Encore Provence by Peter Mayle

I think this is the last of Mayle's non-fiction books about his sojourn in Provence, which is rather a pity, as I thoroughly enjoyed them all. He and his wife moved to America for a while, and then decided to return to France, so he really seems to take a fresh look at it all, and brings us along for the ride. About America, he notices that a curious outbreak of politically correct speech was going on in the late 80s.

"...sophisticated and influential Americans - those whose comments are sought by the media - were not content to finish anything but preferred to 'reach closure,' and I have a nasty feeling that it won't be long before this affectation is picked up by waiters in pretentious restaurants. I can hear it already; 'Have you reached closure on your salad?' (This, of course, would only be after you had spent some time bending your 'learning curve' around the menu.)"

He talks about the plentiful supply of good restaurants near his home, and comments on the fact that there are very few female chefs in France. When he asks one local, he is told, "...in France some things are considered too important to be left to women." He's a little hard on the food critics, and when one reports that in France, the selection of rose wines alone in the supermarket was larger than the entire aisle of cereals, cookies and crackers back home, he snarks, "More wine than cookies! There can be few more telling signs than that of a society in the grip of depravity." That was one of the things, incidentally, that I found marvelous about supermarkets in Portugal - aisles and aisles of wine, cheese, meats and olives. Heavenly!

Outdoor cafes seem to be something that the French do extraordinarily well, and Mayle spends some time capturing the cafe experience. Contrary to the stressful, hurried way in which we Americans most often gulp down our meals, "You are expected to linger. You can read a newspaper, write a love letter, daydream, plan a coup d'etat or use the cafe as an office and run your business undisturbed."

Dry cleaners in France are experts on the oddest things. "...she gave him a short lecture on the staining capabilities of various wines, according to their tannin content, and seemed ready to move on to particular vintages when the arrival of another customer distracted her."

Mayle pays a visit to a perfumerie, where he learns just how difficult it is to be a "nose", and discovers that sometimes the most peculiar scents are added to perfumes for just the right fragrance to emerge, such as pipi de chat. He tries to figure out how the natives of Provence stay so fit on what is supposed to be an unhealthy diet. "...the food police...have lectured us on the evils of fat, any kind of fat...Food products, even here in France, have to confess on their labels that they have committed a crime against the innards of society by including a percentage of fat."

He also goes on a quest to find the perfect corkscrew, visits an olive oil production facility, where he says of the oil, "There was a wonderful smell in the air, rich and slippery and promising, a warm smell I always associate with sunshine."

I feel exactly the same way about Peter Mayle's writing.

Toujours Provence by Peter Mayle

  Mayle's tales about he and his wife's sojourn in Provence related in A Year in Provence were truly delightful, so I looked forward with relish (and maybe a little ketchup and mayo) to this one. Mayle has settled in and nearly gone native by the time this one was written, so he's lost a little bit of the sense of being on the outside, looking in, that made many of his stories so droll, but there's still a lot to love here.

Getting away from the calendar progression of the first book, Mayle feels free to jump around a bit in his subject matter, ranging from the buying and selling of pedigreed dogs to the training of truffle pigs, to the traditions and manufacture of pastis (an anise flavored liqueur that the people of Provence consume in prodigal quantities), to a visit to the Chateau Neuf de Pape and more than a few tastes of its famous wines.

Mayle decries the "gentrification" of his beloved countryside when it is invaded by the beautiful people, and the movie stars, politicians, and other heavy hitters move in, cause property prices to skyrocket, and turn sleepy little towns into pop cultural tourist meccas.

Something that recalled to me fond memories of my vacation in Europe:

There were two stalls selling olives - just olives - in every conceivable style of preparation: olives a la grecque, olives in herb-flavored oil, olives mixed with scarlet shards of pimento, olives from Nyons, olives from Les Baux, olives that looked like small black plums or elongated green grapes. They were lined up in squat wooden tubs, gleaming as though each one had been individually polished."

Mayle's recounts the story of how he hears about a man who is training a group of frogs to sing the Marseillaise (the French national anthem) for Bastille Day celebrations. Is there a racial slur implied here? Anyway, he spends considerable time tracking down the location of the man and his frogs. In pursuit, he inquires of his neighbor, Massot, about whether it is even possible. Massot doesn't quite understand the question.

"I have never eaten toads," he said. "Frogs, yes. But toads, never. Doubtless there is an English recipe. No?"

"I don't want to eat them. I want to know if they can sing."

"Dogs can sing," he said, "You jut kick them in the couilles and then..." He lifted his head and howled.

I began howling as I read this, myself.

I love his descriptions of meals in Provence.

"We eased into lunch like athletes limbering up. A radish, its top split open to hold a sliver of almost white butter and flecked with a pinch of coarse salt; a slice of saucisson, prickly with pepper on the tongue, rounts of toast made from yesterday's bread, shining with tapenade. Cool pink and white wines...The alouettes sans tete (headless larks, but not literally) were hot and humming with garlic, and Michel decided that they deserved a more solid wine...Salad came, and then a basketwork tray of cheeses, fat white discs of fresh goat cheese, some mild Cantal, and a wheel of creamy St. Nectaire from the Auvergne...Scoops of sorbet were offered, and an apple tart, sleek with glaze, but I was defeated."

Time to knock off for a bite to eat. Happy Travels!

A Year in Provence by Peter Mayle

My mom gave me this book, as well as a couple more Mayle wrote about his adventures in France. The one thing I don't understand is how she can read books like this one and not have any desire to go visit the places he talks about, eat the meals he describes, and meet the oddball characters he lives among. I read passages to my wife, and daydreamed about traveling to Provence some day.

Mayle and his wife moved to the Provence region from London, bought a house, and settled in to enjoy la vie provencale. The structure of the book is that of the calendar of their first year, beginning with January and concluding with December, of course. Each month, each season in Provence has its own challenges and rewards, from the wind of the winter mistral to the baking heat of summer, the frustrations of remodeling an old chateau and the joys of delicious meals, fine wines and cheeses, and the viands and fruits of each season.

Both here and abroad, people rally round to donate blood after a natural disaster, but some things are not quite the same.

"In England, the reward for a bagful of blood is a cup of tea and a biscuit. But here, after being disconnected from our tubes, we were shown to a long table manned by volunteer waiters. What would we like? Coffee, chocolate, croissants, brioches, sandwiches of ham or garlic sausage, mugs of red or rose wine?"

I think I'd much rather donate blood in France.

As a neophyte plucker of morels in the Northwest, this bit surprised me:

"It had never occurred to me that a mushroom could be clinically tested before being permitted to enter and omelette, but, since the stomach is by far the most influential organ in France, it made perfect sense. The next time I went into Cavaillon, I toured the pharmacies. Sure enough, they had been converted into mushroom guidance centers...the small, muddy objects in the bags were inspected by the resident white-coated expert, and a verdict was pronounced."

On one of the meals they enjoyed at a neighbor's home:

"It started with homemade pizza - not one, but three: anchovy, mushroom, and cheese, and it was obligatory to have a slice of each. Plates were then wiped with pieces torn from the two-foot loaves in the middle of the table, and the next course came out. There were pates of rabbit, boar and thrush. There was a chunky, pork-based terrine laces with marc. There were saucissons spotted with peppercorns. There were tiny sweet onions marinated in a fresh tomato sauce. plates were wiped once more and duck was brought in. The slivers of magret that appear, arranged in fan formation and lapped by an elegant smear of sauces on the refined tables of nouvelle cusines - these were nowhere to be seen. We had entire breasts, entire legs, covered in a dark savory gravy and surrounded in wild mushrooms."

This book was a delight to read, though I had to take it in small portions, savored and digested slowly.

My Life in France, by Julia Child

This autobiographical work by Julia Child is an absolutely fascinating look at an era and a cuisine that time has left far behind. Julia and her husband, Paul, who worked for the state department, were stationed in Paris, France for several years, beginning in 1948. While she was there, she developed an insatiable curiousity about French cuisine that lasted the rest of her lifetime. She studied at the Cordon Bleu first, then she and two of her friends started teaching their own classes, and began to write a book together, which became Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume I.

Child and her husband were later sent to Marseilles, where she continued to research the cuisine of that region, and eventually were pulled out of France and sent to Germany, then Norway before Paul's retirement in 1962. Everywhere she went, Julia made friends and enjoyed learning about their food and customs.
It helps a bit to either know a bit about French cuisine or read a bit of French while reading this book, as there are a number of phrases or names of dishes left untranslated from the language in the book, and it's fun to sort of puzzle them out as you go along.

I learned interesting little facts I would never have suspected, such as "the French have a 'crus' of butter, special regions that produce individually flavored butters. Beurre de Charentes is a full-bodied butter, usually recommended for pastry dough or general cooking; beurre d'Isigny is a fine light table butter."

Julia and her husband met so many interesting people. For example, she speaks of Hadley Mowrer, the "former Mrs. Ernest Hemingway...the mother of Jack Hemingway, who had been in the OSS during the war and was called Bumby." I have a friend who owns Jack Hemingway's ranch on the breaks of the Grande Ronde River, so this caught my eye. Then, a little later, "On June 25, Bumby Hemingway married Puck Whitlock...an attractive Idaho girl...she and Bumby had met in Sun Valley, Idaho, in 1946." An interesting little tie-in to Idaho history with a personal connection.

I also found out that a cheese such as Camembert must be served at exactly the right time. "If you asked for a Camembert, she would cock an eyebrow and ask at what time you wished to serve it: would you be eating it for lunch today, or at dinner tonight, or woudl you be enjoying it a few days hence? Once you had answered, she'd open several boxes, press each cheese intently with her thumbs, take a big sniff, and - voila! - she'd hand you just the right one. I marveled at her ability to calibrate a cheese's readiness down to the hour..."

Julia and I had certain experiences in common. When I was first married, I'd spent all day long creating a vegetable stock for a soup I was going to make later on. I called my wife on the phone and asked her to pour off the stock, straining out the vegetables, after it cooled. When I arrived home from work, I looked in the fridge for the stock, and it wasn't there. When I queried my wife, she said, "I poured it off. the vegetables are still in the strainer." She'd poured my stock down the drain! After one dinner party, when Julia allowed "the boys" to clean up, they mistook a large pot filled with veal stock she'd left on the floor for a garbage can, and scraped all the plates into it!

I rather liked a phrase of Paul's she quoted, when they were moving from France.  "If variety is the spice of life, then my life must be one of the spiciest you ever heard of. A curry of a life"

There's actually several good recipes included in this book, for three sauces, Hollandaise, Mayonnaise Leger, and Beurre Blanc. I'm going to have to try them out sometime. The hollandaise recipe has a little twist I've never tried before that might make it a bit quicker to make in large quantities, as when you have folks over for Eggs Benedict.

As a book nut, I found the following passage most amusing. "in the ...village of Moustier, we delivered - on behalf of the consulate - a stack of books to an elderly, self-taught librarian who had been patiently requesting printed matter for years. He kept all of the volumes in his musty, dark, one-room operation 'protected' by wrapping them in plain brown paper (thus obscuring the titles). The books were shelved on rough, hand-hewn planks, which reached to the ceiling and were accessible only by a rickety ladder that not even he dared to climb. Lacking a card catalogue, he had devised his own system: 'I organize the books by size!'' he proudly announced."

The book covers all the time the Childs spent abroad, as well as the period when Julia was developing her cooking show on tv, The French Chef, which I remember watching as a child, and time spent writing volume II of her cookbook. There are a ton of fascinating stories in here about people she met and befriended, places she visited and loved, and dishes she created and consumed. I think you'll love it, and as Julia always used to say, "Bon Appetit!"