Provence, 1970

by Luke Barr

  In the course of the glorious operations by the force to free southern France, 66 of our comrades died and over 200 were wounded.

  This memorial is dedicated to the memory of our companions in arms who died in this campaign and to the citizens of Grasse who fell in the liberation of their beautiful city.

  FIRST SPECIAL SERVICE FORCE ASSOCIATION

  24 August, 1991

  I took his picture, standing below the plaque.

  Back at La Pitchoune, Gatti and my grandmother remembered each other and reminisced. We discussed his wife’s famous lemon tart, the recipe for which had nearly found its way into From Julia Child’s Kitchen. Julia had heard about the tart from M.F., as she explained in the note preceding the recipe for Tarte au Citron, La Pitchoune:

  While I was finishing up this book in the south of France, Mary Frances (M. F. K.) Fisher wrote one of her elliptically charming letters, recalling Marseille, and Aix, and our own region around Grasse. And she spoke of lemon tarts; that the one she remembered in Saint-Remy hadn’t the appealing homey quality of a certain Mme. Gatti’s lemon tart from our region. I know Mme. Gatti, and Mme. Gatti was delighted to be so praised by Mme. Fisher. Mme. Gatti said she’d bring me her tart and her recipe for it, but so far I’ve had neither one nor the other.

  Mme. Gatti’s lemon tart recipe would remain a secret.

  It wasn’t just Mme. Gatti’s lemon tart or Pathé’s now-vanished diet clinic—the past is a seemingly always elusive thing. When I peered at Paul Child’s photographs or read my great-aunt M.F.’s diaries, the truth was somewhere between the lines, or just out of camera range. Similarly, when I went with my grandmother in search of Les Bastides, Allanah Harper’s former estate in La Roquette-sur-Siagne, where Eda Lord and Sybille Bedford stayed and where M.F. rented an apartment in 1970, we could find no trace of it.

  La Roquette was a short drive from La Pitchoune, through Mouans-Sartoux and then along a country road winding through roundabouts and narrowing to squeeze past a cluster of yellow and pale orange buildings—the town center, such as it was. La Roquette was tiny. It was also stubbornly unfamiliar.

  My grandmother sat in the front seat, wearing sunglasses. My wife and daughter were in the back. We were all on the lookout for something, anything, a sign. Google Maps said there was a rue des Bastides. Was that a clue? The official address in 1970 (to which Arnold Gingrich had addressed his numerous letters) was simply “Les Bastides, 06 La Roquette-sur-Siagne, France.” We drove some more.

  “I remember the villa as dark and cool,” my grandmother said. The apartment they’d rented was just across a very narrow lane. It had no garden, but there was a second-story terrace on one side of the building. Where were they now, these houses? I had sent inquiries to the mayor’s office and to a local historical society, but hadn’t received a reply.

  Driving along the main road, we slowed down to read the signs announcing the names of the houses and estates to be found along each side street. I took one turnoff and then another, crawling past one property after the next, stopping to examine some of the older ones.

  We circled back to the town square. It was a beautiful if slightly desolate place—the too-quiet town square surrounded by a proliferation of villas everywhere, just as Paul Child had prophesied. A similar withering had happened in Plascassier, in the old village center on the hill. Nevertheless, we enjoyed the slow rhythm of the square under the shadows of the tall plane trees. Our pleasantly fruitless search had come to an end.

  Another day, I made my way to Solliès-Toucas, to visit Richard Olney’s house. Here was a place where nothing had changed—Olney’s books and paintings and pots and pans were still in place, the wine in his cellar continued to age. The property is now owned by his two brothers, Byron and James, who vacation there during the summer. The rest of the year, a young family takes care of the place—Marc Lanza and his wife and children. Lanza was about forty years old, a cook who runs a small catering business. He wore his hair in a small ponytail the day I met him.

  He showed me the house, a solid two-story stone building with an open kitchen. Outside was the vegetable and herb garden; off to the left, an aviary with small, colorful parakeets; and beyond that, a chicken coop. We walked up the hill, a steep climb to a stunning rock swimming pool, carved out of the side of the cliff. We could see down to the village and the valley beyond, and like everywhere else in Provence, there were new buildings going up in every direction. “He would have hated this,” said Lanza, pointing at a construction site off in the distance. “Richard believed in preserving the old Provençal traditions, ways of life. He did not drive, he had no television.”

  In the wine cellar, he showed me Olney’s remarkable collection—wines going back to the teens in some cases, the bulk of them from the 1950s through the 1980s. Each bottle was marked in heavy white pen with its year, in Olney’s handwriting. (The labels were in many cases illegible.)

  The house and the landscape were beautiful, a self-contained world on a Provençal hillside. But it was the food Lanza cooked in Olney’s kitchen that revealed the spirit of the place.

  There is a heartbreaking scene described in the afterword of Olney’s autobiography, Reflexions, written by his brother James. James and Byron arrive at the house just after Richard has died, in August 1999. They find a “picture of perfect order”:

  A dish with traces of tomatoed pilaf on it, the pan in which the pilaf was warmed, and a wine glass, all placed next to the sink for washing (the remains of the pilaf neatly stored in the refrigerator); on the table an open book with Richard’s glasses alongside.

  He had been struck by a heart attack in his sleep. A few days later, the brothers ate dinner.

  Byron to James at table on the terrace in Solliès (Menu: brochettes of lamb’s hearts and kidneys, the remains of the pilaf found in the refrigerator, a bottle of Château de Beaucastel 1986 from the cellar): “Do you realize what we’re doing?—eating the last meal Richard will ever cook for us.”

  Silence.

  Lanza had prepared pieds et paquets, a quintessential Olney dish: lowly tripe, cooked very slowly to transcendent tenderness. It was a meal that encapsulated Olney’s Provence, the rustic sophistication more than a way of cooking and indeed a philosophy of life, not unlike the tomatoed rice pilaf and lamb brochettes the Olney brothers ate in silence in 1999.

  OLIVES

  PIEDS ET PAQUETS

  STEAMED POTATOES

  GOAT CHEESE SALAD

  The rolled, stuffed tripe had simmered with tomatoes for twelve hours. Lanza served it directly from a shallow, heavy cooking dish. The potatoes tasted like the essence of potato, and the goat cheese had been piled on top of bread and put under the broiler. We ate on the terrace, drinking a Domaine Tempier red wine from 1987. It was a pale and dusty color, the best wine I’d ever tasted.

  Child’s final visit to La Pitchoune was in the summer of 1992. She knew it was a farewell, for she had decided to return the house, as agreed, to the Beck family. Beck had died the previous year, and Beard, who visited so often, had died in 1985. His larger-than-life spirit lived on in the kitchen, where they had cooked together so happily, but the “Gigis” were no more. And Paul, after suffering a series of strokes, was now living in a nursing home. He would die two years later. Julia wrote:

  And I came to a decision. Without Paul to share the house with, or my grande chérie Simca, or all of our other favorite friends and family, it had come time to relinquish La Pitchoune.

  People seemed surprised when I told them that it wasn’t an especially difficult or emotional decision. But I have never been very sentimental. La Pitchoune was a special place, but the heart had gone out of it for me now. It was the people I shared it with, more than the physical property, that I would miss.

  Besides, Provence was no longer the quiet refuge we had all loved. It had become hideously expensive (a head of lettuce cost twice as much in Cannes as in Cambridge), and the coastline was more jammed than ever. Houses were multiplying on
the hillsides, and the winding country roads were clogged with streams of cars and enormous trucks. Our little village of Plascassier, which had always had a butcher, baker, vegetable shops, and electrician, now had no little businesses left at all; everyone went to the big supermarket down the hill. As Paul had accurately predicted years earlier, the place was turning into southern California. And that I could walk away from sans regret.

  Child would live another dozen years, never returning to Provence before her death in 2004.

  I thought of her words as we prepared our final dinner at La Pitchoune. It would be a feast, a celebration, in honor not only of our time there with family and friends, but of our connection to the place and to the past. Like Julia and Paul, M.F., Beard, Beck, and Olney—and despite the possible Southern California-ization of Provence, as Paul described it—we would rejoice in cooking together, for one another.

  For me, this was a meal that would also recapture the leisurely formality of the meals of my childhood, at Last House and at my grandmother’s house, meals that were themselves rooted in a kind of Provençal ideal. We would gather at the long, narrow wooden table in Jenner (which my grandmother had bought in France in the 1950s and shipped home) or on the balcony in Glen Ellen, the adults drinking wine and children putting out the silverware. By the time I knew them, M.F. and my grandmother were both imposing, matriarchal figures, demanding a measure of seriousness about food, eating, and manners. My mother was young (twenty-two when I was born in 1968), but she, too, was an opinionated cook. She was from Switzerland, and believed in homemade bread, whole grains, and fresh vegetables. In terms of cooking, she was a child of both Europe and of Berkeley in the 1970s. My culinary inheritance came from these three women.

  We had shopped for groceries with abandon—at the butcher and charcuterie in the neighboring town of Valbonne, and at the Dumanois Primeurs greenmarket. We bought a large slice of fresh foie gras, escargots in garlic butter, and pâté. We bought tomatoes, cucumbers, and onions for a gazpacho. Potatoes, celery root, and Gruyère for a gratin. Leeks for a leek vinaigrette. Two rabbits, and mushrooms, and handfuls of tiny red, yellow, and orange peppers for a gibelotte. Lemon sorbet and raspberries. And plenty of wine.

  In the spirit of M.F., Bedford, and Lord’s 1970 “collaboration dinner,” we each planned to be responsible for one dish. The kitchen at La Pitchoune was a large, accommodating room, and soon we were unpacking our ingredients and spreading them out on cutting boards.

  Cello took charge of the rabbit, browning the pieces in olive oil before adding white wine, mushrooms, and the colorful peppers. It was a simple recipe, the gibelotte, celebrated by Olney as “un plat canaille”—a rakish dish: rabbit and white wine stew, he wrote in Simple French Food, was “thought of as vulgar, popular, unrefined (in this context, all considered to be positive virtues).”

  I sliced and cleaned the leeks and let them simmer with the rabbit, and began making the gratin. I was following Beck’s method, cooking the sliced celery root in water and lemon juice, and the sliced potatoes in milk, then layering them with cheese, cream, and nutmeg in a shallow dish. It went into the oven.

  My wife made a vinaigrette for the leeks, and I toasted some hazelnuts to put on top—a combination we’d discovered at a New York City bistro.

  Across the kitchen, two more friends, brother and sister, were making the gazpacho in a Cuisinart, chopping tomatoes and onion, and also watching a small saucepan of boiling eggs. They had decided to devil them. Beard would have approved: he had a deep affinity for hors d’oeuvres, and considered deviled eggs a real delicacy: “If you have taken care to observe at a cocktail party, nothing disappears as quickly as the eggs,” he noted in American Cookery. When the eggs were done, the siblings turned the yolks into three fillings, one plain, one spicy, one with olives.

  Yet another old friend—we had a full house, even after my father and grandmother had departed the previous week—joined us in the kitchen and announced that he would be making a cocktail, a new invention, in fact. It would be called “The Plascassier.” Into the blender went a basket of raspberries, fresh mint, lemon juice, and vodka. This liquid was poured judiciously into the bottoms of glasses, and then topped with Laurent-Perrier champagne.

  We all raised our glasses, and continued to cook and talk. The mood in the kitchen was purposeful but also intoxicating, alluring smells radiating from the oven and stove. We were amateurs (except for Cello, of course), but we had each found a spot in the kitchen, like line chefs at an exceptionally casual restaurant.

  I took the leeks out of the stewpot and let them cool in the vinaigrette.

  The escargots were in the oven, turned up high to brown the gratin. We had leftover whole peppers and put them in the oven to char briefly and serve as another side dish.

  The pâté and the stuffed eggs were arranged on plates. We eyed the foie gras with a certain amount of awe: the pale goose liver had been sliced thickly from a terrine at the charcuterie, and it cost a fortune. It was the purest decadence.

  In Simple French Food, Olney describes foie gras as a luxury fit for special occasions—which this was—and touches on the ethics of foie gras production in an unforgettable parenthetical remark:

  (I once listened in amazement to a Périgord farmwife describing—in what was intended to be a vehement denial that the raising of geese destined to produce foie gras involves cruelty to animals—the tenderness and gentleness with which the birds are treated and, with mounting enthusiasm and in the most extraordinarily sensuous language, the suspense and the excitement experienced as the moment arrives to delicately slit the abdomen, to lovingly—ever so gently—pry it open, exposing finally the huge, glorious, and tender blond treasure, fragile object of so many months of solicitous care and of present adoration. One sensed vividly the goose’s plenary participation, actively sharing in the orgasmic beauty of the sublime moment for which her life had been lived.)

  Olney left it at that, then discussed a complicated recipe for preserving geese in their own fat.

  We paid our silent respects to this goose, divided its liver onto rounds of toasted baguette, and prepared to serve dinner.

  ESCARGOTS

  FOIE GRAS

  PTÉ AND CORNICHONS

  DEVILED EGGS THREE WAYS

  GAZPACHO

  RABBIT EN GIBELOTTE

  ROASTED PEPPERS

  POTATO AND CELERY ROOT GRATIN

  LEEKS VINAIGRETTE WITH TOASTED HAZELNUTS

  LEMON SORBET WITH RASPBERRY SAUCE

  We ate outside on the terrace, at two tables set beneath the mulberry tree. There had been a brief thunderstorm that afternoon, and the air and light seemed especially clear, the late afternoon sun slanting over the hilltops. We opened wines, corralled children, and passed plates.

  It was all transcendently wonderful—the melting foie gras; the quickly disappearing deviled eggs (just as Beard had predicted); the spicy gazpacho; the tender, dense rabbit in its light, fragrant broth; the rich gratin—the dinner was an extravaganza, and it lasted for hours. When the sun went down we lit candles, and someone went to the kitchen to make an instant raspberry sauce—cooking the berries with sugar and lemon juice. We spooned it over the sorbet. It was the final touch.

  I thought of Child, and how she’d left Provence behind, sans regret, and yet how the legacy of the place—her Provence—lived on. The intimate intertwining of food, life, love, and friendship, the simple pleasure of cooking that seemed so natural and rooted here, had been joined to the democratizing, culture-changing force of her personality and her TV show. The shift that had occurred in the fall and winter of 1970, when Child, M.F., Beard, Beck, and Olney had come together, finding new directions for themselves and for American cooking, lived on, too. It could be felt in home kitchens, restaurants, and farmers’ markets.

  Our last meal in Plascassier was a dinner that, for me, embodied not only the continuing seductions of Provence—traffic, mega-supermarkets, and all—and the still-vital, inspiring power of
Child, M.F., Beard, Beck, and Olney through their recipes and writing, but also our own role in their story. We had cooked with an eye on the past, on what they had transmitted to us, but having absorbed that legacy, we had remade it in the present—in a way that I felt sure would have been approved of by M.F. and Child.

  “One reason we are friends,” M.F. had written so memorably to Child in 1970, “is that we both understand the acceptance of NOW. There is all the imprisonment of nostalgia, but with so many wide windows.” We had found our windows, in the kitchen at La Pitchoune.

  On her last night at La Pitchoune, in 1992, Child had stood in this very spot, barefoot, looking out into the dark:

  Just before going to bed that night, I stood on the terrace in the dappled shadows of the mulberry tree. A pale moon hung in the sky over the red-tiled roof. A cool breeze brushed my face and rustled the trees on the hillside across the valley. I inhaled the sweet scent of flowers, listened to the nightingale-and-frog chorus, and felt the familiar rough stones under my bare feet. What a lovely place.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to thank, most of all, my grandmother Norah Barr, for her help in telling this story. Her memories of the events and the people described in this book were invaluable, and so were her notes and comments on the manuscript along the way. My agent and friend, David Kuhn, made this book possible in the first place. Doris Cooper, Emily Takoudes, and Beth Rashbaum were brilliant, patient editors. Nancy Novogrod’s wisdom, support, and advice were essential. I thank Judith Jones, Raymond Gatti, James and Byron Olney, Marc Lanza, Alex Prud’homme, Kathie Alex, Christian Beck, Robert Lescher, Joan Reardon, John Petersen, John Martin, Clark Wolf, and Kermit Lynch for their insights and recollections. Marvin Taylor and the Fales Library at New York University, the staff at the Schlesinger Library at Harvard, and Jay Barksdale and the New York Public Library provided important research help. For their generosity and editorial assistance of all kinds, I thank my friends Adam Lehner, Benoît Peverelli, Mark Leyner, Bruno Maddox, Suzanne Petren-Moritz, Ocean MacAdams, Chris and Vicky D’Annunzio, Mariana Hoppin, Adrian Erni, Deborah Burkhart, Cello Rohr, Gernot Jörgler, and Adi Schultheiss. My cousin Kennedy Golden guided me through our family archives, for which I am deeply grateful. Finally, I could not have written this book without the help, inspiration, and love of my parents, John and Catrine Barr, and my wife and daughters, Yumi, Sachi, and Emi.