The Perfect Meal

by John Baxter

  But that table-tennis table never gave a decent bounce again.

  Thirteen

  First Catch Your Socca

  Here silver olives shine

  On terra-cotta earth

  And fields of lavender

  In the still, burning air

  Have all their scent distilled.

  The sky’s so primary blue

  The halftones disappear:

  Each color its most true,

  Each object its most clear.

  May Sarton, Provence

  At the end of its five-hour journey to the farthest southern corner of France, the railway line swings sharply east to run along the Mediterranean in the direction of Italy.

  Waking from a doze, I blinked at a panorama of dark-blue sea washing over jagged rocks, brick-red. “I’d never seen rocks like them,” my mother-in-law, Claudine, had told me, the memory of her first visit still vivid after more than sixty years.

  Back then, this had been Le Train Bleu (the Blue Train), and as famous as the Orient Express. Between 1922 and 1947, it collected passengers off the boat at Calais and carried them in luxury to Ventimiglia, on the Italian Riviera, stopping on the way at Paris, Dijon, Marseilles, Toulon, Saint-Raphaël, Cannes, Juan-les-Pins, Antibes, Nice, Monaco, Monte Carlo, and Menton.

  Film stars, industrialists, and diplomats were regular passengers. Professional gamblers heading for Monte Carlo played high-stakes bridge in its club car while poules de luxe loitered, poised to fleece the winners of their loot. A beautiful woman traveling alone on the Blue Train was instantly cloaked in mystery, usually well deserved. Maurice Dekobra gave such women a label when he called his 1927 bestseller The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars.

  Artists loved the Blue Train. Director Michael Powell, who grew up in a hotel his father owned in Antibes, celebrated it in The Red Shoes. Moira Shearer’s Vicky Page, doomed by her love of dancing, even dies under its wheels. In the 1930 film Monte Carlo, Jeanette MacDonald sings “Beyond the Blue Horizon” as she races across France toward the only blue that really counts: the blue of the Côte d’Azur.

  In 1924, Darius Milhaud wrote a ballet called Le Train Bleu for Sergei Diaghilev, a frequent passenger. The script was by another regular, Jean Cocteau, with costumes by a third, Coco Chanel, and a backdrop by a fourth, Pablo Picasso. Into his script, Cocteau slyly incorporated details of a Riviera holiday’s special pleasures. Illicit lovers, instead of sneaking in and out of bedrooms, could retire, as do couples in the ballet, to the cabanas that lined the beaches of the better hotels. During 1937 and 1938, on the grounds of the Hotel du Cap, Marlene Dietrich dallied in such tents with movie mogul and diplomat Joseph Kennedy. When Kennedy’s twenty-year-old son, John, paid a visit for a ball, Marlene ensured that the event would never be forgotten by the future president of the United States. As they danced to that year’s big hit, Cole Porter’s “Begin the Beguine,” she slipped her hand into his pants.

  Aren’t you going to include Provence?” Marie-Dominique had asked as she reviewed my progress with plans for the banquet.

  “I did,” I said. “Remember the bouillabaisse?”

  “But you didn’t eat bouillabaisse. You just tried to eat it. Also, Provence is huge. The Côte d’Azur is just part of it.”

  She was right, of course. Most of the Mediterranean coast of France from the Italian border halfway to Spain could loosely be called Provence, since it had once been a province of Rome, hence the name. And while Provence might, technically, end where the Alpes-Maritimes rise behind Cannes, others will tell you it continues north to Avignon, 115 miles up the Rhone. No Mason-Dixon Line marks the border. Provence isn’t a region so much as a state of mind.

  For more than a century, Britons and Americans have dreamed of living out their fantasies in the warm south. In the 1990s, British writer Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence and its follow-up, Toujours Provence, sold in the hundreds of thousands. Mayle wrote about his attempts to convert a house, frustrated at every turn by the Provençal people, whom he draws as well-meaning but disorganized, inclined to stop work for extended lunches, prone to hypochondria and superstition, friendly toward those outsiders who accommodate their ways but stubbornly resistant to change.

  No Anglo-Saxon reader was discouraged by Mayle’s difficulties. Rather, they made them even keener to find a tumbledown villa and hire their own maddening Frenchmen to fix it up. Today, every hilltop village below 43˚ north echoes to the pounding of hammers and the whine of saws as ancient houses become holiday hideaways with four bedrooms, each with a bathroom en suite. The noise of construction competes with that of onions and tomatoes being chopped, garlic crushed, and all three sizzling in olive oil. Louder still is the clatter of keyboards as would-be Mayles document each nail driven and meal cooked, in the hope that they too will hatch a bestseller.

  The rich are very different to you and I,” Scott Fitzgerald famously is said to have told Ernest Hemingway.

  “Yes,” Hemingway replied. “They have more money.”

  More important, they have more houses. The history of how Provence was colonized by foreigners is actually the history of houseguests.

  After World War I, the Côte d’Azur languished. Co-opted during the war as convalescent homes, the great hotels, the Negresco and the Carlton, the latter with perkily pointed cupolas inspired by the breasts of courtesan La Belle Otero, fell on hard times. A significant part of their clientele had been Russian aristocrats and their servants, so numerous that Nice built an Orthodox cathedral for them. But the 1917 revolution swept them away. Grand Dukes, once the hotels’ best clients, now worked for them as waiters and doormen or drove cabs.

  Postwar Provence was abandoned to its original inhabitants. “At that time,” said American expatriate Gerald Murphy, “no one ever went near the Riviera in summer. The English and the Germans who came down for the short spring season closed their villas as soon as it began to get warm in May. None of them ever went in the water, you see.”

  Colette, author of Chéri and Gigi, bought a house in the fishing village of St. Tropez in 1925 with her third husband, Maurice Goudeket. Other than a few painters, no outsiders lived there. “In the evenings, in the genuine bars,” wrote Goudeket, “the young people of the country would dance to the tunes of mechanical pianos, the boys with each other and the girls with each other.”

  At the same time, Gerald Murphy and his wife, Sara, visited Cole Porter at his villa near Antibes, and fell in love with the emptiness of the area. A nearby beach was so little used that a meter of seaweed blanketed the sand. The Murphys excavated a corner in which to enjoy the sun, and later bought a house nearby, christening it Villa America. It became an ad hoc hostel for their creative friends. Eric Newby credits the Murphys with transforming the Côte d’Azur.

  Without realizing it, they had invented a new way of life (or one which, if it ever existed, had not done so since pre-Christian times), and the clothes to go with it. Shorts made of white duck, horizontally-striped matelots’ jerseys and white work caps bought from sailors’ slop shops became a uniform. From now on, the rich, and ultimately everyone else in the northern hemisphere, wanted unlimited sun, the sea, sandy beaches or rocks to dive into it from, and the opportunity to eat al fresco.

  In 1923, when Coco Chanel stepped ashore in Cannes from the yacht of her lover the Duke of Westminster, her all-over tan and simple, comfortable clothing signaled a trend. “I think she may have invented sunbathing,” sighed Prince Jean-Louis Faucigny-Lucinge. “At that time, she invented everything.”

  Riviera style and the rediscovery of the sun induced rhapsodies of vanity and self-love in the pale intellectuals of the north. American composer Ned Rorem, staying with the Comtesse Marie-Laure de Noailles in her Mallet-Stevens-designed villa at Hyères, wrote in his diary, “In my canary-yellow shirt (from Chez Vachon in St. Tropez), my golden legs in khaki shorts, my tan sandals, and orange hair, I look like a jar of honey.” That evening, the surrealist poet Paul Éluard and his wife came to dinner. �
�He is deeply suntanned,” noted Rorem, “(they had spent the afternoon on Ile de Levant, the land of nudists).” After dinner, they sat on the terrace and Éluard read to them from Baudelaire. As Wordsworth wrote of the French Revolution, “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven.”

  Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald discovered the Riviera through the Murphys. Between April and October 1928, they lived in the Murphys’ Paris apartment, next to the Luxembourg Garden, and spent the summer at Villa America, part of a revolving cast of celebrity freeloaders that included Pablo Picasso, Man Ray, Cole Porter, John Dos Passos, Dorothy Parker, and Jean Cocteau.

  So I was in good company when I invited myself to spend the weekend with our friend Charles. He owns homes around the world, including one on the heights of the Alpes-Maritimes above Cannes.

  Since life at Villa America inspired Fitzgerald to write Tender Is the Night, I used the train trip to refresh myself on houseguest etiquette by rereading it, in particular the dinner party scene that ends in an extravagant gesture by the manic Nicole.

  Rosemary watched Nicole pressing upon her mother a yellow evening bag she had admired, saying, “I think things ought to belong to the people that like them”—and then sweeping into it all the yellow articles she could find, a pencil, a lipstick, a little note book, “because they all go together.”

  Though Fitzgerald describes the flowers at that dinner, the clothes, the conversation, and, naturally, the booze (Veuve Clicquot champagne), he doesn’t mention the food. Whatever Americans went to the Riviera for, it wasn’t to eat.

  Not so the French. Colette, described by Janet Flanner as “an artistic gourmet in a country where eating ranks as an art,” embraced the local cuisine, particularly its fiery garlic, which can burn like chili. Most of her meals, wrote Maurice Goudeket, began with

  a crust of bread dipped in olive oil, lavishly rubbed in garlic and sprinkled with coarse salt. Cooked garlic seasoned every dish and in addition, throughout the whole meal, Colette ate raw cloves of it as if they had been almonds. Lunch consisted of Provençal dishes only: green melons, anchoiade [anchovies pounded with garlic, oil, and vinegar and served as a dip with raw vegetables], stuffed rascasse, rice with favouilles [small green crabs], bouillabaisse and aioli [garlic mayonnaise].

  Purists accuse the Blue Train of ruining the local cuisine. As tourists flowed in, restaurateurs arrived from Italy, Sicily, and Corsica to feed them. They overwhelmed the less flamboyant local dishes. “Provençal” became shorthand for any dish of pasta or seafood with a sauce of tomato, garlic, onions, and olive oil. The same ingredients, with a few olives, hard-boiled eggs, and anchovies, constituted so-called salade Niçoise—salad in the style of Nice. Anyone who has suffered this cuisine will not be surprised to hear that a local remedy for a head cold is water in which you’ve boiled a rat.

  These dishes invariably incorporated herbes de Provence. The curry powder of French cuisine, this mixture is just as imprecise about its ingredients. Thyme, oregano, and rosemary are standard, but after that, it’s a question of what’s on the shelf: marjoram, basil, tarragon, sage, bay, fennel seed, lavender, dill weed, chervil, even mint and orange zest—anything that assaults the nose with an herbal tang. No wonder unscrupulous dope dealers passed off herbes de Provence to their dumber clients as cannabis.

  Fortunately, local producers are fighting back. The Co-operative du Producteurs d’Herbes de Provence has opened a shop almost next door to us in Paris, from which they sell a mixture that, they insist, is the only true and authentic herbes de Provence: 26 percent oregano, 26 percent savory, 19 percent thyme, and 3 percent basil. The young man in charge of the shop dismissed supermarket varieties as fakes. “You know where most of their herbs come from?” he hissed. “Poland!”

  The Cannes into which I stepped from the TGV was a town I barely recognized. A chill wind, precursor of Provence’s annual curse, the mistral, stirred dust along streets that I knew only in film festival time. For those ten days in May, journalists jam the lanes of the old town and Maseratis with Emirate license plates park nose to tail along the Croisette. This was a different Cannes, obviously, with not a Maserati in sight. Maybe the food would be different, too.

  Wedged into Charles’s daffodil-yellow sports car, we zoomed away from the station and headed north, into the mountains that climb behind the narrow coastal strip.

  “I thought we might have lunch in Mougins,” he said.

  “At the Moulin, you mean?”

  Inwardly, I flinched. At festival time, the Moulin de Mougins is a favored hangout of movie people, with prices to match. Its sea scallops smoked over pine needles and served with black truffle risotto can set you back a sum that, elsewhere, would cover an entire meal.

  “Well, I’d prefer somewhere more modest,” Charles said, “but if you’d really like . . .”

  “No, no. It’s fine,” I said hurriedly. “Let’s slum for a change.”

  In a large but mostly empty restaurant in Mougins, I had white bean soup enriched with a trickle of truffle oil, followed by a decent lamb stew and crème brûlée. Not a trace of tomato sauce in the entire menu, or of herbes de Provence. To be fair, tomatoes would have struggled here. Almost no vegetation grows on these crags—just sad, stately cypresses and those twisted olive trees that can root in a few handfuls of earth. The rest is rock. Thyme and oregano sprout in the cracks, but you take your life in your hands to harvest them.

  We climbed, switchbacking along narrow roads buttressed by dry stone walls, snaking through villages that showed little sign that plastic or steel had ever been invented. Up here, you made do with what the mountains gave you. Rough-hewn chestnut beams might date back to the Middle Ages. Windows were asymmetrical and misshapen, their iron hasps and hinges thick and rusted, hammered out in the local smithy. Frames were carpentered to fit the panes, rather than vice versa. Glass had been more precious than wood.

  Charles’s home is in the hilltop village of Cabris. Three centuries ago, it was a farmhouse attached to the château of the Marquis de Clapiers-Cabris. Peasants tore down the big house in 1789, hauling away its stones to improve their own homes. All that remains is a crumbling arch, once the grand entrance, and the paved Place Mirabeau that extends to where the cliff drops 1,800 feet toward the Mediterranean.

  Cabris

  Just before dinner, we walked to the edge and looked down. Below, terraces hardly bigger than a living room sustained olive trees and fruit trees. Beyond, the coastal plain spread to the darkening Mediterranean, the ocean that, to the ancients, was the middle of the earth.

  “When the mistral blows,” Charles said, “the air clears. You can see Corsica, a hundred and ten miles away. People from the village come up here to watch.”

  Maybe they are also looking for Antoine de Saint-Éxupéry. From childhood, the pilot-philosopher who wrote The Little Prince spent summers in Cabris. In July 1944 he took off from Corsica, flying a P-38 Lightning, and never returned. Some wreckage and the remains of a body were recovered off Marseilles. Most assume he chose to quench his increasing depression in the Mediterranean’s hypnotic blue.

  We ate at L’Auberge du Vieux Château. It wasn’t a long walk—just next door.

  I thought I knew every variation on Kir, but for our aperitif, the chef, Emilie Guetet, produced a new one: champagne and lychee liqueur, with, in the bottom of the glass, a tiny spoonful of confit de pétales de rose—rose petal jam. Though tasty, it hovered in that troubled area between refreshment and display, next to the my tai with an orchid in it or sambuca with a flaming coffee bean floating on top. Should we drink it or simply, like a flower arrangement, admire it?

  Over the next three hours, we worked our way through a menu of authentic Provençal delicacies, faultlessly prepared on our behalf by Cyril Martin and proprietor Anne Loncle. A soup of locally grown pumpkin was followed by a tiny stuffed squid, accompanied by sautéed zucchini, then a few spoonsful of boeuf bourguignon on a tile of oil-fried bread, with a curl of homemade
paprika fettuccine, then wedges of goat cheese with a salad of mâche. Colette might have preferred more garlic, but in other respects she would have been delighted.

  Living well is the best revenge. Dining with my friend and host Charles.

  After dinner we walked around town. Nothing in this landscape was soft. It had worn down the Phoenicians, the Romans, the Moors, and within a few centuries, it would have seen us off, too. Unlike the hot hill towns to the north, in the Luberon or Vaucluse, it resisted romance. Fitzgerald never wrote about it, nor has any movie star bought a house here—for fear, perhaps, of being reminded how little he matters. Its only cultural associations are French. Saint-Éxupéry’s mother and widow both retired to Cabris, and the town named a tiny square in his honor. André Gide summered here, preying on its schoolboys but also, to the surprise of all, fathering a daughter; more proof, like that rose confiture in our Kir, of a capacity for the unexpected.

  Provence did have one last surprise for me.

  The next day, we drove down to the Saturday market in Antibes. The halles, roofed but open-sided, already jostled with shoppers and vendors. Zucchini flowers, so rare in Paris, were heaped everywhere. Hot chilis, too, which offend the Parisian palate. A whiff of herbes de Provence led me to the spice merchant, who sold rosemary, oregano, dill, bay, and mint separately, in their own dishes, next to crimson paprika and yellow turmeric—all the flavors of Provence but each one individual, respected for itself.

  At the end of the market, where it opened onto the paved square, I glimpsed flames.

  “What’s that?”

  “Oh, the socca man.”

  I looked blank.

  “You don’t know socca?”

  “Should I?”

  “Good heavens, yes.”