Around the World in 80 Dinners - Bill Jamison [118]
In contrast to the scene in Arles, the historic center of Les Baux is quiet today, the main reason we decide to see it again. Most of the year, busloads of tourists swarm the place as if they’ve been invited to a sneak preview of Heaven. The towering hilltop location alone lures many of them. The Provençal poet Frédéric Mistral compares it to an eagle’s nest, soaring high above the rest of the distinctive local white limestone formations. The fabled history also draws in the crowds. Celts built the first defensive fortress on the site in the second century B.C., but the powerful lords of Les Baux, beginning in the eleventh century A.D., turned it into the “impregnable” stronghold of the Middle Ages, which didn’t fall until Louis XIII laid a royal siege.
Even though we have the old streets and sights mostly to ourselves on this blustery day, we find little to detain us for long. Right before we leave, Cheryl peers over the city wall next to the castle ruins to search for Mireille in the valley below. She spots her and blows a kiss, saying we’re on our way home, from where the historic city looks even more majestic, particularly on moonlit evenings.
Before dinner, Christine and Philippe tell us about the origin of the name of their inn. “Riboto,” they explain, refers to a communal feasting table in the old Provençal dialect. In Mistral’s epic poem about Mireille and Vincent, Taven is the good witch who helps to unite the lowly basket maker’s son and the aristocrat’s daughter. Charles Gounod turned the story into an opera that Christine and Philippe once saw in Avignon. They swear the set looked exactly like their property.
For an appetizer, Bill selects the lamb-sweetbread salad, with crisply tender sweetbreads that Jean-Pierre allows to cool slightly before adding greens and a saffron dressing. Cheryl opts for the langoustine ravioli, luscious little pouches of seafood swimming in a broth of squid ink and olive oil. Both of us follow up with a roasted veal sirloin with sautéed cèpes and parsley, which comes with baby root vegetables. As with many of Jean-Pierre’s dishes, the jus elevates fine ingredients into a spectacular success. Philippe matches the veal flawlessly with his wine recommendation, a locally produced 1999 Château Dalméran blending Syrah, Cabernet Sauvignon, and Cinsaut grapes.
Each of us holds back on the cheese course, sticking with just a wedge of Saint-Marcellin, because we know additional cream is on the way with dessert. Alongside an apple tart, a spiral of roasted apples on buttery pastry, Jean-Pierre scoops a globe of vanilla ice cream churned just minutes before. On top of that, he dribbles a sundae crown of golden, light olive oil, which works beautifully. Only in Provence.
The next morning we drive down the road a couple of miles to drop in on olive-oil producers Jean-Benoît and Catherine Hugues, who make Castelas. The couple jumped into the business about a decade ago when they bought a house and six hectares of trees from a family that had cultivated olives on the land since the seventeenth century. The original owners, who had no heirs, would only sell to people who promised to take excellent care of the trees. The Hugueses must hug each one every night judging by the oil they extract.
The trees don’t deserve all the credit, however. The Hugueses press their oil on the same day that they harvest the olives, usually within six hours, and they use a production system designed by Jean-Benoît to obtain optimum flavor. A professional engineer with a specialization in automated processing, he showed us his custom-built machines with great pride on a previous trip. Jean-Benoît employs water in his scheme only in the initial step of bringing olives to the right temperature for pressing. A blower dries and destems the fruit and eliminates leaves. Another apparatus pushes the olives through a grate just slightly smaller than them, so that they crack but aren’t crushed, as happens with stone grinding. The next machine tumbles them into a paste in an airtight tube and a centrifuge drains out the oil,