Playing House in Provence

by Mary-Lou Weisman

  Once inside, Larry, food lover extraordinaire, slips behind the linguistic barricades and morphs into commander in chief of all that’s purveyed.

  Larry thinks of supermarkets, whether French or American, as food museums, or maybe libraries. He loves to read the shelves. He’s especially excited by the display of fruit juices. “Jus d’orange, jus de poire, jus d’abricot,” he exclaims and puts one of each in his wagon. He can spend two hours fully engaged in a supermarket doing research, or merely marveling that the French sell bouillabaisse in vacuum-sealed glass jars and foie gras in the meat department.

  Supermarkets overwhelm me by their size and the variety of goods they offer. They make me feel stupid. First of all, the same side of my brain that struggles with numbers handicaps me when it comes to spatial relations. I have trouble finding my way through the aisles of my local Super Stop and Shop. It’s way too super. I encounter a profusion of green leafiness: romaine, mâche, radicchio, frisée, Boston, bib, kale, arugula, spinach, baby and grown-up, in addition to mixes of all of the above. I remember when lettuce was iceberg. I have the same problem in the shampoo department. I yearn for the days when mustard was a matter of Dijon or French’s, and shampoo was either Breck or Prell.

  Now imagine me trying to navigate a strange supermarket in France where not only must I locate each item, I must translate it. It takes me fifteen minutes to find the milk and another two to figure out that écrémé means skimmed.

  If I hadn’t run into our neighbor René, I never would have found the garbage bags. I didn’t know the French word for garbage at the time, les ordures, so I shifted into charade mode and acted out a garbage man carrying a heavy bag over his shoulder.

  At first René looked perplexed, he must have thought I was doing Père Noël, Santa Claus, but then his eyes lit up in recognition, and he led me over to les sacs à ordures.

  I make my way to the cereal aisle. I know the word, les céréales, but I face yet another stupefying challenge. I’m looking for bran flakes, but I haven’t any idea of how to say it, so it wouldn’t make any sense to launch into my “excuse me for deranging you” routine.

  Trying to settle down in another country is not for everyone. Feeling disoriented and stupid on a daily basis is not everyone’s verre de vin. Neither is losing your way, or the embarrassment you feel when you carefully look up all the French words you need to ask someone for directions to the pharmacy, “Où est la pharmacie?” only to realize that there’s pas une chance that you will understand the answer.

  To make matters worse, I am unfamiliar with French brand names. I look at the pictures on the packages but cannot tell the difference between one kind of flake and another. When at last I find Kellogg’s All Bran amidst the alien Corn Chex, I hug the box as if it were a long-lost friend.

  The produce department presents a puzzling challenge. Some of the fruits and vegetables are displayed loosely in bins, much as they are in my supermarket at home. Others are segregated in slatted wooden crates, labeled with their country of origin, often Spain, but sometimes other countries, including England and Belgium. I learn later that this produce segregation is the indirect result of a food fight of a complaint brought by the Commissioner of European Communities in 1997 against the French Republic, for failing to take “all necessary and proportionate measures in order to prevent the free movement of fruit and vegetables as required by treaty.” It seems that French farmers had been massing at the borders of Spain and Belgium, sometimes destroying or otherwise preventing lorries full of fruits and vegetables from entering their country. As a result, foods must now be labeled with their country of origin. I assume the unlabeled produce comes from France, and so, being French myself, I select what I want from the bins.

  Meanwhile, over near the meat counter, Larry’s sausage imitation is drawing a crowd. “Just point!” I cry desperately, turning his attention to the phalanx of sausages lined up in the glass display case. Larry has no trouble choosing. He chooses them all. Then he moves on to breads. While I worry about which one is best, Larry takes four and tosses them in his cart, which already contains the juices, organ meats from assorted animals, hard, soft, and semisoft cheeses from cows and goats, and a variety of regional red wines.

  Checking out is a nightmare of incomprehension: we should have weighed certain items before showing up at the cashier’s line. You can’t separate the bananas the way you can at home. You have to pay for the plastic bags. I barely understand a word the checkout lady is saying to us. My eyes well up with tears of humiliation and frustration. Larry, who can’t wait to cook up a pituitary gland or two, is in high spirits. He sorts his way through our ineptitude and pays the bill, 150 euros. When we return our cart, the slot spits out a euro.

  Once home, we carry the bags of groceries from the street into the house. Here, because our street is so narrow that no other car can get past ours, we are obliged to unload the groceries as fast as we can. That done, one of us drives forward to the square, turns around, drives past our house to the church parking lot, and walks home. How wonderfully inconvenient! How French! Ditto for the garbage. Since no truck can enter the village, we must walk the bags partway down the hill to the green bins.

  While unpacking Larry’s juice collection into our refrigerator, I break one of the glass shelves. If that happened at home, I’d mutter an expletive, pick up the phone, and call the local glass repair store. In Saumane, a minor disaster presents both a challenge and, depending on your mood, an opportunity. Larry reaches for the French-English dictionary to find the French word for shelf. It could be l’étagère or le rayon. We decide to go with rayon, since the only étagère we know of was in Larry’s mother’s living room and held books and bric-a-brac. We look up “glass”; it’s la vitrine. In the yellow pages we find un vitrier, which is what they call a guy who deals with glass. Then we play rock-scissors-paper to determine which one of us will be unlucky enough to have to dial the number and speak French to whoever answers. And then, of course, we have to find the place.

  Cooking and Eating Provence

  Larry was born with silver taste buds in his mouth. Just as Yo-Yo Ma at a very young age could accept nothing less than Pablo Casals for his musical mentor, and covered his ears when his mother played Montavani, so little Larry’s inner gourmet complained of stomachaches when confronted by his mother’s cooking.

  Larry’s mother believed that food was necessary but dangerous. To render it harmless, food should be submerged in boiling water until it gave up and turned gray, after which it is best buried under cream of mushroom soup. The only exception was chicken or fowl. He will eat duck but only if it’s crispy. Birds should be sautéed quickly until medium rare, which is why Larry doesn’t eat chicken or even turkey. On Thanksgiving, he makes himself an omelet.

  Larry didn’t want to hurt his mother’s feelings, so at meal times he faked stomachaches. Eventually, his concerned parents sent him to the hospital for tests, where he drank barium and endured all manner of probes and other intestinal indignities. Like the stoic Spartan boy who stole a fox and hid it under his cape, allowing the fox to eat into his stomach rather than confess to stealing, loyal Larry suffered rather than confess to being revolted by his mother’s cooking. His ordeal did not end until he went away to college and encountered what at first he thought was gourmet cooking. Then he married me and learned better.

  “I don’t eat anything that flies,” he warned me when we got engaged. For a while he was satisfied to be out of pain and bird-free. I cooked all-American recipes from Fanny Farmer and Irma Rombauer’s The Joy of Cooking.

  Then, in the 1980s, Julia Child introduced Americans to French cooking. Larry sat up and took notice. Her recipe for French bread filled eleven pages. It required that Larry rise at three in the morning in order to pound the dough down for its third and final rise and then insert a steaming brick into the oven to ensure that the bread came out varnished, like a Strad.

 
Ever since Julia, Larry’s been reading cookbooks for fun. He is not discouraged by complex recipes. I, by contrast, read them to find fast and easy meals. One half hour of preparation time is my limit. I skip over recipes that begin, “The day before, peel and poach 12 plover’s eggs,” or include words like cheesecloth, blanche, reduce, knead, whisk, parchment paper, or nasturtium petals. I am attracted to those that have no more than eight ingredients, including salt and pepper. I also avoid recipes that require one to soak anything overnight in favor of those that begin with the reassuring words, “Preheat oven to 350 degrees.” We are a culinary odd couple, worse than Jack Sprat and his wife.

  Now that we’re in Provence, Larry prefers cookbooks written in French to comprehensible ones in English, although English versions are readily available in the bookstore in the center of L’Isle sur la Sorgue. As a result, Larry needs a dictionary to translate some of the ingredients, and a table of equivalences, which French cookbooks don’t provide, to decipher the measurements.

  “Is a litre more or less than a quart?” he wonders, tossing a few cups of water into the pot. Larry can be very careless about amounts. He tends to double the garlic. He can also be pretty devil-may-care about ingredients. He used to think that Worcestershire sauce and anchovies enhanced pretty nearly every recipe with the exception of Toll House cookies. In that respect, I am also his opposite: I follow directions like a fascist.

  Occasionally I cook. I have noticed that tomato pie is the sine qua non of Provençal fare, or at least in September when there are a lot of tomatoes around. We’ve gone to a few petite soirees, and someone invariably brings a tomato pie. It is clear that I cannot even pretend to be a French woman unless I can make une tarte aux tomates.

  What stops me from trying is that I have never made a successful crust. I do exactly what the recipe says about ice cubes and butter, but I end up with a large lump that looks like a brain and crumbles like plaster. Imagine my delight when I mention my fear of pastry to Monique, and she tells me that it’s easy, any “femme stupide” can do it. Real French women, she says, no longer make crusts from scratch; they unroll them from Pillsbury. Sic transit gloria mundi.

  For the most part, the recipe conforms to my culinary prerequisites: not too many ingredients; degree of difficulty, one; degrees of temperature, around 400 degrees F. Our oven is French, so I must twist the knob to the approximate French equivalent, which Larry estimates is 200 degrees C.

  Tarte aux Tomates

  (makes an 8- to 9-inch pie)

  Ingredients

  Pillsbury or other prepared pie crust

  3 large tomatoes, cut into half-inch slices salt

  1 pound gruyère cheese, cut into thin slices

  1 teaspoon dried basil or 1 tablespoon finely cut fresh basil

  freshly ground black pepper

  3 tablespoons grated parmesan cheese

  Prebaking the Pastry—The Hard Part

  Rub butter on the bottom and sides of a cake pan or quiche pan that’s no more than 1 1/4 inches deep.

  Unroll cold pastry and lower it carefully and evenly into the pan, pressing the pastry into the bottom and sides of the pan. Cut off excess pastry with a knife or scissors. Use a fork to prick the bottom of the pastry, but don’t prick it all the way through.

  Preheat oven to 400 degrees F. The pricks won’t be enough to keep the pastry from bubbling, so butter a piece of aluminum foil and press it, buttered side down, on the bottom and side of the pastry. Bake in the middle of the oven for 10 minutes, take out of the oven, and remove the foil. Then prick the pastry again (again, not all the way through) and return it to the oven for three minutes or until the pastry is slightly browned and has begun to pull away from the sides of the pan. Remove from oven and cool.

  Directions for Filling—The Easy Part

  Sprinkle the tomato slices with lots of salt and place them on a cake rack to drain for about half hour, or if you don’t have a cake rack, use paper towels.

  Arrange cheese slices, slightly overlapping, on the bottom of the pastry shell. Place the drained tomato slices side by side on top of the cheese. Sprinkle a couple of grindings of black pepper, the basil, and the parmesan on top. Bake in the upper third of the oven for 25 minutes, or until the cheese has melted and the edges of the pie are nicely browned.

  The tomatoes need too much time to drain, and there’s a bit too much pricking of the crust with a fork, but I obey my way through it. The tomato pie becomes my specialty, my calling card, not so much for its quality, it’s pretty hard to screw up, but because I rarely cook anything else. If we stayed longer than a month, they’d find me out. “Oh here comes Mary-Lou again with her tomato pie.”

  The Stuff Center of the World

  Tourists don’t visit supermarkets, but they, along with the native Provençaux flock to the weekly outdoor markets for which Provence is well known, and so do we. Part flea market, part food market, part circus, part social gathering place, and part country fair, the markets are the most defining aspect of traditional Provençal life.

  At the outdoor markets, some French women still carry genuine French paniers, straw shopping baskets with leather handles, although small white recyclable plastic bags are taking over. In ecologically sensitive American towns where plastic bags are also no longer available from merchants, French paniers are getting a handhold, at least among the pretentious.

  The atmosphere among vendors and customers alike is festive and friendly. Even as the vendors hustle by offering potential customers free samples of cheeses and sausages, they pause to chat. The goods are displayed attractively in pottery bowls and baskets, on makeshift tables and in stalls: a giant, carbon steel pan of paella looks like a still life. Prices are written in pencil or ink on cut-out squares of cardboard, or in chalk on small framed slates, the kind French children carry to school. Or at least it pleases me to think they still do. What makes the markets especially authentic and appealing is that customers are waited on by the very farmers who have grown the food they’re selling.

  Inevitably, modernity has inserted itself into the traditional weekly markets. An amplified rock band sets up in front of the charcuterie. In another part of the marketplace, a woman in peasant clothing cranks out “Under the Bridges of Paris” on her hurdy-gurdy. One has the sense she’s been cranking away anachronistically for years.

  Markets take place on a fixed day in every village and town throughout Provence. If it’s Monday, it’s Cadenet; on Tuesday, it’s Apt; the big Wednesday market is in St-Rémy-de-Provence; Thursday it’s Aix-en-Provence; on Fridays, Lourmarin; and on Saturday, it’s Uzes.

  Sunday belongs to L’Isle sur la Sorgue, the largest, most copious market in the immediate region. It teems with tourists. My first act is to buy a straw shopping basket into which I cannot wait to add a baguette. When you’re pretending to be French, props matter.

  We make our way through the slow-moving throng. We are primed to buy by the sheer variety, beauty, and seemingly infinite display. The soaps come in all colors and flavors, including chocolate, good enough to eat. We are drawn to everything: kitchen towels, table linens, lavender sachets, puppies and baby pigs in baskets, African masks, olive wood bowls, bouquets of flowers, honey, and all manner of kitsch variations on the theme of cicadas. In the outdoor markets, this truly bug-eyed bug is as ubiquitous as a horde of grasshoppers to which they are entomologically related. They are everywhere, cicada sachets, doorknockers, lapel pins, salt and pepper shakers, ashtrays, and dish towels. Probably tattoos. Although revered in Provence, in China they eat cicadas. The females are meatier.

  The cicada is the celebrity insect of Provence as emblematic in its way as the fleur-de-lis is to the kings of France and the eagle to the United States. The French fabulist La Fontaine, no doubt borrowing from the Greek fabulist Aesop, wrote a fable called The Grasshopper and the Ant, although he used the word cigale for the grasshopper. In both fables, the cicada is
the antihero, a morally reprehensible creature. He hangs out in trees all summer, lazy and carefree, humming a happy tune while the industrious ant spends his summer storing away food for winter. In fact, rather than fable, the cicadas are not lounging around and giving voice. They’re procreating nonstop. What could be more louche, more insouciant, more French?

  I learn that there are thousands, probably millions of live cicadas hanging out high in the trees above me right now. The male makes a kind of loud noise, which, since male cicadas have no larynx, is produced by rapid retractions of the male’s hollow stomach. A female cicada that finds a male attractive will respond to his call by giving her wings a come-hither flick that makes a clicking sound. As the duet continues, the sonar-guided male makes his way toward the female. Cha-chi-chi. The accent is always on the first syllable, cha-chi-chi, cha-chi-chi, cha-chi-chi. They go at it all day long. No one in the marketplace seems to notice the perpetual din, although I’m told that if you hold a male cicada up to your ear, his 120-decibel noise—the intensity of a jet engine—can cause permanent hearing loss. Better they should stay in the trees.

  Perhaps the natives are so used to the chirring sound that they no longer hear it. But I’m not used to it; I’m just getting to know it. The cicada chorus relaxes me. Their repetitive trill vibrates, filling my brain with a peaceful hum. I suppose, like everything wonderful here, I could accommodate to it and stop hearing their sweet call, too. But please not yet.

  In the household appliances section of the market, Larry and I fall under the spell of a fast-talking salesman who is demonstrating a many-bladed vegetable device that curls cucumbers into spirals, sculpts radishes into tulips, and shreds carrots into confetti. We buy one and go home to try it out. It cuts fingers into ribbons. We must restrain each other from trying to acquire all of Provence. We take turns talking each other out of ridiculous purchases. While I’m stroking the patina of an eighteenth-century cobbler’s bench and asking the dealer how much it would cost to send it to the United States in a shipping container, it is Larry who knows to deliver the coup de réalité by reminding me that we can’t afford it, and besides, it wouldn’t fit in our kitchen. Similarly, Larry may not buy the clippers that can cut through bamboo. “We don’t have any bamboo,” I remind him.