GARLIC
The first girl I ever kissed smelled of garlic. It was in a hut in Les Goudes, at that hour on a summer’s day when adults take an afternoon nap. I learned, that year I turned fifteen, to love garlic. Its smell in the mouth. Its taste on the tongue. And the intoxication of kisses, of pleasure. Then came the joys of bread simply rubbed in garlic and the spicy bodies of women. Since then, in my kitchen, garlic has reigned supreme. In spite of its bad reputation. Because garlic, as you must have realized by now, is part of our hunger for life. It is garlic alone that opens the doors to all flavors. It knows how to welcome them. That’s what cooking and eating is: a welcome. Lovers, friends, children, grandchildren. All of us, without exception, around the table, peeling white or red beans, cutting eggplant and zucchini and green and red and yellow peppers, gutting fish, washing octopus and squid and cuttlefish, cutting up rabbit, marinating red meat . . . Sea bream in fennel, aïoli, ratatouille, bouillabaisse, vegetable soup, paella, braised artichoke in white wine broth, cod in tomato and red wine sauce . . . These dishes are born out of friendship, out of the pleasure of being together, unrestrained words and laughter. And the house is filled with a strong odor. A bold, wild odor. Because it’s obvious that cooking with garlic is a culinary outrage, an insult to good taste. It is in these gestures around garlic that worlds divide. More seriously than you might imagine. Nothing, in fact, goes better with garlic than wine, preferably red wine. Bandol in particular, from the wonderful Mourvèdre grape. Generous, elegant, powerful, rich, aromatic wines. With each mouthful, the garlic and wine together push the outrage to its limits, until the palate can’t take it anymore. Like the intoxication of a first kiss. That’s why I say, in opposition to all the bloodsucking vampires who steal our energy, empty our brains and dry our hearts: Eat garlic and drink wine. That’s life. Because, to paraphrase the writer Jim Harrison, it’s hard to get by in this life without garlic and wine.
MINT
We love mint for its smell. It’s the most popular. Ask us to name a plant that smells good, and it is mint, and only mint, that comes to mind. Its scent, it must be admitted, though slightly peppery, does not go to our heads, does not intoxicate. What moves us is its grace. And we simply have to drop a few leaves into a teapot to be transported to the Palace of Scheherazade.
That is how mint works. Like a love potion. I will even say that it opens the gates to that Orient of the imagination where, as Baudelaire sang, all is luxury, calm and voluptuousness.
Perhaps that is why mint is used so little in Western cooking, even in the South. Because of the fear of traveling, which takes us far from Penelope more than it returns us to her. But, you will say, we drink mint. Don’t make me laugh. The thing we add to water when we’re on vacation, to color it green, has long forgotten its origins! Teenagers may still believe that if we drink a lot of it we’ll become amorous, but in fact it has no effect on human beings. Besides, I have never yet known a man or a woman who, having drunk mint in water all summer, has ever cried out, “Get up and come with me: we will renounce our royal power and travel the vast world, thinking of nothing but love . . . ”
If I may be allowed a piece of advice, spread mint about you. Corsican mint to decorate your garden paths with its tiny mauve flowers. Orange mint with leaves veined in red. Pennyroyal mint, whose small pink flowers grow between the flagstones. Banana mint with its pale green leaves dotted with cream and white. Last but not least, green mint in pots on your windowsills. Breathe in those peppery smells. Then you will discover that there are always 1001 nights to your dreams. And you will cherish mint as the most beautiful of lovers.
BASIL
I grew up with the smell of basil. Like all children of the South. Whenever my mother came back from the market, she always brought two or three pots of it with her, which she placed on the windowsill in the kitchen. That was the place for basil. In the shade of the shutters, left half open as soon as spring arrived. I learned later that its smell frightened away insects. Later still, I learned many other things. For example, that until the Revolution basil was a royal plant. It could only be gathered with a gold billhook, and only by a person of high rank. But I don’t suppose the plebs waited for Year One of the Republic to sprinkle it on their food! Good taste and good smells are acquired instinctively and, once you have sniffed basil, it’s something you can’t do without. That’s how it is for me. Whenever I can’t smell it in my house, I miss it. With the arrival of the first tomato, I need it. A few drops of olive oil on nice red pomodori, two or three leaves of basil sprinkled over it, a hunk of leftover bread rubbed in garlic, and your taste buds go dancing! I don’t know any simpler happiness. The first one offered by basil. The others will tempt you. Such as, once the meal is over, simply closing the shutters on the afternoon heat. Remembering the pot of basil on the windowsill of your room. In the scented shade of the room, life becomes simpler. Like the pleasure of loving. Have no fear: an excess of basil, like an excess of love, will not damage the heart.
HERE, MY DARLING, TASTE THIS
Wherever I go, in any city in the world, the first thing I do is go to the market. To feel the city. I was brought up that way, with that tradition of going to the market. Every day. Marseilles had as many markets as it had neighborhoods and squares. We used to live near one of the most popular streets in the city. The market on Rue-Longue-des-Capucines was not a Provençal market, it was a Mediterranean market. Where the humblest cucumber already savored the joy of being prepared in an Eastern way or a Latin way. Fruit and vegetables, but also herbs and spices. The variety of colors rivaled the multiplicity of smells. Mingling with the cries and the laughter. Words exchanged amid the noise and bustle: “Fire! Fire! My watermelon’s on fire!” Spoken in that drawling accent that takes time to say things. “Here, my darling, taste this!”
That was where I discovered the wonders of the world, and there were a lot more than seven. Like olives. There wasn’t just one or two, black or green, but whole stalls of olives, from different places, prepared and seasoned for all the palate’s revolutions. “Taste this, son, just take it . . . ” The intoxication of living was invented here. And is constantly invented in markets. That’s what I tell myself whenever I while away my time like this, even when I am far from home. In another port. Another city. A village. There is a feeling of community that is born as soon as you stroll around a market. Like a common appetite for living. The eyes say it. The smiles, too. Dinner time will be soon. The magic hour for cooking fresh food. According to mood. And our desires. For the family, and for others, this cuisine is one of conviviality. Of togetherness. Antipasti with tagine, aubergine with couscous, spaghetti vongole with stuffed vine leaves, bouillabaisse with meze. I remember that I always tried to imagine what my mother was making us to eat from the vegetables she had chosen. White beans, red beans, green beans, meant vegetable soup. Carrots, cauliflower and green beans meant aïoli. Purple artichokes meant barigoule. Tomatoes and zucchini and eggplant meant petit-farcis. Of course, there was always a mystery about certain vegetables that could be used in several dishes. Leeks, broad beans, broccoli, peas, fennel, tomatoes . . . As I grew up, I learned, for example, that each of the varieties of tomato had its use: for salads, for coulis or for farcis. “Here, taste this,” my mother would say, coming back from the market. She would hold up one of the tomatoes, cut in two, with a trickle of olive oil on it. I loved pendelotte tomatoes. They reminded me of Italy, where we went on vacation. But what was true for the tomato was also true for any other young vegetable. That was something I discovered later. Along with the pleasure of wines. And the pleasure of olive oil. This is where you find the basis of taste. In these ordinary markets which are the soul of a city. Where the influences of the South inspire recipes, while escaping those who would like to set them in stone. The years have passed. I still go to markets. And always, like Prévert, I want to make an inventory of them. Beginning with those intoxications of the senses: basil, savory, dill, tarragon, par
sley, marjoram, mint, rosemary, sage, thyme, aniseed. Their smell makes your mouth water. Cooking is something we dream, first of all. Before we do it. It invites us. As Manuel Vázquez Montalbán has taught us: we can cook to perpetuate, but also to seduce. It is afterwards, when we are at the table, indulging in the intoxication of all these tastes of sun-ripened produce, that a multitude of tiny details comes back to our eyes and ears: the noise of a fountain in a little square, the smell of warmed tiles, the shady silence of an alleyway . . . The sweetness of living? The sensuality would be more accurate. I am always taken by surprise in a market—how can we not be filled with wonder at a tiny stall of zucchini flowers? Then I reason with myself. The only thing that matters is the essential, not the superfluous. And the only thing that exists here is the pleasure of the day. Tomorrow belongs to tomorrow, and is quite another story. That is the happiness of the Mediterranean, a way of giving meaning to the day, day after day. Shopping in a market is nothing but the reinvention of the art of living simply, and together.
MARSEILLES: A MUSICAL TRADING POST
One day when I was a little boy, I was on my way to see my cousins in the Panier when music filled the steps of the Montée des Accoules. A song in Spanish. A tango. I discovered later that it was Garufa by Edmundo Rivero. But the name of the singer didn’t matter. What struck me was that when I turned right onto Rue du Refuge, I heard the unforgettable voice of Reinette l’Oranaise, and at the end of the street a man leaning out of a window was humming Maruzzella, Marruzella. Renato Carosone. My father used to listen to him at home. He bought every new 45 rpm as if it was the latest news from his family in Naples. On Rue des Pistoles, where my grandmother lived, both sides of the street were the kingdom of flamenco, mostly Arab-Andalucian. Subsequently, I found a similar atmosphere on the streets of Barcelona, near the Plaza Real. Then in Genoa. And also in Algiers. It was there that I first heard Bambino in Arabic. By Lili Boniche. The shores of the Mediterranean were joining together. They still do. Even today, when the Catalan Lluis Llach “hands over” to the Moroccan Amina Alaoui and the Greek Nena Venetsanou in Un pont de mar blava. I like to believe that it will always be this way. On both shores of the Mediterranean. That our shores will still join together. And that they will remain without borders, as Louis Brauquier wrote in the Cahiers du Sud.
I haven’t plucked the name of that famous review, born in Marseilles, out of the air, nor that of Brauquier, one of this city’s finest poets.
Today, Marseilles has a curious tendency to close her doors and windows. Refusing to sing about herself on her hybrid shores. Thinking that certain kinds of music have too much flavor, too much smell, even, like our markets. Asserting that what comes from elsewhere has no reason to be here, and that there is no other shore to the Mediterranean but our own. Latin, obviously. Harping on about our roots in the land, in the hills of Provence, where you can’t see the sea, where you don’t even dream of the sea. And which echo, when Sunday comes, to the fifes and drums so beloved of Frédéric Mistral.
And at the same time, we are expected to take sides: either Vincent Scotto or Khaled. But what nobody can deny, unless they are of bad faith, is that Marseilles is not one, but multiple. It is multicultural, multiracial and, of course, multi-musical. The people of Marseilles sing in several languages, just as we think and dream in several languages. And love too.
Marseilles the capital, where Verdi is as popular as Bob Marley. That, I think, is what makes groups like IAM or Massilia Sound System so intelligent: the fact they have understood that. Both come from this music of our childhood, and both have inherited these songs, these different kinds of music that their fathers hummed and that lingered on the streets of Marseilles.
It should be clear by now that, for me, the groups, the kinds of music, the albums that are born in this city—rap, raï, ragga, but also Brazilian music, flamenco jazz, accordion tunes—are to music what the Cahiers du Sud was to literature. These different kinds of music help us to hear ourselves. Each group—those that grew in the neighborhoods of the city, those that come here to play—is also a wager. Not only cultural. A wager for humanity. And therefore for the future. A wager similar to that of the Cahiers du Sud, when it defied Vichy and Nazi censorship and published—in Algeria, lest we forget—Exile by St. John Perse.
There, just a few miles from Marseilles, writers are banned by the city’s libraries. There, too, one night’s boat ride from Marseilles, musicians are killed on the street. While the shores of the Mediterranean sing and dance in Marseilles, and their languages mingle, and their roots with them, political and religious fundamentalism shakes its death rattle.
In Marseilles, of course, we carry on regardless. We know perfectly well that it is our sea that unites us. And that our South, to quote Brauquier again, is “an attempt to point the way toward those vague regions where man situates his paradise.”
MARSEILLES BETWEEN SEA AND LIGHT
It was September, but it could have been July. Marseilles’ glorious summer was not yet over. In the noisy streets, as exuberant as those of all southern cities, the fierce August forest fires in Septème-les-Vallons, Le Rove and Allauch, and everyone’s unspoken fear of seeing the flames engulf the city, had been forgotten. That evening, Olympique Marseille was playing Bordeaux. In Bordeaux. From eight in the evening, the neighborhood bars would be filled with supporters. People here like to go to bars to watch soccer matches. One or two TV sets, depending on the bar. Some men even bring their wives and kids. A slice of pizza, a beer, and ninety minutes spent hoping for your club’s victory. Each bar is like a microcosm of the stadium and, apart from Paris-Saint-Germain, if you come from somewhere else or are simply passing through the city you can demonstrate your support for the opposing team. Within limits, of course. We have our honor, all the same!
For the moment, in the Vieux Port, on the terrace of the Samaritaine, we drink in for as long as possible, in the same carefree manner as always, that superb autumn light pouring down from the sky after five in the afternoon. You can’t understand anything about this city if you are indifferent to her light. It is tangible, even when the heat is at its most intense. When it forces you to lower your eyes. Marseilles is a city of light. And of wind, that famous mistral that rushes in from the top of her alleyways and sweeps everything down to the sea. As far as the open sea off the Frioul Islands, Pomègues and Ratonneaux. Even past Planier, the now extinguished lighthouse that has become a diving school, which used to indicate to all the sailors in the world that Marseilles was within reach, and that her women, whether or not they were whores, would make them forget their passion for distant seas and islands. Marseilles, to tell the truth, can only be loved like that, arriving by sea. Early in the morning. At the hour when the sun, rising behind the massif of Marseilleveyre, embraces her hills and turns her old stones pink. Then you see Marseilles just as Protis the Phocean discovered her. And who cares if this is an exaggeration? Marseilles always exaggerates. That is her essence. And basically nothing has changed since that day. You just have to arrive by ferry from Corsica to relive that story. Or, even more simply, to come back from a night’s fishing off l’Estaque. When the harbor opens its arms to you, then and only then you discover the eternal meaning of this city: Hospitality. Marseilles gives herself without resistance to those who know how to take her and love her. Marseilles is a myth. That is the only thing there is to see. To embrace. The rest can be as futile or vain as anywhere else. We might even say that the city is just like those fake blondes you meet on her streets. They display only what they are not. Second Empire vanities like the colonial wealth of the Palais du Pharo, with its magnificent view of the bay and the city, and the Palais Longchamp, which towers over her but whose avenue, leading to the sea, loses itself in a maze of alleyways forgotten by everyone. The futility of the renovation and restoration of the neighborhood of the Grands Carmes and the old neighborhood of the Panier, where the new Italian-style ocher façades try to make everyone forget
the ancient roots of the city, which are Greek, and therefore tragic, drowned now beneath tons of concrete to create shopping malls and parking garages, obliterating all maritime, Oriental and adventurous daydreams. Charles de Gaulle against Pytheas: Pytheas who revolutionized geography by discovering the route to the poles and disproving Strabo. That may well be why the Garden of the Vestiges, behind the Bourse shopping mall, a stone’s throw from the Vieux Port, is the saddest place in Marseilles. It is here, faced with a few heaped-up stones, fragments of Greek or Roman fortifications, that the memory of the city is lost. Beauty has been exiled. The Greeks, from whom the Marseillais claim inspiration, took up arms for beauty. The beauty of Helen. And so, in our frustration, we take the ferry. The Marius, in tribute to Pagnol and Raimu. Making another attempt to understand this city, by linking the Quai de la Marine to the Quai de Rive Nueve. Atypical is not the word for Marseilles. Unconventional is more accurate. Like the Saint-Charles station. With its monumental staircases turned toward the city and its magnificent facade looking toward the harbor, the sea, the East. The journey is a brief one. From the Place de la Mairie to the Place aux Huiles. There, on the quayside, stands the statue of Vincent Scotto, who sang of the working class of Marseilles and made it sing. We can make the journey again. In the other direction. It is as we go from one dock to the other, our eyes turned now toward the open sea, now toward the Canebière, that this city reveals herself. That we understand, finally, that we have to let ourselves be carried away by her, by her streets and hills, all of them so built-up that we forget that Marseilles is made up of hills descending toward the sea. Could anyone coming to Marseilles, and going up Rue de la République with its Haussmann-style buildings—it stretches from the Vieux-Port to the commercial port of La Joliette—ever imagine that this street was bored through a hill by Napoleon III’s town planners? The hill of the Carmes. No, of course not. It is only when we walk around this city that we become aware that we are constantly climbing, descending, climbing again. Before, we assumed there was only one hill, the one where Notre Dame de la Garde sits enthroned. The Good Mother, who shines in the sun by day and under the floodlights at night. Like an everlasting candle. Yes, Marseilles plays games with perspective. It’s a tough climb to the old neighborhood, the Panier, up the steps of the Carmes. When you get to Place des Moulins, you discover you are as high as the Saint Charles Station, higher than the Church of the Réformes at the top of the Canebière, as high as Place Jean-Jaurès, known as the Plaine. And you start to imagine that from the pretty little houses surrounding the square you see the sea, always on both sides. Besides, in this neighborhood, which the Germans dreamed of razing to the ground in 1943, because its streets were so narrow that they couldn’t keep control of it, when you come back down, by way of Rue de Lorette, Rue du Panier or Rue du Refuge, the terraces of all the houses compete with one another, some of them hurriedly arranged directly on the red tiles of the roofs. Here, there are hours of the day when you love to feel like that: standing halfway between the light and the sea. A way of telling yourself once again, as every Marseillais will explain, why you are from here and not from somewhere else, why you live here and not elsewhere.
Garlic, Mint, and Sweet Basil Page 3
