Two Towns in Provence

"Do you know about M F K Fisher? She was an American writer who was working in France in the pre-war years, and she went back to the US and wrote these marvellous stories about life and food and living in Provence, and she is pretty much credited with telling the Americans that they had to shape up and get into the war. She was very influential. We don’t have the same appetite for food writing like this now. We read recipe books but we don’t like those narratives that have everything in them – the place, the people, the food itself. She wasn’t strictly a recipe writer but she was extraordinarily adept at telling people how things were. A marvellous book. Basically, classic French food, the traditional French food. It hasn’t changed much. There’s a lovely description of eating sea urchins in Aix-en-Provence, eating them fresh. She’s able to conjure up the taste and the sense of things and the physical presence of them. So, it’s sort of lovely stories like that, almost entirely food-oriented. The seller will sit there with this bucket of prickly sea urchins, still alive, and then there’s a special coupe-oursin , something that looks like a pair of scissors, and he’ll just snip them open and hand them to you and you eat them with a little plastic spoon. Probably in those days it would have been a wooden spoon. You can have them with lemon but it may not be worth spicing up their flavour – they’re very sea-y and lovely."