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!