I like to eat, I like to cook, and I like to blog about the both.
While Stephanie and her sister were treated to a spa day on Sunday (birthday present from their dad), Stephanie’s mom and I went to the Provencal Market in Antibes. We picked up olives and tapenade, Corsican salami, woodland strawberries, cannelés, potatoes, cheese, and fresh raviolis.
I just finished reading two similarly titled books, A Year in Provence, and A Pig in Provence. The former is a bestselling classic of travel literature, chronicling the events that comprise the life of a British couple’s first year after relocating to the Provencal countryside. The latter is more of a food memoir, the story of how Provence left an indelible mark on one woman and her family’s culinary traditions.
A Year was published in 1989, and each chapter concerns a single month from January through December 1987. A Pig was published in 2007, but concerns events primarily from the 1970s. So in a way, they are both rooted in the past, pre-dating even Stephanie’s experience growing up there.
It’s probably not a coincidence that I decided to read these books before embarking on my third trip to France next week. I’m not someone who likes to read up on a place before thrusting myself into it, but since I’ve already had the opportunity to travel there twice, I felt like it was safe to read the perspectives from a few other “outsiders” like myself. What follows are a few of my notes, food-focused, of things that were new to me.
Everyone drinks marc. What the heck is marc? Even Stephanie didn’t know. I finally looked it up and discovered that marc is the French word for brandy made from grape skins. To us, it’s better known as the Italian grappa or the French eau-de-vie.
At one point they go to a butcher to get veal for a stew called pebronata. Again Stephanie gave me blank stare. A quick search turns up that it’s a braised veal or pork ragout with peppers and tomatoes. Sounds tasty.
They say the best olive oil is from Maussane-les-Alpilles from the Coopérative Oléicole de la Vallée des Baux. Turns out we drove right through this area during our first trip, when we visited Baux-en-Provence. I think we might even have picked up some oil from a boutique in Baux.
There was a lot of pork offal happening in this book. I’m going to have to keep my eyes open for caillettes, basically organ meat burgers, and pied-et-paquets, tripe “raviolis” in tomato sauce. These are not things I would normally pursue, but given the loving way in which they were described, if I saw either of them on a menu, I’d have to go for it.
There was a lot of discussion of mushroom foraging, centering around three varieties in particular. Chanterelles most everyone has heard of, but cèpes and sanguins I didn’t know. Turns out most Americans know cèpes by their Italian name, porcinis, but I’m unfamiliar with sanguins in any language. Apparently they are known here as saffron milk caps or red pine mushrooms.
Reading this book really made me want to try a real bouillabaisse with rouille. Apparently in Marseilles.
Stephanie’s dad made soupe au pistou (pesto vegetable soup) for us once, but I’d like to have it again. French pistou is essentially Italian pesto without the pine nuts, and optionally gruyere along with or instead of parmesan.
Stephanie’s never had brandade de morue, a pureed salt cod gratin, but it sounds just crazy enough that I’d like to try to make it sometime.
Finally, I think it’s time I get over my lifelong aversion to mayonnaise-like sauces and make a homemade aioli.
On Wednesday night our veggie box arrived with 6-8 small yellow squash and zucchinis. That motivated Stephanie to want to make a pizza, so she set to work on a homemade dough while I went to the store and bought 4 thick slices of black forest ham to brown for a topping. We broiled slices of the squash and zucchini with salt, pepper, and olive oil, and then assembled it all on the par-baked crust, topping it off with a healthy layer of shredded emmental (because that’s what they put on pizza in France—and it’s fun to be different). When the pizza came out of the oven, we added a fresh egg yolk to each half, which melted all over everything. It was…amazing.
But we only used half of the dough, so I decided to throw the other half on our hot pizza stone at 450°F to see what would happen. Sure enough it turned into bread. A small, beautiful, experimental boule. It was a dense bread, we hadn’t properly kneaded or proofed it, but it was still bread. Toasted with a spread of cultured butter and a sprinkle of sea salt, it was delectable.
Come Saturday, we still had a little less than half of the loaf left, and surprisingly it hadn’t turned rock hard yet, so we decided to make BLTs for breakfast—since the eggs had disappeared into the pizza earlier that week. I fried up some local bacon from Marin Sun Farms via the Ferry Plaza farmer’s market, added some 4 year aged vintage cheddar from Pt. Reyes Farmstead Cheese Company, and then topped it all off with some sliced heirloom tomatoes and lettuce, both from our veggie box. It sounds like we planned it, but it was completely impromptu—we were just using the things we had on hand.
I have to admit, I’m not much of a baker, but the idea of making a loaf of bread on the weekend for the following week is very appealing. So tonight I used one of the sample baggies of locally-milled whole wheat flour in a bread dough “recipe” from Michael Ruhlman’s latest cookbook, Ratio. I’m going to let it continue fermenting overnight in the fridge, and then tomorrow I’ll bake it on the pizza stone.
…I mean, if I was Hugh Hefner.
