Provence, 1970
Page 1
Copyright © 2013 by Luke Barr
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Clarkson Potter/Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
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CLARKSON POTTER is a trademark and POTTER with colophon is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously unpublished material:
Inkwell Management: Letter from M. F. K. Fisher to Paul and Julia Child, December 11, 1970, and letter from M. F. K. Fisher to Paul and Julia Child and James Beard, December 16, 1970, copyright © 1970 by M. F. K. Fisher. Reprinted by permission of Inkwell Management on behalf of the Trustee of the Estate of M. F. K. Fisher.
The Julia Child Foundation for Gastronomy and the Culinary Arts: Letter from Paul and Julia Child to M. F. K. Fisher, December 12, 1971, Julia Child material copyright © 2012. Reprinted by permission of The Julia Child Foundation for Gastronomy and the Culinary Arts.
James Olney: Letter from Richard Olney to James Beard, October 1, 1970. Reprinted by permission of James Olney, Literary Executor of the Estate of Richard Olney.
John Petersen: Letter from David Pleydell-Bouverie to M. F. K. Fisher, October 10, 1971 (M. F. K. Fisher Papers). Reprinted by permission of John Petersen on behalf of the Audubon Canyon Ranch.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Barr, Luke.
Provence, 1970 : M.F.K. Fisher, Julia Child, James Beard, and the
Reinvention of American Taste / Luke Barr. — First edition.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Cooking, American—History—20th century. 2. Cooking, American—Philosophy.
3. Fisher, M. F. K. (Mary Frances Kennedy), 1908–1992. 4. Child, Julia.
5. Jones, Judith, 1924– 6. Beard, James, 1903–1985. 7. Olney, Richard. 8. Olney, Richard—Homes and haunts—France—Provence. 9. Provence (France)—Biography.
10. Provence (France)—Social life and customs—20th century. I. Title.
TX715.B3417 2014
641′5973090′04—dc23
2013007782
ISBN 978-0-307-71834-1
eISBN 978-0-7704-3331-4
Jacket design by Gabriele Wilson
Jacket photography by DNY59/iStock
v3.1
FOR YUMI
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
PROLOGUE
1 • ALL ALONE: DECEMBER 20, 1970
2 • TEN WEEKS EARLIER …
3 • EN ROUTE TO PROVENCE
4 • AN EPIC DINNER WITH RICHARD OLNEY
5 • FIRST MEALS IN FRANCE
6 • LA PITCHOUNE, COUNTRY RETREAT
7 • JAMES BEARD’S DOOMED DIET
8 • PARIS INTERLUDE
9 • A DINNER PARTY AT THE CHILDS’
10 • SEXUAL POLITICS
11 • TWILIGHT OF THE SNOBS
12 • ESCAPE
13 • THE GHOST OF ARLES AND AVIGNON
14 • CHRISTMAS AND RÉVEILLON
15 • GOING HOME
16 • LAST HOUSE
17 • NEW BEGINNINGS
AFTERWORD: PROVENCE NOW
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES AND SOURCES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
PROLOGUE
ON A COOL AUGUST MORNING IN 2009, I drove up a sloping, narrow driveway in Glen Ellen, California, on my way to visit the past. Last House. This was where my great-aunt, the writer M. F. K. Fisher, lived the last twenty-plus years of her life, and where she died in 1992. I had not been back since then—none of us had. In the car with me was my grandmother Norah (M.F.’s sister), along with my father, my wife, and my five-year-old daughter. The house was set back a good distance from the country road, facing a dry, rustling meadow. I drove slowly, past a row of large walnut trees covered in extravagant drapings of moss. They were like something out of a dream, alien but beautiful.
The house was a fixture of my childhood: small and white, with a peaked tile roof, thick stucco walls, and arched openings over the veranda and entryway. M.F. referred to it with the barest note of irony as her “palazzo.” Inside were two grandly proportioned high-ceilinged rooms, and the largest bathroom I’d ever seen, with a bathtub in the middle of it and a shower from which jets of water shot out in all directions. The bathroom walls were painted a dark, Pompeian red.
I called my great-aunt “Dote,” which was her childhood nickname. We in the family all called her that, though she was M.F. or Mary Frances to friends. My grandmother was Noni or None—Dote and Noni, they called each other. M.F. was the older sister, by nine years.
In the 1970s, my parents, younger brother, and I used to come for lunch on our way to visit my grandmother for the weekend. Norah lived in Jenner, a bit farther north on the Sonoma County coast. I can still remember the pulsing, dry heat of midday, midsummer Glen Ellen, the pleasure of escaping the stifling backseat of the family car—a red VW Bug or white Toyota Corona, depending on the year—and entering the cool, dark interior of M.F.’s house. It always smelled faintly of cooking and even more faintly of vermouth and of books. The books were everywhere, and M.F. would have been reading while waiting for us to arrive, her glasses on a cord around her neck. As she rose to greet us when we walked in the door, her Siamese cat Charlie, never friendly, would retreat stiffly out of sight. The open kitchen was along one side of the large, square living room, and there was a long wooden table that looked out onto the terrace and the pasture beyond. The walls of the house were thick and solid, and the overall impression was completely different from that of the airy, open-to-the-elements glass-and-wood Joseph Eichler house my parents rented in Mountain View, in the Bay Area. M.F.’s papers were piled everywhere—on her desk, by her typewriter, in her bedroom.
I can still remember the dense and meaty grilled chicken drumsticks with watercress and homemade pickles she served for lunch when I was about ten years old. Or they may have been drumsticks from some other, smaller bird—I remember they were tiny and delicate, a little bit sweet. I loved them. Even more than the drumsticks, though, I remember my dawning sense of mortification as I heard myself say:
“This is exactly the same thing we had the last time we were here!”
The adults all laughed awkwardly. Needless to say, I hadn’t meant the remark as any kind of criticism, but that’s what they all thought, I realized too late. That I was suggesting she had a limited cooking repertoire. M.F. assured me she had made the dish again especially for me—since I’d liked it so much the last time we were there (which must have been months earlier; we visited three or four times a year).
I quickly agreed that I had, and still did.
Everyone watched me as I ate. I ate slowly at that age. This was another topic for discussion.
“Luke, you are a very slow eater,” M.F. said, not for the first time. She approved of this character trait. One should stop and savor the food while eating, take pleasure in the moment. She, too, was a slow eater.
M.F. spoke to children as if they were slightly amusing adults. She took them seriously, though, I remember. Her voice was quiet and confiding. She looked me right in the eyes and listened when I spoke, and in her eyes I saw an impossible combination of intense interest and dispassionate, calculating judgment. There was no condescension at all, but she left no doubt that she was at all times taking note. Of what you said, and how you said it, what you ate, and how quickly. That look in her eyes is my most lasting memory of my great-aunt.
The adults drank wine. Wine with lunch was something
that happened only up north, in Sonoma County, at Last House and at Norah’s in Jenner. The lunches were correspondingly longer: leisurely hours spent around the table cracking crab and passing the salad and opening more wine. And there was dessert—an unusual and welcome luxury for a ten-year-old at lunchtime. After we cleared the table, M.F. served vanilla ice cream with baked nectarines.
The nectarines weren’t hot, they were warm, and the same had been true of the drumsticks. M.F. always finished cooking long before her guests arrived, and then pulled dishes out of the cooling oven as needed, or left them on the counter. There was never a hint of effort or any last-minute flurry of activity.
“Did you bring your swimsuits?” M.F. asked after lunch. We had: in Jenner, we would go to Goat Rock Beach and wade in the surf, ice-cold even in summertime, or swim in the Russian River in nearby Guerneville, but at Last House there was a pool. It was just up the hill, behind the main house, which belonged to M.F.’s friend David Pleydell-Bouverie.
Bouverie was a debonair and idiosyncratic Englishman, an expat aristocrat—grandson of the fifth Earl of Radnor, a title dating back to the eighteenth century. He had come to America as a young man in the early 1930s, and eventually married Alice Astor, the heiress; they divorced after a few years, in 1952, and Bouverie went on to the life of a jet-setting bon vivant. He settled in Glen Ellen and built an estate suitable for the sort of grand entertaining he undertook, hosting dinners that mixed local characters, San Francisco socialites, and European royalty. The rooms were filled with art—paintings by Matthias Withoos and John Singer Sargent, among others—and dramatic pieces of overscale furniture. Trained as an architect, Bouverie had designed all the various buildings on his ranch, including a bell tower, a barn, and guesthouses.
M.F. and Bouverie met in the late 1960s, hit it off, and agreed to an unusual arrangement: he would design and build a house for her on his ranch, and she would pay for its construction; when she died, the house would revert to him or to his estate. She named it Last House, knowing that’s what it was destined to be.
Bouverie’s pool was round, lined entirely with tiny dark blue tiles. It was mesmerizing: the water was still, cold, and unchlorinated, glinting icily in the heat. My brother and I jumped right in, while my parents sat on the edge with their feet in the water.
To a child, Last House always seemed a place of grown-up pleasures and writerly secrets, and it still does. Partly, of course, the mood here is that of any beloved place revisited years later: strangely different, yet somehow exactly the same, haunted by time and memory. But more than that, Last House embodies and represents a turning point, both in M.F.’s life and—as a consequence—in the life of American cooking. It was built during the fall and winter of 1970, after M.F. had sold her house in St. Helena, in Napa Valley. Her possessions boxed up and stored away while she waited to move into her new house, M.F. left that September for an extended journey to France with her sister, a journey that brought her into unexpectedly intense contact with many of her friends and colleagues in the world of food and cookbooks, including James Beard and Julia Child. It was a journey that would challenge many of her beliefs about herself, and about France, which she had loved for so many years.
Looking back, I can see the story of that journey embedded in the shape of Last House itself, in the architecture, the Provençal colors and materials, even if, now, there is an enormous high-definition television in the living room and a small dog yapping in circles in front of it. The TV and dog belong to John Martin, an Irishman who was for years Bouverie’s ranch foreman, and who now lives in the house. Bouverie left his land and all the buildings to a nature conservancy, the Audubon Canyon Ranch, and John Petersen, the director of the program, showed us around along with Martin, who now works for Audubon as a land steward. The barn functions as a classroom for visiting schoolchildren, with numerous bird’s nests on display. No one lives in the main house anymore, and it’s now used mostly for fund-raising galas and dinners. We walked around back, and there was the round, blue pool, still as ever: unchanged. From the veranda at Last House, too, the view was the same as it ever was, except there were no longer any cattle wandering around.
But if Bouverie Ranch and Last House seemed unchanged, the world of food and cooking over which M.F. for so many years presided has been utterly transformed. Within just a few miles of where we stood was a cornucopia of Michelin-starred restaurants, family-run organic wineries, self-taught goat herders and cheese makers, small-scale mushroom farmers, upstart Asian-inflected seafood cafés, artisanal salami and bacon producers, and too many farmers’ markets to count—and those were just the people and places I’d encountered in the preceding three days.
Sonoma County is saturated with sophisticated flavors and ambitious cooking, and, more than that, with an unmistakable sense of craftsmanship and idealism. During the week we spent there I heard much discussion about ingredients, where they came from, who grew and raised them, and how; about what was in season and what was not quite yet but soon would be; about the importance of procuring organic hay to feed the goats who produced the milk for the cheese—and the fact that you could taste the difference in the cheese itself; about the farms and gardens that many of the restaurants operated, where they also sold produce. There was a moral dimension to the conversation about food in Sonoma, a sense that quality and refinement and taste were deeply connected to the land itself, to how one worked the land, and how one lived on it.
Sonoma County may be a particular epicenter of food, agriculture, and urbane bohemianism, but the way Americans eat and cook has changed significantly everywhere in the United States. You can see it in the quality and ubiquity of fresh produce, in the democratization and popularization of cooking knowledge and expertise, in our multicultural, internationalized recipes and menus. You can see it in the valorization of ethnic street food and gourmet food trucks; in the spread of Whole Foods, slow food, and “farm-to-table” restaurants; in Michelle Obama’s organic White House vegetable garden.
Of course, the culture of food is always changing, but the starting point for so much of the contemporary story is the epochal shift that took place at the end of the 1960s, when previously unquestioned European superiority and French snobbery lost their grip on American cooking. No one sensed this change more keenly than M.F., who had for years made France—the idea of France, the philosophy of France—a recurring theme of her writing. It was in France that she had found liberation, license, and pleasure. And it was in late 1970, on her trip to France with her sister, that she would come to terms, finally, with her European legacy, and her American future.
She would not be the only one making such a reckoning at that time.
Who can know how history actually happens, where or when exactly an idea takes root, or blossoms, or wilts away? In December of 1970, the seminal figures of modern American cooking—M.F., Julia Child, Simone Beck, James Beard, Judith Jones, and Richard Olney—found themselves together in the South of France. They could feel their world was changing. Indeed, they themselves had set many of the changes in motion.
The gathering happened more or less by accident, but at a particularly combustible moment. So much was shifting in the larger culture—the politics of identity and style, the parameters of taste, of what it meant to be a sophisticated person—and they would each be making choices about how to move forward. There was new energy and a countercultural ethic in the air, and their reactions to it, and to one another, would change the course of culinary history.
This book tells the story of that moment: a few weeks in the hills above the Côte d’Azur, weeks that were full of meals and conversations, arguments and unspoken rivalries. The small group gathered there was the tightly wound nucleus around which all others orbited in the insular, still-clubby world of food and cooking in 1970. And while it would be folly to argue that they alone determined the future direction and sensibility of American cooking, their encounters in Provence, in rustic home kitchens, on stone terraces overlo
oking olive groves, in local restaurants, and at the ubiquitous farmers’ markets in the surrounding countryside, provide a unique, up-close view of the push and pull of history and personality, of a new world in the making.
Of course, before there could be a “new world,” there had to have been an old world, and for all of them, that was Europe. Each of these cooks and writers had been profoundly influenced by their experiences on the Continent, and had fashioned themselves in its glamorous shadows.
It was M.F. who led the way. Her writing, starting with the 1937 publication of her first book, Serve It Forth, had defined for a generation how to talk and think about food and wine and life; she projected sly, knowing worldliness and American-in-Europe sophistication, and she did it with a light touch. In the book’s introduction, she describes various types of “books about eating,” so as to explain how hers would be different:
They are stodgy, matter-of-fact, covered very practically with washable cloth or gravy-colored paper, beginning with measurements and food values and ending with sections on the care of invalids—oddly enough for books so concerned with hygiene! They are usually German, or English or American.
Or, on the other hand, they are short, bound impractically in creamy paper or chintz, illustrated by woodcutters à la mode. They begin with witty philosophizing on the pleasures of the table, and end with a suggested menu given to seven gentlemen who know his wife, by a wealthy old banker who feels horns pricking up gently from his bald skull. These books are usually French. They are much more entertaining, if less useful, than their phlegmatic twins.
M.F. would navigate her own course, she wrote, finding a way to avoid both the dull and the decadent. She would write about meals she’d had, but they would most certainly not be the kind where “you sit, pompously nonchalant, on a balcony at Monte Carlo, tête-à-tête with three princes, a millionaire, and the lovely toast of London, God bless her!” Nor would Serve It Forth be the sort of book to discuss with “firm authority the problem of Bordeaux versus Burgundies, or when to drink Barsac”—that being the type whose authors, needless to say, “are young and full of intellectual fun and frolic,” and are, of course, “making a gastronomic tour on bicycles.”