Around the World in 80 Dinners - Bill Jamison [119]
Just around the corner, Mas de la Dame makes some of the best local A.O.C. wines. The old farmhouse looks the way it must have for decades, if not centuries, featuring limestone block architecture with a faded red tile roof. In the tasting room, bottles of current vintages sit on the counter, including our two favorites from past experience, the Coin Caché and Le Vallon des Amants. After sipping a little of each, Bill buys a bottle of Le Vallon, the longer-lasting of the pair. Cheryl starts looking closely at the lovely holiday baskets on display and Bill goes en garde. In France, Cheryl sometimes buys and hauls home some of the most unwieldy items in the country—the worst excess being a fragile, three-foot-high walnut-drying rack that she carried back as checked luggage after begging yards of bubble wrap from shops in Saint-Tropez, of all places. This time she exercises restraint.
After escaping unburdened, we drive south a dozen or so kilometers to Saint-Martin-de-Crau for lunch at Auberge La Pastourello, another of our treasured spots in the area. You enter the restaurant through the bar, which Monsieur attends, and pass a miniature living room furnished with a sofa and a TV that’s always on and tuned to a game show around the noon hour. The proprietors and their family station themselves here before and after meals. The adjacent dining room, which Madame oversees, is exuberantly decorated with a collection of antiques and objets (not all d’art) that define the essence of eclectic. Wherever you look on the walls and shelves, you see musical instruments, operatic masks, ceramic ware, copper pans, carpenter’s tools, santon figurines, paintings, and kitchen implements such as coffee grinders. An enormous cooking hearth blazes today at one end of the room, directly across from a grandfather clock and a piano.
In warmer months, when we’ve come before at lunch, La Pastourello sets out an expansive buffet of Provençal fare. In this slower period, the restaurant offers a recited menu of daily specials for a three-course prix fixe meal with house wine. Cheryl starts with a “pizza” on a puff-pastry base with cheese melted over tomato and ham, and Bill leads with a custardlike mussel terrine accompanied by an anchovy-laced salad. For a main course, both of us order dorade (sea bream) in pistou, the Provençal equivalent of an Italian pesto. Delicious fillets float on creamed chard, and pistou swathes the fish. Cheryl chooses the île flottante (floating island) dessert, while Bill has a tarte au citron that’s as close to a lemon meringue pie as we’ve ever seen in France. At ten minutes until 2:00, the restaurant clears completely as all the other patrons head back to work.
In the afternoon, we read lazily, learning later that Christine, Philippe, and Jean-Pierre are toiling hard at the same time, helping with the olive harvest. It doesn’t diminish their spirits at dinner. Unusual for us, we decide to get the same dishes this evening, foie gras for an appetizer, followed by roasted macreuse, a cut of beef unfamiliar to us. The sautéed foie gras rests on a thin potato cake, crispy and garlicky, and drips dabs of red currant sauce. A glass of Muscat from the Languedoc mates perfectly.
The macreuse, Philippe tells us, comes from the top front of the shoulder, guaranteeing full beefy flavor, and is cut in a way that increases tenderness. Jean-Pierre presents it in medium-rare scallops with a caramelized shallot–red wine jus, and nestles it with a mélange of fall vegetables—fennel, baby turnips, green beans, roasted potatoes, and marble-sized Brussels sprouts almost as sweet as fruit. As Philippe clears the table, we somehow get into a discussion of American barbecue sauces. The ones he has tried all overwhelm and mask the food, he says, a flaw we’ve seen also in some French sauces. Jean-Pierre’s meat