La Cuisinière Provençale

"La Cuisinière Provençale is basically the re-establishment of the identity of Provence which had pretty much disappeared. It was one of the Languedoc-speaking places and it was pretty much destroyed in the 14th and 15th century, and I think we were quite responsible for it. Anyway, there was a big sweep to bring back language and customs of the Mistral, around the time when the Impressionists were getting going in that area and J B Reboul gathered together all the remaining Provençale recipes and wrote them down in very simple form, but knowing exactly what he was doing. Mine’s in French and I don’t know if it was ever translated. It’s bit like a Mrs Beeton this, but it’s all Provençale cooking, so masses of tomatoes and aubergines and garlic and olive oil and recipes for aioli and all those classic things that you get in Provence. I think he’s got one of the first recipes for tapenade in here. There’s a strong sense of place which didn’t exist before in terms of people having been slightly ashamed of it in the way that you are when you’ve been suppressed. I’ll always look up how to do a tapenade or what to do with a cardoon. Well, it’s a sort of winter artichoke and it’s kind of furry and you buy a huge bundle of it and the thing is that, unlike the artichoke, it’s the stalk that you eat and you have it with something like the Italian bagna cauda , which is salty anchovies melted into olive oil with a bit of garlic. It is! It’s a Christmas thing. It’s a really important Christmas thing. There is a very eccentric museum in Aix, set up at about the same time, and it has panoramas, life-size panoramas with people eating the fasting supper of the Eve and there are cardoons there, so it’s all of a piece. Before Christmas you don’t eat meat or anything creamy or rich or red. They have a prejudice against tomatoes at that time. And very often you’re eating sea snails, prickly things that look like an ordinary land snail but with spikes like a Roman chariot and salt cod. It’s very ritualised and subscribed. When people think they are going to lose their identity, domestic habit is where they remember who they are. So, this book is very interesting. He has marrons glacés for dessert, lots of syrups, jams, quince. Mostly you’d go to the patisserie for dessert, the best one, and you’d order something and you tell everyone how clever you are because you’ve gone to the best patissier. I mean, he has flan and things like that, but he doesn’t even do a caramel custard, I don’t think. No need! You’ve got fruit – it’s the Mediterranean!"