by Ann Mah
We began by preparing the zucchini—about 130 pounds of it—peeling the dark skin away into tiger stripes. I helped chop the squash into a large dice, adding the pieces to a communal bowl. I could feel the eyes of the other women watching my knife move across the cutting board, and I concentrated hard on not cutting myself.
“Votre couteau n’est pas trop grand, Ann?” said a white-haired woman with eyes like a hatchet.
She thought my knife was too big? I glanced down at it, a dainty chef’s blade. “Tu . . . uh, vous trouvez?” I stammered. Really? She thought so? “Non, ça va aller.” I gave her a mild smile. She puffed her cheeks up and went back to peeling squash. A teenage girl with goth-black eyeliner handed me another pile of vegetables to chop and pulled a little face, as if to say, Ignore her.
Obtaining an introduction to the party of soup-making volunteers had seemed more difficult than wrangling an invitation to a White House state dinner. I’d summoned all my American resourcefulness and puppy-dog charm, calling the local tourist office, befriending the village on Facebook, all to no avail. Finally the manager of our rental house, a dynamic woman named Solange, took pity on me. Three phone calls later, I had an interview with Mauricette to present my soup-making credentials. Solange came with me to smooth the path—and to provide French vocabulary before my own could fail me.
“Si je peux vous aider, je serais ravie,” I said with my most earnest expression. If I could help you, I’d be delighted. . . . “Je suis entièrement . . .”
“Disponible,” Solange inserted neatly.
“Disponible,” I agreed. Available. For soup. Exactly.
I’m still not sure if it was the introduction from Solange, Mauricette’s curiosity, or the bottle of pure, grade-A maple syrup that I brought her (I’m not above a bribe, not when it comes to secret recipes), but somehow I was deemed acceptable. Mauricette took me under her wing and vowed to teach me her soup. As I was discovering this morning, however, an alliance with the boss can alienate you from other members of the team. Especially old hatchet eyes. She needled me with questions couched as concern. “You’re not cold?” she asked me, eyeing my thin sweater. Later she told me, “Watch out for your sleeves!” though they were nowhere near the food. I sent a sympathetic thought to her daughter-in-law, whoever and wherever she was in the world.
We finished chopping the courgettes and potatoes and moved on to plucking basil leaves—“No stem!” instructed Mauricette—the heavy fresh-licorice perfume competing with the raunchy odor of peeled garlic. As the sky lightened into a pale grayish blue, so had the atmosphere around the table. After tiny cups of weak coffee, everyone looked more cheerful.
I finally felt brave enough to pose a question to the group. “Do you ever add any other vegetables to the soup? Carrots or leeks?”
“Mais NON!” The table erupted. “Jamais de carottes, ni de poireaux!”
“This is a summer soup, made with only summer vegetables,” the woman across from me explained. “Courgettes, tomatoes, haricots verts, beans—fresh, never dried—potatoes, and pistou. C’est tout. Winter vegetables like carrots or leeks don’t belong in soupe au pistou. And we never add meat.”
“I once had soupe au pistou with meat,” Mauricette said in a musing tone. “My cousin’s wife made it. It was all pasta and cubes of ham!”
The other women stared, their mouths open in horror. “Oh, la-la-la-la,” someone said faintly.
“It was good, but . . .” Mauricette shook her head. “It had nothing to do with soupe au pistou.” Everyone clucked in agreement. “I still don’t know why she didn’t just ask for my recipe.” I eventually discovered that a ham bone, or a smoked pork knuckle, is sometimes added to soupe au pistou, namely in the rocky, mountainous region of the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence—a climate too cold to raise olive trees—where the meat probably replaces the calories and flavor traditionally added by a lazy drizzle of olive oil.
“What happens to the basil?” I asked.
“The leaves are blended with garlic and olive oil to make a sauce—pistou. That’s what we mix into the soup,” said Xavière.
“Ah, it’s pesto!” I exclaimed.
“Pistou,” Xavière corrected. She pronounced the word with care: “Pee-stoo.”
“Yes, like pesto. From Italy?”
Silence fell around the table. “The Italians can call it what they want,” someone sniffed.
Pistou, I later read, is the Provençal version of pesto; indeed, the word comes from the Italian pestare, which means “to pound.” It’s a sauce of crushed basil and garlic mixed with olive oil—a combination as ancient as the Roman ruins that dot the dry Provençal landscape. The poet Virgil wrote of pistou in the Eclogues, describing it as a mixture of herbs and garlic ground in a mortar. Today it’s more commonly made in a food processor—even in rural Provence, even by traditionalists.
There exists perhaps no greater culinary rivalry than the one between Italy and France. But no matter who invented the fork or first perfected the béchamel or balsamella sauce, it is true that the two cultures have influenced each other enormously, especially in Provence. Greek Phocaeans founded Marseille in 600 B.C., bringing with them olive trees and grapevines. Julius Caesar claimed the port less than five hundred years later, leading troops of Romans through the region. They built aqueducts and arenas, created cities like Arles and Avignon and Aix-en-Provence, and cultivated lavender, the flower that still defines the landscape.
Centuries after the decline of the Roman Empire, parts of France and Italy remained loosely entwined—neighbors who sometimes slept together—as in the case of Nice, which remained protected by the counts of Savoy (and, by extension, tied to the Italian Piedmont and Sardinia) until the late nineteenth century. By this time Nice was a bustling port, fiercely competitive with its northern neighbor Genoa. Is it any surprise that Liguria’s prized culinary invention—pesto—traveled about a hundred miles north–west to Provence?
The basic ingredients of pistou and pesto sounded similar to me, but I didn’t dare mention this opinion to the Bonnieux soup volunteers. I had an idea what they might say: “Je veux pas être chauvine, mais . . .” Already this morning I’d heard the phrase many times, always followed by an inexorable opinion. “I don’t want to be prejudiced, but . . . soupe au pistou is better than minestrone.” Or, “. . . Parmesan cheese and pine nuts have no place in pistou.” Or, “. . . you can’t call it soupe au pistou unless all the vegetables come from Provence.” I admired their loyalty even as I recognized the faint insularity. Because if you came from a region as stunningly beautiful and naturally abundant as Provence—a region that has been both saved and spoiled by the summer tourist season—wouldn’t you be fiercely proud and protective of it, too?
At this point we had started crushing the tomatoes into puree—an exciting process that involved grinding them through a hand-cranked contraption that removed the skin and the seeds—and some of the ladies were gathering up their cutting boards and knives to go home. I lingered and watched Mauricette stir pistou into the giant pots of soup with a wooden spoon attached to a long stick. The liquid turned from softly rust-colored—leached from the bright skin of the cranberry beans—into a vegetal green, velvety with melted courgettes.
“The end is always the hardest part,” Mauricette said, huffing a little bit. “Once the cheese is added, you can’t stop stirring.”
The soup’s final ingredient, Emmental or Gruyère, is a controversial addition. Some add it directly to the soup, while others pass a small bowl of it at the table, while still others don’t use any at all, feeling it detracts from the refreshing herbal punch of the pistou. Mauricette scattered a handful of shredded cheese across the surface of the soup and gestured to Fabrice, a visiting relative with strong arms, to come stir the vats of thick, bubbling liquid. “Don’t let it burn on the bottom,” she told him, and he respectfully obeyed her.
As she sprinkled an
d Fabrice stirred, Mauricette reminisced about her husband, who had passed away a few years before. “Wasn’t he handsome?” She’d shown me his photograph at five-thirty that morning when I’d come to her house to follow her car to Xavière’s.
I nodded. “Il était très beau.” And he had been, with a youthful bronzed face and a relaxed smile.
“Oh, how he loved soupe au pistou!” exclaimed Mauricette. “I used to make a big pot in the morning, and he’d look forward to it all day long.” She tipped the last shards of cheese into the steaming pot. “This soup, it’s a celebration of summer, you know.” Her eyes met mine, dark and serious.
Less than an hour later, I joined the crowd that had gathered for the fête in the village square. Rows of picnic tables covered in white butcher paper and dotted with plastic pitchers of rosé wine filled the sunny space. I could tell who the locals were because they stood in small clumps, gossiping in lowered voices while the vacationers picked their way around them, trying to find a spot to sit. Calvin and I joined Solange and her friends at a shaded table and unpacked the soup bowls and silverware we’d brought from home. Dotted throughout the crowd, I spotted the ladies from the soup-making committee, now attired in pretty summer garb. We waved at one another like old friends.
Mauricette arrived, clad in a fresh, bright T-shirt. (I was the only one who hadn’t taken the time to change out of my pistou-flecked clothes, I noted with some embarrassment.) And close on her heels came an enormous soup pot, swaddled in a blanket and tucked into the back of a van. We crowded in front of the pot like Dickensian orphans, bowls in hand, and received ladles of fragrant soup. I dipped my spoon in and scooped up a mouthful of tender vegetables in a broth laced with the heady scent of garlic and basil. The fresh beans were like none I had eaten before—thin-skinned and exquisitely creamy, with a faint flavor of chestnuts—while the more toothsome green beans contrasted with the smooth texture of melted courgette. It sang of summer, the soup, a product of the nourishing sun, the Provençal soil, a shared moment in a village square, high in the Luberon hills. When we finished our first bowl, there were seconds, and even thirds, and with each bite I discovered a bitter undernote of unfiltered olive oil, a robust burst of cheese. I ate because the soup was delicious but also, perhaps, to prolong the moment a little longer.
As a dry breeze blew across our table and the pichets of rosé emptied, Calvin chatted with a retired Swiss diplomat and Solange and her sister argued the merits of their mother’s soupe au pistou recipe. The crowd acknowledged Mauricette with enthusiastic applause, which she accepted without any pretense of modesty. People began to wander off, some to take naps, others to join the fiercely competitive boules tournament starting in a dusty square next to the church. Sleepy from lunch, I gazed a little blankly at the remaining crowd of village families and tourists. I kept thinking of something Mauricette had said earlier, when I’d asked her why she gave her time and energy to organize the village fête each year. “Pour faire plaisir,” she’d replied without hesitation. To give pleasure.
* * *
* * *
The village soupe au pistou fête marked the midway point of our vacation. We still had about a week, but now our slow breakfasts at the kitchen table, our languid afternoons by the pool felt a little less luxurious. One morning we got up early to follow the market to Gordes, parking at the edge of town and joining the line of people climbing to the village center, buying a basket of tomatoes for dinner, a few lavender sachets for gifts. Another day we explored the ruins of an ancient Roman fort, scrambling down a secret staircase carved into a side of rock. We lunched at my favorite local restaurant, a simple café with a view of a hayfield where the omelets were plump and tender and laced with finely chopped herbs. We read Tintin comics and swapped them with each other; we sipped rosé wine in Solange’s thick-walled Provençal house; we listened to the Beatles while cooking dinner; we ate in the garden at a table aglow in candlelight. And suddenly the days had dwindled and we had only three left, then two.
That evening, as I sat in the garden, an ice cube bobbing gently in my predinner glass of rosé, I had a sinking feeling, as if everything was slipping away too fast. Soon we’d return to Paris, and I’d return to working at the library and preparing for the launch of my novel, and a day later Calvin would board a plane to Amman and then continue traveling east in his return to Iraq.
I sipped my wine, ate an olive, black and oily, and tried to focus on the silky air, my hair still damp from a late-afternoon swim, the bats swooping in the fading light. But an urgent flutter descended forcibly into my stomach. Vacation would be over soon, and with its end came the frisson of excitement and anxiety brought on by the thought of work. Calvin felt it, too, I could tell, a growing itch to get back to the office and continue the ambitious march.
During the past two weeks, we had indulged in love in Provence—love of place, of pastimes, and of each other. But without work to anchor me, I was beginning to feel a little unbalanced. And yet going back to work and the daily routine also meant being thousands of miles away from my husband. Without love, my work felt a bit meaningless; just as when I cooked for myself—the food never tasted as good.
The next morning I lingered in the market as if selecting the perfect pincushion goat cheese could erase the nine months that remained of Calvin’s tour in Iraq. At the vegetable stand, I looked for all the ingredients for soupe au pistou—fresh beans, tomatoes, courgettes, basil—checking them off a mental list even though I had no intention of making the soup. But when the vendeur hovered over a pile of cocos rouges, I suddenly heard myself asking for five hundred grams of them. And five hundred grams of the white beans. A kilo of courgettes, a kilo of haricots verts, a big pot of basil. I lugged everything home, carried a bowl into the garden, and started shelling beans. Calvin came and joined me, and we worked together, pausing now and again to take photos of the pink-speckled beans against the green glaze of their pottery bowl. We trimmed green beans, crunching a few squeaky segments between our teeth, peeled and chopped zucchini, and plucked basil leaves until our thumbnails turned black.
I told myself I wouldn’t think about anything but the soup—the beauty of its ingredients, the scent and sizzle and simmer of them as the heat softened their color and texture. But of course that was impossible. Living mindfully and in the moment is a learned skill, one I hadn’t yet developed. Also, soupe au pistou takes a really long time to make.
I could feel my anxiety rise as we accomplished each step and moved on to the next one, shelled the last bean, peeled the last squash, plucked the last basil leaf. Calvin started to feel it, too; his shoulders appeared tense.
“I’m starting to get a little sad,” I admitted in a small voice as we picked sprigs of wild thyme from a corner of the garden.
“Me, too,” he said. “Don’t think about it,” he added.
Instead we ranked all the meals on our vacation, from the porcini mushroom lasagna we’d eaten on our first night to the lunch of omelette aux fines herbes, the hamburgers grilled on a bed of rosemary, the soupe au pistou at the village fête.
“That was my favorite meal of the trip,” I said.
“Yeah, mine, too. Definitely.”
His voice sounded as wistful as my own. And with the courgettes disintegrating in the simmering soup and the pistou oxidizing slightly in the blender, I knew that we needed to reassure each other. We couldn’t hide our sadness about the coming months apart, nor could we indulge it. All we could do was keep moving forward, because the only thing that would end our separation was time.
A few hours later, we emerged from the kitchen a little disoriented, blinking at the dirty knives and spoons and cutting boards piled on the counters, the plastic bags of empty bean pods, the slimy strands of zucchini peel clinging to the sink. A pair of wasps circled the air with intent, zeroing in on the bowl of grated Gruyère.
And then there was the soup. It stood in an orange enameled
cast-iron pot, cooling gently on the stove, waiting for the evening when we would eat it for dinner. It filled the kitchen with a perfume at once delicate and hearty, a basil-scented work of love, a profusion of summer vegetables made tender with time and patience, a small moment of pleasure to look forward to for the rest of the day.
Soupe au Pistou
There are as many recipes for soupe au pistou as there are soup cooks in Provence, but they all share a common ingredient: fresh white and cranberry beans, available only in summer. For most Provençal cooks, it would be unthinkable to use anything else. After conducting an informal social-media straw poll, however, I discovered that fresh beans are not widely available outside France. I’ve included a variation of the recipe that uses dried beans (just don’t tell Mauricette).
Serves 6
For the soup
1 pound fresh, unshelled white beans (also called cannellini) or ½ cup dried white beans, sorted and soaked overnight
1 pound fresh, unshelled cranberry beans (also called borlotti) or ½ cup dried cranberry beans, sorted and soaked overnight
2 pounds zucchini
2 to 3 medium waxy potatoes
2 pounds green beans, trimmed and cut into 1-inch segments
1 cup elbow macaroni
Salt and pepper to taste
For the pistou
1½ pounds ripe tomatoes
1 large bunch basil, washed and dried