Foods of Provence O to P

 Les Olives

Olive Varieties:  Aglandeau, Salonenque, Lucques, Negrette, Bouteillan, Noire de Nyons, Picholine, Cailletier

Olives cassées de la Vallée de Baux de Provence:  Broken, green olives from the Salonenque or Béruguette varieties that have a low shelf life and come flavored with fennel.

Olive de Nîmes:  Whole green olives of the Picholine variety with a characteristically crunchy and juicy texture.

Olive de Nice:  from Cailletier olive

Pan Bagnat:  Often called the Salade Niçoise between bread.  Just like with the Salade Niçoise, there are rules to follow…. The ones on the left are from the Commune Libre du Pan Bagnat.

The vegetables have to be raw:  no cooked potatoes or cooked green beans.  Lots of recipes to choose from:

Bon Appétit

America’s Test Kitchen

Serious Eats

New York Times

Are they authentic??

For a good discussion of the complexity of the issue, go to David Lebovitz.

We’ll discuss the Salade Niçoise in more detail below.

Panisse:  Fried chickpea fritters that are a specialty of Marseille.  Chickpea flower is cooked into a polenta-like mixture, cooled, cut into French fry shapes and then deep-fried. 

Socca: These are chickpea crepes, also called Cade in Toulon and Farinata in Liguria.  We saw these being made in Toulon when we visited Yolanda in 1999 but we weren’t ready for lunch at the time and then didn’t see them again.  We’ll have 6 weeks to hunt them down in Provence.  Or in Nice.

Foods of Provence A to N

 I have a list of foods to try in my notes but not with an explanation of what they are, and sometimes even I forget.  So here I’m going to elaborate on them.  Naturally they are in alphabetical order and this is an ongoing post.  Of course, numbers come first.

13 Desserts de Provence

The photo above from the Maison Mirabeau winery is one of the best illustrations of the «treize desserts» that are eaten on Christmas Eve in Provence standing for Christ and his 12 apostles.  They are Almonds, Walnuts, Raisins and Figs representing 4 mendicant orders; Dates representing the east and the wise men, Fruit pastes put up in the summer, notably quince; Black and White nougat representing winter or evil and summer or good; olives, fresh fruit (apples, pears, or citrus), Calissons, Navettes and Pompe a l’Huile (breads).

Affligen beer:  OK this is really a Belgian ale but I found it on a menu along with Mort Subite Kriek, a Belgian cherry lambic, and I want to make sure I don’t get a lager…

Aioli: A mayonnaise-like sauce made by emulsifying pounded garlic with olive oil, salt and sometimes lemon juice.  Traditionally it didn’t have egg in it but NY Times Cooking adds an egg yolk and ATK adds egg yolk and sugar…

Agneau au lait:  This is suckling lamb which is available only in spring time.  Fernando should get his fill of lamb in Provence.

Artichauts violet de Provence:  These are pretty purple artichokes that are supposed to be very common in Provence.  April and May are prime artichoke season and I’ll need to try them thinly sliced raw as a salad.

Artichauts à la Barigoule: Serious Eats has an explanation of how these artichokes are named after a mushroom that they apparently were  substitutes for.  They are peeled down to the stalk and heart and cooked with vegetables, stock and white wine, and served with a butter parsley sauce.

Beignets de Fleurs de Courgettes:  These are summer squash flowers that are battered and fried, sometimes stuffed.  Usually they use male flowers but sometimes you will find baby zucchini attached to them (more expensive that way).  Julie Andrieu, who has a France.tv show that you can watch on YouTube, has a recipe for them.  Her channel is in French of course and she speaks very fast.  Sometimes there are subtitles (in English, French or Spanish) but you know how those are…

Berlingots:  These are traditional fruit-flavored hard candies in a pillow shape with white stripes.  These handmade artisan products are naturally flavored and colored and have a long history, perhaps all the way back to Avignon Pope Clement V in 1313.  You can read about them in The Connexion.  One of the centers of production is in Carpentras, 97 km north of Aix-en-Provence, 2-3 hours by public transportation.  If you want to see how they are made, it’s easier to watch this YouTube video.

Bouillabaisse:  This is the iconic fish stew from Marseille that used to be a dish of poor fishermen using the unsold fish that they caught.  Now it has been civilized with additions of saffron and shellfish and the price has risen as well (up to 80€ per person).  Peter Mayle recommends going to Le Peron restaurant in Marseille for their bouillabaise (73€) and the view of the sea.

Bourride:  Bourride is a fish stew typically made with lotte (monkfish) and potatoes and covered with an aioli sauce.

Brandade de Morue:  A dish of pulverized salt cod with olive oil and garlic, and sometimes with potatoes mashed in with it.  It is also eaten in Italy (baccalà mantecato) and in Spain (brandada de bacalao).  If you want to learn more check out Serious Eats.

Chateauneuf-du-Pape:  These are the famous red wines from outside of Avignon, north of Aix.  Translated it means the new castle of the Pope, as in when the popes relocated to Avignon.  Daddy once sent me to buy a case of it with Nana (I was 20) because the May Company advertised the case in the LA Times at an incredibly low price.  It turned out to be a missprint but they sold it to us at the price anyway.  I’m not sure if we’ll be able to afford it these days.

Coquillages:  Shellfish, of which there are a lot, although some say the shellfish from the cold waters of France’s north coast are better than those of the Mediterranean.  In any case I promise I will slurp down a raw oyster…

Daube de Boeuf Provençal:  This is the Provençal boeuf bourguignon but it has orange peel in it and its vegetables are mainly onion and carrots.  It gets its name from the daubiére earthenware pot that it was traditionally cooked in.  The photo of it at the left is from an article in Craftsmanship Magazine about Paula Wolfert and her clay pots.  It includes an article by Wolfert:  The Magic of the French Daubière.

Fougasse:  Related to the Italian focaccia and other flat breads of the Mediterranean, fougasse is usually slashed to resemble a stalk of wheat. Unlike focaccia, it is not slathered with oil but can have savory additions like garlic, olives or anchovies.  Here’s a recipe from Domaine Mirabeau.  Naturally it goes well with one of their Rosés.

Gardiane de Taureau:  Also known as daube camarguaise, this is a beef stew using the black bulls from the Camargue region west of Marseille.  Julie Andreiu has a recipe for this as well, along with a short video.  It includes orange peel, chocolate and olives, as well as red wine and vegetables.  She serves it with the red rice of the Camargue that you see in the photo.

Huitres de Bouzigues:  Bouzigues is on the southwest French Mediterranean coast to the west of the Camargue and Montpellier.  They are supposed to be the best if you can find them.  You know I am swearing to eat an oyster raw.

Miel de Lavande, de Chêne et de Châtaignier:   Lavender, Oak and Chestnut honey.  We have 6 weeks to use up 3 jars of honey as I don’t think I would risk bringing it home in a suitcase.  Or we could just buy it from The Honey of Kings (so much for the French Revolution) or just have a taste of each at the marché.

Navettes:  These are dry cookies in the shape of small boats that are flavored with orange blossom water and traditionally prepared for Candlemas (Feb. 2), especially in Marseille.  Le Grand Pastis has a list of where to buy them.  Le Grand Pastis reports on the Food Scene in Marseille in case you want to read more.  In French.

There is also a navette bakery in Aix:  Les Navettes Aixoises.

Chemin d’Arles / Via Tolosana to Santiago de Compostela

Near the Adagio Aparthotel in Aix-en-Provence there is a road called Route de Galice.  Galice?  Galicia?  Was this a pilgrim road connecting to the Camino de Santiago?  It isn’t a far-fetched idea since we ran across markings for the Camino in Switzerland.  It turns out that indeed there was a pilgrim route from Arles through Toulouse and over the Pyrenees that connected with the Camino Aragonés that runs through Jaca in Spain and connects with the Camino Frances at Puente la Reina.  And the significance of Arles was that it was also a starting point for the pilgrim route to Rome.

The road from Arles to Rome, the Via Aurelia, goes through Aix on its way to Genoa, Lucca, Siena and Rome and the Italian section was built by the Roman consul Gaius Aurelius Cotta in 241 BC.  In 13 BC the road was extended to Arles, a significant Roman town, by the Emperor Augustus.  Recently a hiking route has been mapped out (Grandes Randonnee GR653-A) to trace it but it goes up into the Maritime Alps rather than through Nice and the coastal cities.  I can’t imagine the Romans building a road through the mountains when they could go along the coast line.  But maybe the new route is to appeal to hikers and avoid the cities and towns.  One hiking blog mentioned that on parts of the trail he didn’t see a single person, and this was in August, the height of the tourist season, but maybe they were avoiding the heat.

If you want to explore the route more closely, Les Amis des Chemins de Compostelle et de Rome offer an interactive map.  Their website is in French but with Google Translate…. We will let you know if we run across any scallop shells.

Waiting 13 Months isn’t so long…

 I’ve been worrying that waiting 13 months until we go to Provence is awfully long.  Then I reviewed my blog posts and realized that we waited 17 month to go on our Sicily trip.  We switched our OAT September 2020 reservations for Machu Picchu to November 2021 reservations for Sicily in June of 2020, the height of COVID.  So that was 17 months of preparation and I made use of every minute of it.  13 months will allow me to do almost as much for Provence!

Already I’ve read the Provence and Cote d’Azur/Nice chapters in Daddy’s copy of Waverley Root’s The Food of France.  Granted it was published in 1966, almost 60 years ago, but it should give me a good idea of what food was traditional.  However, Waverley is not always the best informed:  he didn’t know what a loquat was.  But then he came from New England, not California, and this was before Alice Waters.  He doesn’t have much to say about Aix-en-Provence but he does have nice things to say about Nice, probably because it is on the coast and heavily influenced by Italy.

Now I’ll get back to reading M.F.K. Fisher’s Two Towns in Provence: Map of Another Town and A Considerable Town, which covers Aix-en-Provence and Marseille.  My copy is a Kindle book and I have an inborn resistance to reading it online.  Not that I don’t read loads of things online but a book I like to touch and hold in my hands.  You can’t thumb through an online book like you do the print edition, looking for things to skip and checking how many pages are left to read in a chapter…  My edition was published in 1978 although the first edition is from 1964 so again we are looking at an Aix and a Marseille from 50 years ago.  At the time, Aix had a population of 50,000, now it has 150,000.  And Marseille, the Considerable Town, is undoubtedly « considerably » larger now with more than 800 thousand.  However, compared to cities in China, that’s hardly a drop in the bucket, is it?

Yes, I’m looking at more recently published books too.  I just picked up Rosa Jackson’s Niçoise, Market-Inspired Cooking from France’s Sunniest City. Who’s Rosa Jackson you say?  She doesn’t sound French at all, or even Italian!  However, she’s been running a cooking school, Les Petits Farcis, in Nice for over 20 years and the recipes look  authentic to me.  I’ll have to try the socca and the pissaladière.  Afterall, I have 13 more months to go!

Mont Sainte Victoire

Mont Saint Victoire is the mountain near Aix-en-Provence that Paul Cézanne painted over and over.  Sort of like Mount San Cayetano in Fillmore that we photograph over and over.  When you see a mountain looming up before you every day of your life, it becomes a fixture.  San Cayetano is taller at 4212 feet compared to Sainte Victoire at 3317 feet.

Cézanne was born and died in Aix-en-Provence and spent most of his life there.  Emile Zola did convince him to move to Paris for a while but he eventually returned to the south.  You can visit his studio in Aix although currently it is closed until spring of 2025 for renovations.  Hopefully it will be open by April of 2026.

There is also his family home, a mansion (afterall his father was a banker), that you can visit on a guided tour but apparently it is closed for renovations as well.  Perhaps because it is still winter?  Another reason to wait until spring to visit Europe.

If you want to see more paintings of Sainte Victoire by Cézanne, here’s a collection of them for you.