Provence, 1970

by Luke Barr

  Simple French Food was more than a cookbook; it was a treatise of sorts on what he called the “sensuous-sensual-spiritual elements” of cooking. It was also beautifully written. In the Times, Hazelton raved:

  The book’s greatest virtue, I think, is that the author, in his preface on a number of subjects including herbs, wine, improvisation, practicals (oven temperatures, etc.) and in the way he writes the recipes, really teaches you to cook French in a way I’ve never seen before. Here, you don’t learn to cook a set dish, the way an actor acts a set role, but you acquire the methods, the tour de main, the tricks that are the heart and essence of French food.

  To promote her book, Child traveled far and wide, and made high-profile appearances, including on Barbara Walters’s Not for Women Only interview program and on the cover of People magazine. Beard, too, was frequently on the road, performing cooking demonstrations. And even Olney agreed to come to the United States to promote his new book.

  On September 4, 1974, Olney arrived in New York on the SS France, the same ship M.F. and Norah had taken to France four years earlier. It was the ship’s last westbound voyage, as the French Line was finally going out of business. Olney planned to stay for six months, touring the country to teach cooking classes (his publisher, Atheneum, had organized numerous appearances) and visiting his parents in Marathon, Iowa.

  Beard had recently moved a few blocks, from Tenth Street to Twelfth Street in Greenwich Village, into a large town house. He had offered to host a launch party for Simple French Food, and Olney would be teaching a week’s worth of classes in the downstairs demonstration kitchen.

  Beard’s house was the teeming epicenter of the New York food world, crowded with writers, cooks, students, and acolytes at all hours. Gino Cofacci had launched a small cake and pastry business, and spent all his time in the third-floor kitchen, assembling disks of meringue and layers of butter cream. Beard held court in his jovial manner; Olney arrived to find him surrounded by a group of women, watching a demonstration of how to fry meat on the newly installed Corning Ware glass stovetop, a smooth surface embedded with electric burners. Beard asked him about his trip on the France, and professed to be shocked when Olney said he’d traveled tourist class.

  “If things are done right,” Beard said, “one never pays one’s way, and one always goes first class.”

  Olney laughed. And one didn’t pay for one’s Corning Ware stovetop, either, he thought. (Beard had indeed received the equipment for free, in exchange for promotional considerations.) Olney said nothing. Free or not, the Corning Ware was a far cry from his beautiful La Cornue, as troublesome and prone to repair as it sometimes was.

  The party was a blur of new faces. Olney had prepared hundreds of caillettes—baked, caul-wrapped morsels of chopped pork, innards, spinach, and chard. For his cooking classes, he led students through a litany of stews, roasts, fresh pastas, truffled scrambled eggs, crêpes, and gratinés. He maintained his superior, sometimes contemptuous attitude toward many in Beard’s inner circle, including Cofacci and Rojas-Lombardi—the “Peruvian Adonis,” in Olney’s words. But he also found himself warmly embraced by a new group of friends and admirers, including the Times food writer Nika Hazelton, the Associated Press food editor Cecily Brownstone, and the food writer Irena Chalmers. They went out drinking together in the evenings.

  All anyone ever talked about was food and cooking. They discussed recipes and restaurants, the proper way to make pâte brisée. (“What’s the secret of your pastry?” Beard asked Olney. “Lots of butter, very cold, diced,” he replied; “cross two knives, like our grandmothers, to cut it into the flour—work fast, don’t overwork.”) There was the inevitable, perennial gossip about Craig Claiborne, who had thrown in the towel on his newsletter and was returning to the Times. He’d apparently agreed to return only if he did not have to write restaurant reviews.

  As Olney traveled from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C., and from St. Louis to Dallas, he found eager audiences, including a number of his former students from Avignon. He could feel the energy of the moment in American food. It was remarkable to him how much had changed so quickly.

  In Boston, Olney stayed with the Childs, at their house in Cambridge. Paul was recovering from a recent stroke, but Julia graciously insisted Olney come anyway. He stayed in their guest bedroom.

  They had seen each other a few times in France in the years since the winter of 1970, over lunches, and usually accompanied also by Beard. Olney had always felt on edge on such occasions, embittered and superior. But now he had a different perspective. He could see, for one thing, what an enormous impact Child had managed to achieve, even if it was mostly due to television. The sheer numbers of people; the interest in cooking, in baking bread, in new recipes and cookbooks, owed much to her, and Beard’s, pioneering work. And perhaps more important, Olney felt for the first time that he had made a place for himself in the American food establishment. His brand of culinary purism was catching on.

  Part of the routine in Boston, as in many other cities, was to perform a five-minute spot at the end of the local newscast. Olney traveled with a frying pan with rounded edges that allowed him to sauté chopped onion and zucchini and ham and then theatrically toss the food high in the air and catch it in the pan. Then he’d talk a bit, add some garlic and parsley, talk a bit more, squeeze a bit of lemon juice over the dish, and he was done.

  He and Child commiserated about the miserable hot plates to be found in television studios. He’d had a bad experience in New York (the hot plate never got more than warm) and now brought his own wherever he went. Child had long been doing the same thing. They talked about their mutual contempt for the newly emerging nouvelle cuisine, which they considered faddish and artificial. All those dainty, overly fussy dishes that looked like the chef’s hands had been all over the food. And they talked about their French ovens—the La Cornue in La Pitchoune had begun to release great clouds of black smoke every time it was used. Olney had the same model, and he had the same troubles. They laughed.

  Olney’s stay with the Childs in Cambridge in the winter of 1974–1975 was a moment of détente, a reflection of their respective shifts in outlook. Child had half-turned away from France, while Olney had half-turned toward America. Child had expanded and deepened the American food conversation, while Olney had planted the seeds of an artisanal and purist cooking philosophy. Both had found their inspiration in France, and were now reinventing the shape and style of modern American cooking.

  It had all started during those few weeks in Provence in 1970, when the primacy of France, of French taste, had come into serious question, at least in the minds of several of its greatest champions. Who knows how the story of American cooking would have turned out if Child, Beard, and M.F. hadn’t lost their patience for snobbery, thanks in part to the snobbery they were exposed to during that time. Child had been battling Beck all year about what was and wasn’t authentically French (“Ce n’est pas français!” was the refrain that had echoed in her head); Beard had been struggling for over half a decade to articulate, in the writing of his book, the evolution of American cookery as a distinct and worthy cuisine; M.F. had come to France with the question of “France” on her mind—what it had meant to her in the past, and how it might figure in her future.

  Olney, too, had changed. Not his personality, which remained as prickly and judgmental as ever. But he had become a teacher, first in Avignon and now as he toured the United States. He could see that his book was reaching people, Americans, and changing how they cooked.

  That was never clearer than when he arrived on the West Coast for the last leg of his promotional tour, where he was giving demonstrations in Williams-Sonoma kitchen supply shops in Beverly Hills, Palo Alto, and San Francisco. (The company and its catalogues were expanding rapidly, another sign of the times.) At the end of his demonstration in San Francisco (split chicken, stuffed beneath the skin) he was approached by two admirers, Alice Waters and Jeremiah Tower. Waters had opened Chez Panisse,
in Berkeley, a few years earlier, and Tower was now a chef and partner at the restaurant.

  Chez Panisse was the ground zero of the emerging organic, bohemian-utopian, locally sourced food movement. It represented, in many ways, the future of American cooking, combining culinary influences in an easygoing way—the menu was French-inflected, but not exclusively so—and highlighting the freshest ingredients. The ambiance was casual; the food was seriously ambitious.

  Waters and Tower had both been inspired by Olney’s first book, and they adored his new one. Waters invited him to dinner that night at Chez Panisse, and had arranged for a surprise guest—Olney’s old friend Kenneth Anger, the avant-garde filmmaker. He and Olney had known each other in the bohemian Paris of the early 1950s. A new strain of bohemianism, a culinary bohemianism, had taken root in California at Chez Panisse.

  At Last House, over the coming years, M.F. worked on her Marseille book. It was a highly personal account of the city, weaving recollections of earlier visits with recent observations. She had spent four months there in 1973, for the purpose of gathering material. Norah came, too. They’d rented a small apartment near the harbor, and hired Raymond Gatti for periodic excursions out of town—to Aix and Nice. Gatti brought them slices of his wife’s homemade lemon tart, which M.F. declared to be the best she’d ever tasted.

  They found Marseille much the same as they always had—it was a rough, tough place in parts, long a hub of smuggling. The port city had a vitality M.F. admired.

  But it was changing, too, wicked in new ways. There were drugs and crime everywhere; there were shootings. She wrote about how four people had been gunned down in the port: “Nobody seemed to be much annoyed by anything except the fact that the act was one of petty revenge carried out by amateurs. Where was the old spit and polish in crime?” There were countless identical bars in the arcades under the quai, with names such as La Lune Bleue and Bébé-à-Go-Go. She observed the young dandies in coffee shops—Pinball Boys, she called them—and the prostitutes lingering outside the seafood restaurants on Bouillabaisse Row. She noted the layers of development and overdevelopment.

  She also described the tomatoes of Provence, her favorite restaurants, and the sights and sounds and smells of the fish market:

  Often, in a window opening onto the street, as crown of the display inside, there will be a kind of pièce montée, a Dalí or Carême sculpture of one stunningly graceful loup, posed for an endless second with a great pink shrimp in its mouth, as it leaps from a high wave of smaller red and blue and silver fishes over the piles of oysters, mussels, urchins, clams …

  She wrote about meals she’d eaten in Marseille in 1932, and about walking home from a movie (Last Tango in Paris) late at night with Norah in 1973, and about “sitting in cafés drinking degenerate apéritifs before lunch.” She had found a new tone in this book—it was vintage M.F., but it was also less elegiac and tougher, more rooted in the present. Her experiences in Arles and Avignon in 1970 and her refusal to sentimentalize the glamour of France could be felt on every page.

  A Considerable Town took her until 1977 to finish. Arnold Gingrich had died in 1976, of cancer. It was another blow, but it had happened quickly, and she was glad of that. The book would turn out to be her last of entirely new material. There would be essays and anthologies and magazine stories in the coming years, but this was her final book.

  Jan Morris reviewed the work in the New York Times Book Review: “Nobody who reads this book, I swear, will ever think of the place in the same way again.”

  M.F.K. Fisher stands to so many of us, wherever we live, in the office of an endlessly entertaining and slightly mysterious aunt. She has written one such book before, about Aix, but in “A Considerable Town” she develops the genre much further, and weaves a meditative, discursive, and sometimes enigmatic spell about that Chicago of European seaports, Marseille.

  Anatole Broyard reviewed the book in the daily Times. He noted M.F.’s focus on Marseille’s contemporary changes.

  Inevitably, Marseilles is now going the way of all old cities. There is talk of high rise apartments to house the fishermen’s families near the port, and of moving the auction house for the day’s catches to a suburb. Good restaurants are being replaced by snack bars with electric organs and “oriental bistros.” But that may simply be the way of the world in our time.

  In the summer of 1978, shortly after the book was published and on the occasion of M.F.’s seventieth birthday, Alice Waters proposed a celebratory dinner at Chez Panisse, and M.F. accepted. The women had met earlier in the year, when M.F. invited Waters and cookbook author Marion Cunningham to lunch at Last House. They’d hit it off.

  The dinner at Chez Panisse was playfully organized around the titles of some of M.F.’s books—quantities of oysters, of course, in honor of Consider the Oyster. Four dishes inspired by Marseille and A Considerable Town: snails in Pernod, tomatoes and garlic; charcoal-grilled rockfish with wild herbs and anchovies; spit-roasted pheasant; and bitter lettuces with goat cheese croutons. For dessert there were three plum sorbets and a Muscat de Beaumes-de-Venise, inspired by A Cordiall Water.

  All of the San Francisco food world was in attendance, and so was James Beard, who’d traveled from New York. The food was incredible—the best M.F. had ever had at an American restaurant, she said. She had come with Norah, and they sat together enjoying the valedictory moment, the toasts, the laughter, and it was clear to both sisters that Waters and her generation of cooks had found a new idiom, an entirely original continuation of the legacy of the winter of 1970, a modern art of American eating.

  It made a certain, perfect sense that Waters had embraced both Olney and M.F., as different as they were. For Waters, avatar of the new American cooking, was rooted both immediately as a cook in Olney’s bohemian purism, and culturally in M.F.’s groundbreaking literary sensuality. Cooking was for Waters about more than food, it was a philosophy. The same had always been true for M.F., and for Olney, too.

  M.F. had come full circle: She could see that the seeds she had planted were blooming. She saw it at Chez Panisse; she saw it in Glen Ellen. “In the Sonoma Valley I see young people growing their own food and making their own bread,” she said. “And of course the American people seem to be demanding so much more and, with exposure, choosing more wisely what they put in their stomachs.”

  It was true: Americans had tuned in to food, and to the possibility of good, simple cooking, the sort of cooking M.F. had always embodied: the primacy of flavor over all else, the astringent luxury of the oyster, the explosive sweetness of the tangerine. M.F. would live more than another decade before being struck by Parkinson’s disease, and would see her gimlet-eyed philosophy of food and living adopted and celebrated. Like Julia Child, she had become an icon of sorts, presiding over a renaissance in American cooking.

  AFTERWORD

  PROVENCE NOW

  THE ROAD UP TO LA PITCHOUNE IS A NARROW, unpaved driveway, winding up a steep hill. It’s narrow enough that if you happen to encounter a car coming the other way, someone is going to have to back up, or pull into one of the turnoffs for the other houses in the immediate area. Each house has a name; small signs with dark green lettering and arrows point to the left, toward Le Vieux Mas, the eighteenth-century farmhouse where Simca and Jean lived, and to the right toward La Campanette, La Pitchouline, and Le Mas de Levandre, all built by the Beck family over the years. La Campanette is where Beck taught cooking classes in the 1970s. The Childs’ La Pitchoune is at the top, at the end of the road.

  I arrived on a Saturday in early July 2010. The weather was hot, the cicadas singing a gale-force barrage of noise, a wall of sound of summer. The horses in the fields below La Pitchoune stood in whatever shade they could find, and they all looked up and watched, diffidently, as we passed by. I was here with my family: my wife and six-year-old daughter, my father and my grandmother Norah. The last time she had been here was to visit the Childs with her sister, in 1978—M.F.’s last trip to Europe. M.F. died in 19
92. Now here I was writing about their 1970 trip, and what better place to do that, to research, think, write, and cook, and sit on the terrace with afternoon cocktails with my grandmother and ask her about that time, than La Pitchoune? I had rented the house for a good part of the summer.

  It was something of a miracle that my grandmother had made it over—she still lives in Sonoma County, a long way from the Côte d’Azur for a woman in her nineties. She was sure this would be her last trip to Europe, her last Provençal hurrah.

  Norah was shocked at how much the area had changed since she was last here. She could hardly recognize the landscape and the towns as we drove to Plascassier from Nice and through Cannes, a half hour away. There were new buildings everywhere, American-style big-box stores and car dealerships, highways crowded with traffic.

  In 1971, Paul Child had written in a letter to his brother, from La Pitchoune:

  Everywhere around us the horridly inevitable up-building and despoliation of this terrain goes forward relentlessly. Little box-like villas and large Hollywood-style stucco mansions are mushrooming everywhere. The concomitant roads, concrete telephone and lightpoles too, of course now spatter across the once pristine landscape, and noise, people, and smoke add to my sense that our lovely earth is being plundered by the human race.

  The statement is just as true—more true—today. By the time we got to the house, however, the rush and noise of the Côte d’Azur had long receded. Standing on the terrace, looking across the little valley at the village of Plascassier, set on a hilltop a mile away, the view was more or less identical to the one I’d seen in photographs from the 1960s and ’70s.

  I was looking for these views, looking to catch glimpses of the past, to find the Provence that had inspired Child, M.F., Beard, and Olney—to see it, however refracted, through their eyes. I planned to travel in their footsteps, cook in Julia’s kitchen, and sit in the shade of Paul’s beloved olive tree. I wanted to see for myself the world I had found in their letters and diaries, and also to gauge the distance between then and now.