by Ann Mah
I parked, and we climbed out of the car, clambering down a steep road, picking our way between potholes and slimy patches of figs fallen from the tree above. We retrieved the key from its hiding place and entered the refreshing darkness of the house, breathing in the clean scent of lavender that filled the entryway. For a minute I hesitated. What should we do next? Unpack our bags? Walk to the village épicerie? Drive into Apt to stock up on wine? But then the cool silence of the house crept through me, and I allowed myself to stand there for a long time, rooted to the stone floor in the hall. After all, we were on vacation.
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* * *
The French love of vacation is well documented, an institution as sacred as Sunday lunch en famille, one that’s alternately mocked and sighed over by other, non-European nations. It’s true the French take a lot of leave—at least five weeks a year, compared with the two enjoyed by most Americans—parceled out in the summer, at Christmas, in the February ski season, at Easter, and at Toussaint (an autumn holiday I’d never even heard of before moving to France). But the right to a vacation is in fact a rather recent French institution that dates from the 1936 Matignon Agreements, which made congés payés, paid holidays, a legal obligation. In contrast, the United States has no federal law requiring employers to grant annual leave.
Les Accords de Matignon were a pet project of the Popular Front, the 1930s leftist political party led by Prime Minister Léon Blum. The laws gave workers a broad range of rights, increasing wages, introducing the forty-hour workweek, raising the school-leaving age to fourteen, and recognizing trade unions. But the most popular, enduring symbol of the Popular Front’s commitment to social reform was the guarantee of two obligatory weeks of paid vacation, which over the decades stretched to five.
In the summer of 1936, floods of working-class travelers took advantage of the new policy, streaming south to resort towns previously the exclusive domain of the bourgeois. The government encouraged the exodus, organizing price reductions for holiday train tickets and creating newsreels of happy travelers crying “Vive la vie!” Blum patted himself on the back, saying he had “injected a little beauty and sunshine into lives of hardship.” And thus the French tourist industry began to blossom.
With the spread of automobiles, more people headed south to the Mediterranean Sea—Charles Trenet even wrote a song, “Route Nationale 7,” which paid homage to the “highway of vacations” that led from Paris to Italy. These sun-bronzed vacationers ignited an interest in regional cuisine—particularly for Provençal cooking—that eventually became a French passion.
I, too, had heard its siren call years ago, long before I ever set foot in Bonnieux, when I was only twelve years old. I had begged my parents to let us take a family trip to Provence that summer. Why? What about the south of France could have appealed to a girl who hated hot weather and insects, one who preferred reading over bicycling to the playground with the other neighborhood kids? Actually, I suspect that’s the answer—I’d probably read something in a magazine or a book, some clever sketch of words, now long forgotten, that captured the region’s beauty.
Despite my zeal, my parents were dubious. They’d been wary of my travel enthusiasms ever since suffering at my hands the previous summer, when I’d begged them to make a three-hour detour to visit the Tillamook cheddar-cheese factory in Oregon. I had pictured hand-pressed wheels of cheddar, spotted cows, and three-legged milking stools. Instead we encountered fractious families crowding the windows overlooking the factory floor. The gift shop marketed its cheddar so aggressively that even my cheese-averse mother felt coerced into buying a wheel. (Over twenty years later, my parents still haven’t let me live that one down.)
But my uneven track record wasn’t the only thing stopping us from donning berets and hopping the next plane to Marseille. There was also the problem of France—or rather my mother’s aversion to it. She still bore deep emotional scars from her childhood in Shanghai’s French concession, remnants of the psychological abuse meted out by her half-Chinese, half-French stepmother. Niang had worn her Frenchness like a fur coat, preening and posing with it, stroking it to a high luster. Never mind that Niang’s father had come from Corsica, the rugged island that had struggled for independence from France, or that he’d probably moved to China to escape poverty and cultural prejudice. In 1920s Shanghai anything was possible for a foreigner, even for a Corsican who wished to reinvent himself as a Frenchman. By the time Niang was twenty, slim and beautiful and stepmother to five children she detested, she had become French. She gave my mother a French name—Adeline—and sent her to a French kindergarten, before packing her off to boarding school and never allowing her to come home during the holidays.
For my mother, carrying this colossal load of unhappy childhood memories, France became like an allergy, something she preferred to avoid as if it made her eyes itch and her nose run. At age twelve I didn’t really understand why, but her aversion was obvious, displayed in crackly little blasts. “You want to visit France? My stepmother was French,” she’d say, in the same tone she used when I brought home a B on an algebra exam. Perhaps Freud would say that was part of my attraction to France—that tinge of the taboo, the temptation of forbidden fruit.
As the school year dwindled down and my mom signed me up for an intensive SAT prep course—“You can never start too early!” she’d said, even though I was only finishing seventh grade—I began to brace myself for the lonely summer months ahead. My parents worked long days, my mother as a physician and my father as a microbiology professor, and now that I was old enough to stay at home alone, there seemed to be an awful lot of hours to fill outside of college-preparatory work. I had just resigned myself to a few months of algebra drills (relieved by a secret stash of Sweet Valley High novels) when my parents surprised me with a late birthday present—plane tickets! What made them change their minds? Had I actually convinced them of the educational value of a trip to France? I’m still not sure. Whatever the case, several weeks later the three of us found ourselves in Aix-en-Provence during an August heat wave.
France surprised me. It was hot; I remember that so clearly, a kind of airless, choked heat that I had felt on our trip to Paris seven years before. The heat settled in the antique crevices of our rented apartment, drawing close and unrelenting at night, especially with the flocks of French mosquitoes feasting on us. By day the sun was so strong it shimmered, causing a haze around Mont Ventoux. We sat under the plane trees on the Cours Mirabeau and drank tall glasses of lemonade, ordered up by my mom. That was the other surprise—my mother could speak French! I hadn’t remembered that from our other trip. I couldn’t believe she’d allow the devil’s tongue to fall from her lips, and yet there she was, booking bus tours of Roman ruins and interrogating the waiter as to whether there was cream in the potage aux légumes.
“Mom, you speak . . . French?”
“Just a few words that I learned in kindergarten.” She shrugged and shot me a look that said, Don’t get any ideas, buster.
Most of our meals were, I’m sorry to say, totally unremarkable. This was long before the term “foodie” had been coined, before Internet chat forums, Zagat guides, or even Rick Steves. Unfamiliar with the city, we found ourselves dining in mediocre restaurants planted squarely on the beaten path. And yet food is so ingrained in French culture—especially in fertile Provence—that I still came away from that trip with three indelible gastronomic memories.
The first took place at the home of Simone and Jacques, the French cousins of one of my mom’s medical-school classmates. They invited us to their home in Marseille, where we sat in the garden and watched the sun drop into a grove of umbrella pines. Simone and Jacques were Jewish, part of Marseille’s vibrant Sephardic community, and for dinner they had prepared a chicken tagine with preserved lemon. I can still taste its bitter, tart brininess, so clean and exotic—so contrary to what I thought of as French food and yet, Simone assured us, very typic
al.
The second unforgettable meal was at another home, that of Bernard and Véronique. Bernard had been a student researcher in my father’s microbiology laboratory at UCLA. After a few years in Los Angeles, he’d returned to his native Provence, to the brush-covered hills that formed the arrière-pays, or backcountry, above Marseille. We sat in the garden at a long table under a grape arbor, and Véronique, Bernard’s wife, served us roasted birds, as tiny as golf balls. We ate them with our hands, pulling the miniature limbs apart, crunching the bones between our teeth. The birds were called ortolans, and Bernard had caught them himself, baiting small traps with winged ants just like his father and his grandfather and probably his grandfather’s father before him. I didn’t know it then, but a meal of ortolans was a local tradition, one memorialized in Marcel Pagnol’s tender memoirs of his Provençal childhood, a celebration of the hunting, trapping, and boyhood high jinks set in the high hills above Marseille.
My third food memory from that vacation is of the morning market in Aix-en-Provence, the beautiful marché traditionnel brimming with flowers, vegetables, fruit, honey, and cheese. My parents and I wandered through its shaded stalls breathing in the peculiar aroma of lavender soap and roasting chickens, stopping to admire displays of cherry tomatoes tucked into straw baskets, the flash of yellow courgette flowers against dark-skinned squash. Unlike the chilled produce section of our grocery store at home, this market was alive with smells and wasps and people haggling over the price of a kilo of eggplants. My father eyed the piles of sun-warmed vegetables with the itchy longing of someone who loves to cook. Alas, our vacation rental’s primitive kitchenette prevented him from buying sacks of food and whipping up a feast for twenty. Instead he contented himself with just one purchase—a giant, fragrant bunch of basil. We displayed it in a vase on the dining table so its perfume could drift across the apartment.
After a couple of weeks, we returned home to Southern California, back to air-conditioning and ice machines and our double-doored refrigerator. School started again, and so did Chinese school on Saturdays. I stopped daydreaming about France. But somewhere in the back of my mind, I guarded those food memories, taking them out from time to time to give them a polish. They seemed to represent another existence, one of tradition, of history, of continuity, rooted in a small sliver of the world. In contrast, the tract homes and tidy sidewalks of our American suburb, the shrink-wrapped Asian vegetables at the Vietnamese grocery store, the strawberries available in January and the napa cabbage that appeared in July, all of it offered little connection to the land on which we lived. Instead of traditional recipes, the food we cooked and ate combined a hodgepodge of cultures and cuisines. Over time I came to realize the great freedom in this diversity, as well as the loss.
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Thirty years ago you’d have been lucky to find a bunch of basil in Paris, even at the height of summer. Basil was a plant of the Midi, the colloquial name for southern France, and its fragrant leaves didn’t really travel north. For thousands of vacationers—including even my family—the aromatic herb represented summer holidays in Provence. And one dish in particular showcased its refreshing perfume: soupe au pistou.
I heard about the chunky vegetable soup during my first vacation in Bonnieux with Calvin. I was at the market, moving slowly so I could inspect the produce in each stall. The village hosted the market each Friday, attracting a mix of vendors and shoppers wielding baskets. Some were regulars, like the older woman with a zippy Provençal accent who greeted the salesmen with a “Bonjour” and a hearty handshake. Others were clearly tourists, like the young couple in shorts and bedraggled hair who paused before a pastel stack of overscented soaps. The stalls overlapped without reason—cheap and cheerful tablecloths fluttered next to rows of goat cheese; piles of espadrilles stood next to jars of honey. A display of fresh pasta smelled of egg yolks and raw flour, and a hint of marijuana emerged from the back of the vendor’s van. At the fish stand, the poissonnier could have leaped from the set of a Pagnol film, with his curled mustache, straw hat, and striped shirt. In front of him, a row of shiny fish stared blankly at the underside of the striped awning, the crushed ice below them dripping slowly into a dirty bucket.
At the vegetable stand, I spotted something unusual: pods shaped like green beans but longer and fatter, some a delicate, pale greenish yellow, others splashed in magenta and white.
“C’est quoi?” I tried to ask.
“Voulez-vous des cocos blancs ou des cocos rouges, Madame?” asked the vendeur. He had a blurry look in his eyes, clearly hungover from rising too early after a why-not-one-more-glass-of-rosé kind of evening. Actually, so did everyone in the market. Come to think of it, so did I.
“Comment? Cuisine?” This was before I could speak French, and my cheeks burned at the sound of my cavewoman grunts.
The woman standing next to me in line took pity on me—or maybe she just wanted to hurry me along. “You can make zee soupe au pistou,” she said. “Like a vegetable soup. You need some of zis.” She handed me a couple zucchini. “And some beans and a beeg, beeg pot of basilic. Vairy, vairy deeleecious.” She paused, searching for words. “Eet is zee essence of summair.”
Before I knew it, she had dictated a recipe, selected my vegetables, picked out exact change from the handful of coins I produced out of my pocket, and sent me on my merry way.
When I got home, I split open the pods and discovered a strand of fresh shell beans inside, as round and plump as if they’d already been cooked, the white ones tinged pale green, the red ones—called borlotti, or cranberry beans—spattered in hot pink. This was how beans grew, I realized with a jolt—encased in these beautiful shells. As a city girl, bean horticulture was something I’d never before considered.
When it came time to prepare the soup, the woman’s voice swirled faintly through the foggy recesses of my hungover brain. Did I cook the beans first? How should I cut the zucchini? And as for the beeg, beeg pot of basil . . . well, I had no idea what to do with that. I cobbled together a vegetable soup of carrots, leeks, beans, zucchini, and a few roughly chopped leaves of basil floating on top. It tasted earthy and wholesome, kind of like minestrone. But comparing it with the essence of summer seemed like a grandiose exaggeration.
“I must’ve gotten the recipe wrong,” I said glumly, transferring the leftovers to a vat-size plastic container. “That soup was more like essence of Progresso.”
“I really liked it,” Calvin said. (Four meals of soup later, his enthusiasm had dimmed considerably.)
Even after a few more summer vacations in Provence, soupe au pistou continued to elude me. I longed to taste this “essence of summer,” and yet every time I asked for it in a restaurant, I was told it was a plat de famille, cooked and eaten at home. Now, on our fourth visit to Bonnieux, I was determined finally to taste it. But . . . how? Unless I kidnapped a Provençal grandmother and held her hostage in the kitchen, it seemed unlikely. And then one morning, while buying milk at the village épicerie, I spotted a fluorescent yellow poster. FÊTE DE SOUPE AU PISTOU À BONNIEUX, it announced in uneven handwriting.
I pounced on Calvin as he examined bars of milk chocolate. “The village is having a soupe au pistou party!” I said breathlessly.
“Hmm? Oh, that’s nice.”
“We have to go! This is my chance to finally taste the essence of summer!” I held up my phone. “Let’s call and reserve right now!”
Calvin took a step back, but after six years of marriage he knew better than to question me when I had the excited, slightly rabid gleam of culinary obsession in my eye. He took the phone, called, and left a message.
But then I started thinking. What if instead of simply eating soupe au pistou at the fête, I actually helped prepare it? What if I cooked soupe au pistou for the entire village?
That is how I found myself chopping and peeling vegetables with a group of formidable Provençal wome
n. At five-thirty in the morning.
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The head chef of Bonnieux’s soupe au pistou fête is a diminutive, deeply tanned woman named Mauricette. She has soft brown eyes and a sweet smile, but she runs a very strict kitchen. Whenever she came over to inspect our chopped vegetables, an anxious undercurrent ran through the group of volunteers.
“Are these potatoes the right size, Mauricette?”
“Am I peeling enough skin from the courgettes, Mauricette?”
“We’re supposed to remove the seeds from the tomatoes!” one woman said accusingly to her neighbor. “Isn’t that right, Mauricette?”
About ten of us had gathered at the home of Xavière, a robust woman who played soup producer to Mauricette’s director. The sky was still dark when I parked my rental car on the edge of a fig orchard and made my way to the cement patio next to the house. In the dim light, I saw a long table groaning with tubs of white and cranberry shell beans, as well as haricots verts, or snap beans, cut into segments. A few feet away, under a grape arbor, stood two industrial-size pots of water, each perched on a powerful portable gas burner. This cooking area was Mauricette’s domain. In the six hours it took to prepare the soup, none of the other women approached it.
As the sky brightened, the volunteers arrived one by one, each armed with her own cutting board, knife, and vegetable peeler. They were all local Bonnieulaises, all members of the Association la Boule Dorée, a local pétanque, or boules, club that organized the village soup fête as an annual fund-raiser.
Mauricette introduced me to the group. “She’s an American journalist who wants to learn how to make soupe au pistou.” At the words “American” and “journalist,” eyebrows rose and a chill descended. Only a Parisian would have received more scrutiny. I tried to look as friendly as possible, mostly by smiling a lot, though this had the danger of making me seem simple. Don’t slip up and call them “tu,” I reminded myself. Vous, vous, vous. Switching from the formal to informal form of “you” was a delicate decision, even for French people. Unfortunately, I had the bad habit of confusing the two when I got nervous.