseurs in the art of living." The best wheat, the finest lamb and game, the most pungent herbs are produced in Giono country, where lavender fields melt into the sky in mid-July.

On the gentler slopes of the Mont Ventoux, farmers have revived a special kind of winter wheat called épeautre, sometimes known as "einkorn" in America, on which local chefs like Philippe Monti at the Hostellerie of Crillon-le-Brave perform magic metamorphoses. The Ventoux is also the kingdom of truffles, centering on the market town of Carpentras. Not less famous is the Provence of Marcel Pagnol--the hill farms south of Aix-en-Provence where Jean de Florette learned to cultivate chick peas, apricots, almonds, figs, grapes for the table and for wine, all the family garden vegetables and above all, the "orthentic", a rare plant which has its roots in dreams. Pagnol's Provence is also the city of Marseille, a trading center described already by Roman historian Tacitus as "a happy mixture of Greek urbanity with Gallic temperance."

The folklore of its famous fish soup, bouillabaisse, has not prevented the creation of inventive new seafood in Marseille's kitchens. M.F.K. Fisher judged that Marseille's "freshly caught fish, scaly or in the shell, have a different flavor and texture and SMELL there than in any other port in the world...intense and assertive, no matter how delicate."

The great chef Escoffier, born on the French Riviera, provides one of the best summaries of Provençal seafood: "A quick look at the blue harvest of the Mediterranean reveals many treasures, from the tiny nonat or goby which a brilliant and virgin oil transforms into golden sequins; from the delicate sardine from Nice, to the sea bream of the Lerins islands off Cannes.

The shiny red rock mullet after patiently passing through the trials of the barbecue, arrives on the table on a bed of buttered rosemary sprinkled with sea salt and fresh-ground pepper, fines herbes and to conclude, a simple chopped shallot and a sprinkling of lemon juice to intensify its flavor.
Or again, those lovely spiny lobsters from Saint-Raphaël which lend themselves so generously to so many culinary preparations.

Their flesh is much more delicate than lobster, with a completely different taste..."
The French Riviera has had a curious history, wrenched from its country roots as of the late eighteenth century when it became a cosmopolitan playground for the European elite from England to Russia, then the vacation dream for mass tourism in more recent times. None of this was favorable to genuine country cooking, although Nice has remained throughout a source of good food. Its famous "pistou" resembles Genoese "pesto" without being in any way derivative: culinary families, like those of language dialects, do not recognize political boundaries but cluster like cousins. On the Riviera too, however, recent years have brought many changes.

There are now more starred chefs on the Riviera than in Paris. Their reigning monarch, Alain Ducasse, presides in Monaco at the fabulous Hôtel de Paris, where crèpes Suzette were once invented, by accident, for a companion of the Prince of Wales.
But even on the Riviera, the trend today is back to country roots, away from the overrun coast into the inland hills around Grasse, Valbonne and Opio. These terraced landscapes of ancient olive trees have long grown roses, jasmine and citrus trees for the local perfume industry.

Riviera chefs today dream of an ocher-toned bastide on such a hillside--Ducasse has just opened his at Moustiers-Saintes-Marie, Jacques Chibois in the Saint-Antoine suburb of Grasse. Others are exploring the unspoiled hills of the Var department, west of Nice an east of Marseilles, where the Côtes de Provence wines are attracting more and more attention.

The diversity of Provence is inexhaustible. And yet unifying all these landscapes, traditions and resources are "the familiar prospects of vines, olives, cypresses" of which British writer Lawrence Durrell wrote: "they are always here to welcome one...enchanted landscapes of the European heart."