A Pig in Provence (15 page)

Long after Ethel and Oliver were grown, and I was teaching cooking classes in Provence, two brothers, both commercial fishermen, bought the big farmhouse at the bottom of my road and divided it into two adjoining living quarters. It had belonged to one of their uncles, their mother’s brother, and they had often been visitors to the house, so they were familiar with most of the villagers and their extended families and friends.

Once a year in the fall they put on a semiprivate
bouillabaisse
feast, inviting eighty to a hundred people, charging everyone approximately twenty euros, just enough to cover their costs. The event includes
apéritifs; hors d’oeuvres; bouillabaisse
served correctly, according to the charter, in two courses; and a dessert. I discovered the event when a friend invited me to make up her party of six. I had just finished four week-long sessions of classes, and I looked forward to doing something different. The weather was still warm, as it so often is in late September, but the evenings could be chilly, so I brought along a wool shawl to wear over my long black linen sundress, because I knew we’d be eating outside until late.

I arrived just before 7:30, not wanting to be too early, just in case no one I knew was there yet. The road on either side of the brothers’ house was already jammed with cars, and one of their wheat fields, now free of crop, had been turned into a parking lot for the night, but I still had trouble finding a place for my car. Floodlights mounted on the edge of the farmhouse roof illuminated the scene below, where rows of tables dressed in white butcher’s paper were laid out. Old-time farmers and full-time residents mingled with the European and French urbanites who had bought second homes in the area. Everyone was wearing versions of summer finery and milling around the
apéritif
table where two of the most handsome men in the village, both masons with prematurely gray hair, dark brown eyes, weathered skin, and muscled forearms, were pouring a choice of
pastis, rosé
, or Coca-Cola. Voices rose and fell on the air, cicadas clicked in the background, and the scent of garlic cooking in olive oil came from the depths of the garage under the house.

I immediately saw my friend Yvonne, waving me to her table. She leapt up and kissed me on both cheeks, then introduced me to her friends who were visiting from Germany. Everyone brings their own tableware to these affairs, and Yvonne’s was Rosenthal white china—huge soup bowls that were mostly rim, the kind you see in Michelin-starred restaurants—flatware acquired on a recent trip to Thailand, crystal wineglasses, and heavy dark-orange linen napkins. Down the table I could see a wide variety of tableware glittering in the light. By contrast, the
apéritifs
were in plastic glasses, and the
hors d’oeuvres,
which were peanuts, potato chips, and bite-size squares of
pissaladière,
caramelized onion flat bread, had been handed out on small paper napkins.

“Come on, let’s go see them cook.” Yvonne grabbed my hand. She was a successful stage actress in Germany and also
an excellent cook, voraciously interested in all things culinary. We headed straight to the garage, which a hundred years ago had probably housed carriages, but now held two huge woklike pans, each more than a meter in diameter and steaming with a broth whose fragrance of hills and sea reminded me instantly of M. Bruno’s little kitchen. The pots were set on large gas rings built into a cement-block base about hip height. The rims of the pots rose almost to my waist, making them a good level for tending. The garage was deep and dark in the corners, but on the closer walls I could see hanging the leftover trappings of rural life: padded leather donkey collars, sieves for separating the grain from the chaff, and pitchforks and rakes of worked-smooth wood. Had we been in a restaurant they would have seemed kitschy attempts at authentic decor, but here, on an old family farm, they were a natural part of the setting, just like the rototiller and disc whose outlines I could see in the far corner.

Along one wall, under the pitchforks and rakes, were a dozen or more plastic bins filled with fish. The incandescent lights of the barn selectively reflected their bright eyes and glittering scales, creating an unlikely seascape deep in the barn. I could identify some of the fish. Small, bright orange mullets, considered a delicacy. St-Pierre, easy to identify because of the thumbprint. Fat chunks of monkfish, whose ugly heads I supposed had already gone into the soup base. A whole bin of the spiky, essential
rascasse,
and many more fish, black, greenish, bluish, and red, whose names I didn’t know. More bins, filled with peeled potatoes, stood next to the fish. On a small table between two of the steaming pans was a ceramic canister of sea salt, a glass jar half full of saffron threads, a big basket of bay leaves and wild thyme, and two glasses of
pastis.
I stood a moment, inhaling the scent of the place, before Yvonne dragged me over to be introduced as the American who lived up the road.

The brothers, each armed with a long metal spoon, were tending the pots of simmering soup. We all agreed we had seen one another in passing and were happy to meet finally. Both wore short-sleeved cotton shirts and jeans. One was wearing a baseball cap backward. The other had brushed his thinning brown hair back from his forehead. Their faces were rosy from the steam and heat of the soup, and glistened with a faint sheen of sweat. I asked how much fish was in the bins.

“Oh, forty or fifty kilos are left. We brought up more than a hundred kilos, including the
favouilles,
but a lot went into the
fond
here,” he said, as he stirred.

“Did you catch them all?” I asked, watching the golden soup as it rhythmically bubbled up, collapsed back, and rose again. I could just see the propane flames beneath the black bottom of the pots and feel their hissing warmth. The crowd outside had stopped milling, and people were beginning to sit down.

“Oh, not all. Most of them. We made a few trades. We had more of the deepwater fish, like the St-Pierre, fewer of the shallow-water rockfish, so we traded with another fisherman. We’re all pretty friendly.”

A lighted doorway suddenly shone in the dark rear of the garage, framing a woman carrying a basin. She came toward us.

“Eh, Jean, the
rouille
is ready. Just needs a little more soup.” She indicated the ladle on the wooden table with a nod of her head and held out the basin. The closest brother scooped up some soup, poured it into the basin, and then stirred it until the stiff peaks of the reddish gold
rouille
softened and smoothed.

“Bonsoir,”
she said smiling at me and Yvonne.
“C’est bon, n’est-ce pas?”

We agreed that it was good, everything—the evening, the setting, the fish—all the time eyeing the basin of fragrant
rouille,
thinking that soon we would be slathering it on top of our dried bread, into the soup, on top of the fish.

“Go on, have a seat. We’re ready to bring out the rouille and serve the soup.”

We left the garage and hurried back to our seats just in time to get a piece of bread into our bowls before a woman approached our table, laughing and joking as she came down the row, spooning the thick
rouille
on top of the waiting bread. Someone else followed with soup.

Yvonne poured the red Vacqueyras wine she had brought from her cellar. I thought it was a little powerful for the soup, but she likes big red wines, and it tasted good as the evening began to chill. As we set upon the soup and the wine, voices rose with laughter and camaraderie, and I could feel a bond growing among us, created by the sheer joy of eating
bouillabaisse,
a dish that everyone, including me, had memories of.

My bread softened with the soup, the
rouille
melted into it, and with each bite I tasted the garlic, roasted red peppers, fennel, saffron, fish, crabs, and eel, no longer discrete but melding to form the taste and texture of the
fond.
We served ourselves more toast and took more
rouille
from the small bowls brought to the table, while women passed behind us with pots of steaming soup, ladling more into our bowls if we asked. I had two servings, plus extra toast, and then the fish began to arrive.

The deep platters were heaped with chunks of monkfish and fillets of red mullet and sea bass, plus buttery potatoes, tinted gold by the soup’s saffron. I remembered that M. Bruno didn’t put potatoes in his
bouillabaisse,
but had explained that the Toulonnais swear by the necessity of potatoes.

I found myself caught off-guard by the memories that the
bouillabaisse
evoked of my past life, when the children were little and life seemed simpler. I excused myself early, explaining to Yvonne that I was more tired than I had thought. I managed to extricate my car from the crowded field where I had parked and drove up the road into the night.

Not all
bouillabaisse
is made with the precise collection of fish that M. Bruno taught me and that my fishermen neighbors support. Nor are there vast numbers of adherents to the Marseille
bouillabaisse
charter, although it appears to be a worthy endeavor. Among the many Provençal recipes for other versions, one is made with sardines and another, the so-called one-eyed
bouillabaisse,
with a fried-egg topping. There is even a bouillabaisse made only with vegetables, and another with spinach. The key element is always the boiling, the
bouillir,
and the reduction, the
abaisser,
which creates the luscious
liaison
of broth and olive oil.

I am not among those who assert that true
bouillabaisse
can be made only with Mediterranean fish, as some purists do. One such purist is a Provençal chef and cookbook author who carried on at length about authentic
bouillabaisse
over a dinner he was serving at his recently opened
auberge
in the hills not far from Aups. He insisted on using the exact Mediterranean fish and on cooking the soup in an old seasoned pot, the kind that you have to go the flea markets or
brocantes
to purchase unless you inherited one from your great-grandmother. He went on to say that he couldn’t abide cookbook writers who purported to write traditional Provençal recipes while including nontraditional ingredients or methods, just so the books would sell to the foreigners that swarm to Provence.

I felt a little put off by this, especially the part about the flea market pot, but I kept smiling and said nothing.

“These so-called writers, a lot of them not even Provençal, are writing shortcuts and wrong instructions about everything. They’re writing for foreigners, just to sell the books.” I wondered briefly if I should take this personally, and decided not to.

He continued, arms waving, telling us how, at a restaurant he once had near Ubraye, two hundred kilometers from the Mediterranean, he hired people to go to the quai des Belges in Marseille to buy the proper fish for him, then engaged taxi drivers to bring the fish to him in the mountains, at great expense, so important was it to have fresh, perfect fish for any dish, but most certainly for
bouillabaisse.

“Now, it is almost time for the fish soup I’ve made tonight, which I am serving with a special sauce, a lot like
aïoli
, but not an
aïoli
.” We were a small group of ten friends seated at one of the three tables in the dining room. The soup arrived, the individual bowls delivered to us by the chef’s wife. He appeared next, with several bowls of sauce and placed them at intervals along the table.

“Spoon a little of the sauce into your soup bowls, just a little to start. It can be powerful, and it might not suit all your tastes.” Among us, only Anne was French, the rest being German, Dutch, American, and Belgian, and all except me were year-round inhabitants of the region.

I was sitting next to Anne, who sniffed at the sauce and added two large soupspoons of the pale yellow, very thin sauce to her bowl.

Joanne, across from me, added some to her bowl, then took a spoonful of soup. “What can you tell us about the sauce? What is in it?”