French Provincial Cooking - Elizabeth David [13]
Madame Léon Daudet who, under the pen-name of Pampille, published many years ago a little collection of regional recipes called Les Bons Plats de France, goes so far as to say that ‘the cooking of Provence seems to me the best of all cooking; this is not said to hurt the feelings of other provinces, but it is the absolute truth.’ Whether or not one agrees with Madame Daudet’s wonderfully sweeping statement one should on no account be deceived by the often clumsy attempts of London restaurateurs to reproduce Provençal dishes. To them Provence is a name, a symbol to display to their customers; the string of garlic hanging on the wall is something like the equivalent of an inn sign. Nor must some ostentatious meal in a phoney Provençal ‘oustalou’ whose row of medals stands for price rather than true taste or quality be taken as representative. Provence does not consist only of the international playground of the coast. Northern and western Provence, the departments of the Vaucluse and the Basses Alpes, are still comparatively unsophisticated, and the cooking has retained much of its traditional character, the inhabitants relying on their own plentiful resources of vegetables, fruit, meat, game and cheese rather than on the imports from other provinces and from Algeria which supplement the more meagre resources of the coastal area.
Provençal food is perhaps best considered in terms of a meal such as that described, again, by Madame Daudet: ‘I know of nothing more appetising,’ she says, ‘on a very hot day, than to sit down in the cool shade of a dining-room with drawn Venetian blinds, at a little table laid with black olives, saucisson d’Arles, some fine tomatoes, a slice of water melon and a pyramid of little green figs baked by the sun. One will scarcely resist the pleasure of afterwards tasting the anchovy tart or the roast of lamb cooked on the spit, its skin perfectly browned, or the dish of tender little artichokes in oil ... but should one wish, one could make one’s meal almost exclusively of the hors-d’œuvre and the fruit. In this light air, in this fortunate countryside, there is no need to warm oneself with heavy meats or dishes of lentils. The midi is essentially a region of carefully prepared little dishes.’
This was written in 1919, but these little dishes of Provence are still to be found in country restaurants where they aren’t falling over backwards to provide local colour; places where you may perhaps have the routine Sunday grilled or roast chicken but with it an interesting anchovy sauce, or a mayonnaise made unmistakably with real Provençal olive oil; or a rôti de porc with pommes mousseline, the interest lying in the fact that that purée of potatoes will be good enough to serve as a separate course because the aromatic juices from the roast have been poured over it. It may be an hors-d’œuvre of anchovies and eggs, a salad of chick peas, a pot-au-feu or a beef stew which will be different from the pot-au-feu and the beef stew of other regions because of the herbs and the wine that have gone into it, even because of the pot it has cooked in. There will be vegetable dishes, too. The haricots verts are remarkable, although of course you won’t get them on the crowded coast in August. Provence is now a great market garden centre, and from Cavaillon and Pertuis come melons, asparagus, artichokes, lettuces, courgettes, aubergines, peaches and cherries to enrich our own English markets. The little town of Le Thor supplies France with great quantities of table grapes; Carpentras is the centre of a lively trade in the local black truffles. The natural caves round about the astonishing red and ochre village of Roussillon are used for a large-scale cultivation of mushrooms; Apt provides peach jam and bitter cherry jam and most of the crystallised apricots we ourselves buy at Christmas time. It is also one of the few places hereabouts where you can still find the old traditional earthenware gratin dishes, saucepans and cooking pots of Provence.
Of course the inhabitants of Provence do