A Pig in Provence (13 page)

M. Bruno displays his catch. An authentic Marseillais recipe.
Tasting history. The brothers fête.

During the brief time we kept goats and made cheese, we were welcomed by the people of the small community where we lived, all of them eager to share their knowledge of the local food and customs, no one more so than M. Bruno.

One spring day, when Oliver was only five months old, we were at M. and Mme. Bruno’s home where we had been invited for an
apéritif.
He was holding forth on
bouillabaisse
as Donald and I sampled his
vin de noix,
a fortified wine he had produced by macerating green walnuts in red wine with sugar and
eau-de-vie.
“You can’t make
bouillabaisse
with just any fish,” he said.

“Mon mari,”
beamed his wife,
“mon mari
makes the true Marseille
bouillabaisse,
you know. He’s a Marseillais. He grew up there and that’s where he lived before he joined the Legion.” She nodded, “Yes, I met him because he was in Indochine with the French Foreign Legion. I lived in the country, just outside
Hanoi. My grandmother was one of the earliest colonists. Her husband had a big butcher shop, the biggest in Hanoi. She rode horseback all over with her servants.” As Mme. Bruno became more and more animated, her hands fluttering, her eyebrows lifting, and her mouth alternately pursing and smiling, it became increasingly difficult for me to follow the thread of her story. Her husband never interrupted her, just smiled and nodded and let her continue until she paused for breath. It was a story I had heard before, and was to hear many times again. With each telling, more of their personal history was pieced together, though I never got quite all of it before he died and she moved away.

“Now, the
bouillabaisse.
Have you had it before?” We had once, in Marseille, but I had only a vague memory of bowls of fish, shellfish, and a garlicky sauce. I had a stronger memory of the candlelit table where the two of us had sat facing the boats of the Vieux Port one October night, a few weeks before Donald and I got married. We stayed up late and walked along the
quai
of the port until we could see the
château
d’If, where Dumas’s Count of Monte Cristo had been imprisoned.

“Ah, that’s good. And good you had it in Marseille,” M. Bruno said. “Other places have different versions, but in Marseille you can find the true
bouillabaisse.
But listen, why don’t I make it for you? You like to cook, Georgeanne, and I, a true Marseillais, will show you exactly how to make it. Can you come next Sunday—is that a good day for you? Next Sunday? I will bring the fish from Marseille. You have to have certain ones, you know. Well?”

“Yes,” we said in unison. Although the goats’ milk was in full flow, we could have all our morning work done early. I didn’t sell the cheese to any Sunday markets, and Donald had Sundays off from his chicken delivery job. It was a relatively free day
for us, and I loved the idea of learning to cook something with M. Bruno, especially something as special as
bouillabaisse.

“Good, good.” He rubbed his hands together.

We were sitting outside on their small flagstone terrace, near the brick barbecue he had just finished building. Red tulips were blooming against the gray stone wall that ran along the gravel driveway down to their house from the upper road. We could see across the vineyards in the valley to the forest beyond and, if we stood on our tiptoes, the roofs of the barns at the edge of the forest where we kept our goats and pigs.

“So, next Sunday morning come here at 10:30. I’ll show you the fish and explain each step to you.
La petite,
Ethel, can play with my collection of stones.” Ethel loved looking at his stones, all of which he had found in and around the valley. Some had fossils embedded in them, others were actual fossils, like fragments of dinosaur bones. Others were remnants of Gallo-Roman pottery. “Jocelyne can look after the baby while we cook. Will that be all right?”

“Of course,” I said. Jocelyne, Mme. Bruno to me, was very fond of Oliver, and when he was born had given him a traditional Provençal baby-carrying basket made of woven willow. She trimmed it in antique cotton lace, sewing through the upper edge of the willow, and had made bedding to match. The basket had two handholds threaded with wide bands of blue satin ribbon plus heavy white cord, for hanging in the olive trees, she explained, while the parents were working. Inside the basket was a quilted Provençal baby cape and cap. I still have the basket, but recently passed on the lace and the cape to Oliver and his wife for their baby.

As kind as Mme. Bruno was to us, her intensity made me anxious. M. Bruno had exactly the opposite effect on me. It was going to be fun to cook with him.

The next Sunday, which was very clear and bright, we arrived at the Brunos’, bringing several of our fresh cheeses.

“Oh, thank you, thank you.” M. Bruno said, unwrapping one and bringing it up to his nose, breathing deeply. “Ah, so sweet, so fresh. Bravo! You have done a wonderful job with your cheeses.
Ils sont les vrais fromages de chèvre d’autrefois
—the real goat’s-milk cheeses of the past.”

I felt my face flush. Although he and many others had told me this before, each time I heard my cheeses praised made me feel proud of what we had done. It was an especially important compliment coming from him because he loved and appreciated good food and wine and was knowledgeable about their origins. He knew how to make goat’s- and sheep’s-milk cheeses, to cure meats, to slaughter and butcher, to raise animals of all kinds, to choose the best fish and shellfish, and to make wine and
vin maison
and liqueurs. He also knew where to find wild asparagus and mushrooms. He was, like so many Provençal men I’ve met since, fascinated by local ingredients and food and how to cook them, and far more interested in talking about that than about his work. I never heard about what occupation M. Bruno pursued, other than his wife’s references to his years in the Legion, and some apartment properties that were occasionally mentioned as a reason for needing to return to Marseille where they lived most of the year.

“Let’s put these cheeses on a platter—I brought a couple of sheep’s-milk cheeses from Marseille for you to try, plus some of the
Brousse
I told you about, the one that is made in le Rove, not far from my cousin’s house—and then we’ll start our
bouillabaisse.”

Their house was not a farmhouse or a bastide, or a villa or a manor house, the four most common country places in the area. Farmhouses, or mas, range from large rambling affairs to
small compact ones.
Bastides
are large farmhouses that could also serve as a fortification.
Villa
is the term used to describe large, rather important freestanding houses with garden or land, often recently built on the edges of villages as well as in the country. Rural manor houses are large, multistoried, and square or rect-angular, and the approach to them is often lined with long alleys of plane or poplar trees.

The Brunos’ residence was a small two-story stone house with a red tile roof, set just below a narrow dirt road on a rise of land cut out from the
garrigue
-covered hillside, thick with scrub oak and juniper. Its plastered walls were painted pale chalk blue, a color popular in the 1930s, with wooden shutters stained dark brown and decorative iron grating on the lower windows and the window of the front door. It had no barns or lofts, just a recently built garage, so it was not a farmhouse. It was too small and modest to be a proper villa, and it was certainly not a manor house. I have never seen a house quite like it.

The front door opened directly into a square foyer with a massive, carved wooden staircase, more appropriate for a
château
than their small house, that twisted up to the second floor. The foyer was crowded with several small gilded tables whose spindly legs supported ebony statuary, carved boxes, pieces of jade and rose quartz, and a few large fossils. One table held a lamp with a maroon silk shade fringed in gold. Just behind the door was an elephant-leg umbrella stand, and, off to the side, a coat rack and a decorative cabinet. There was just room to move through the foyer to the stairs or to turn either right toward the bathroom door or left into the living room. The space felt a little claustrophobic, as did the rest of the house.

A round dining table, lit by a green glass chandelier, was in the corner of the living/dining room, which also held a large
maroon tufted sofa, two overstuffed leather chairs, an Oriental rug on the tile floor, a curio cabinet in one corner topped with a record player, and a built-in armoire in another corner. The walls were devoted to bookshelves, oil and watercolor still lifes (M. Bruno’s own work—and quite good), and a large clock. In the back of the living room was a doorway opening to the right, into the kitchen.

“This way, this way.” M. Bruno led the way through the living room maze to the kitchen doorway.

“It’s all in here. I picked it up this morning at the quai des Belges. The boats come in every morning there to unload their catch from the previous night. It’s a wonderful place. The fishmongers are, well, they can be pretty coarse, but, that’s part of it. The important thing is the fish.”

“Now, first of all,” continued our guide, “I must tell you that it is very odd to be making
bouillabaisse
for only six of us.” I thought it was nice that he included Ethel in the table count. The French think children are never too young to learn how to eat. “The minimum, the
minimum,
would normally be eight, but best of all, ten, twenty, forty—the more the better, because one of the secrets of a great
bouillabaisse
is the number and variety of the fish that are used.”

He rolled up his sleeves and tied on a white apron, covering his hand-knit brown sweater-vest and ample midsection. He was about fifty at the time, and his brown hair had begun to thin and recede, showing more olive skin. His brown eyes twinkled as he talked, and whenever he smiled a dimple appeared to the right of his chin. For a Marseillais, known for the volubility of their arms and hands, his were, unlike his wife’s, restrained. I wondered if it was the influence of his time spent in Asia, where he had said he’d practiced Buddhism.

“Look. Here are the fish.” He opened the metal cooler at his feet and I saw a dozen or more whole fish laid on ice, plus a perforated metal container and some wet burlap bags. He tapped the container. “These are the
favouilles,
the little crabs. I have to keep them separate from the fish or they’ll gnaw on them.”

The kitchen was tiny, with one small window above the composite granite sink, a waist-high refrigerator next to it, a stove against the rear wall, and a pantry. Pots and pans hung overhead. A curtain of traditional red Provençal fabric in tiny print gathered on a wire covered the open space and shelves beneath the sink and the countertop. I could have stretched out my arms in the middle of the kitchen and touched both hands, palms flat, to the opposing walls.

We stood hip to hip, as M. Bruno laid one fish after another onto a large, fennel-covered platter, discoursing on the culinary attributes and habitats of each fish while showing me the key signs of quality and freshness to look for. I was fascinated.

“Now this is St-Pierre, and it comes from the deep waters.” He laid out a silver flatfish that seemed to be half head, its back crowned with sprays of spiny fins. I found it beautiful and wondered what it had looked like only hours ago, cutting silently through the sea.

“You can always tell St-Pierre by the dark spot behind the eyes. This is a white fish, one of the tender ones we’ll add toward the end of the cooking.” I could clearly see the dark, round spot, almost a smudge, nearly in the middle of the fish.

Before I could ask why it was called St-Pierre, he told me. “It got its name because Saint Pierre, the apostle fisherman, was said to have left his mark when he grasped the fish, pressing his thumb there while he looked in his pockets for money to pay tribute to the Romans.” I reached out and pressed my thumb
into the smudge, remembering my Sunday school lessons about the big fisherman.