Omelette and a Glass of Wine (13 page)

The second restaurant we visited was out in the country, not far from St André-d’Olérargues. We had been shopping in the Thursday morning market at Villeneuve-lès-Avignon – we wanted more of those little
ravioles
and had discovered that the lady selling them would be there – and were prevented from crossing the Rhône into Avignon by the lorry drivers blockade which was disrupting traffic that week. Instead we drove to a place with one Michelin star which sounded and indeed had looked promising when we had passed it a few days previously. Settled at our table we discovered that the restaurant was run mainly by the chef’s wife, assisted by another lady who was perhaps her sister, or some other close relative who was for some reason tied to the place in a subservient capacity. The prix fixe menu seemed to offer decent old-fashioned country cooking. So in a way it did, with a respectable terrine of chicken livers followed by oxtail braised with mushrooms, carrots and onions, a plate of gratiné potatoes and leeks on the side. The oxtail had been substituted for some other dish which was finished. When I had started to explain to Madame that we didn’t want the alternative
côte de bœuf
either with or without a supplementary price the lady
interrupted me. ‘You surely don’t imagine I can afford to give you
côte de bœuf on
the fourteen franc menu’ she snapped. It wasn’t a propitious beginning, but the oxtail was well cooked and so were the vegetables. No complaints. But then we were offered a choice of three fourth-rate commercial cheeses or a dessert of
œufs à la neige
smothered in caramel – a recent development, that tacky caramel, I believe, and one which quite wrecks the innocence of a dish which should be frail and pale as a narcissus, just white meringue and creamy yellow
crème anglaise
. Alternatives were a bought-in gâteau and a tatty-looking apple tart. Turning her back to our table Madame stood over the trolley carefully measuring out the portions of whatever it was we had chosen. Coffee was mediocre. The two women, unprepossessing in their worn tweed skirts and draggy woolies, were anxious to clear away. The chef, who had spent most of the lunch hour sitting at a table reading the paper and smoking, now disappeared, making no attempt to ask the customers if all had been well. Our bill, with a bottle of undistinguished Gigondas, was just half what we had paid at Hièly. Had we enjoyed our lunch half as much as the one at Hièly we should still have had no-cause for complaint. Alas, we had not enjoyed it at all. The grasping attitude, the general shabbiness, the brainless parsimony displayed by Madame, the dispirited and dispiriting service, the dreary bread, the absence of a house wine – always a bad sign in a starred restaurant – all added up to yet another of those dozens of unsolved Michelin mysteries of my past travels in France. There was something about the people and the place and the ambiance which took me back to the London of 1963, the Profumo summer, the couple and the restaurant I described in the article called
Secrets
in the present volume. Any restaurant which reminded me so strikingly of that one certainly has no business whatever having a Michelin star. We were lucky that we could shrug off the dispiriting experience, climb back into the car, remember that in the back of it we had a lot of good things bought at Villeneueve that morning, that we had a kitchen to cook and eat them in, that we needn’t ever go to another restaurant again for the rest of our stay unless we chose to do so. But I still wonder what the Michelin organisation thinks it is doing. Hièly in Avignon very properly has, and for many years has had, two stars. One star is gravely and grossly overdoing it for a great many of the establishments to which Michelin awards them, and of all the faults which turn me off a restaurant – surely I cannot be alone in this – meanness is just about the most unacceptable. If the Michelin
inspectors didn’t notice that defect, not to mention others, in the restaurant in question I don’t think they can have visited it for a very long time.

The above was written in the early summer of 1984, while this collection of articles was in preparation. In 1985 I again spent several weeks at Uzès, staying in the same welcoming house, again feasting on the beautiful cheeses and fresh produce to be bought on market days, once more enjoying a fine meal at Hièly, but not this time venturing into any local country restaurant. The Michelin Guide however had obviously revisited the establishment near St André-d’Olérargues, and, not before time, had withdrawn its star
.

February 1986

Roustidou

With the exception of ordinary cafés and the
relais routiers
, where you get ordinaries by the litre, few restaurants or hotels in Provence now offer much alternative to fancy-bottled Provençal wines at prices comparing unfavourably with what one would pay for much more classy Alsace, Loire or Beaujolais wines if one were travelling in these districts. One can’t have everything, and for me Provence has more than most other provinces of France, so one doesn’t complain, and what the local wines may lack in distinction is partly made up for, at least in retrospect, by the evocativeness of their names and the coaxing messages which some of the proprietors send out with – not in – their bottles. In my notebooks of recent Provençal journeys I find Chante-Gorge, Rocmaure, Domaine de l’Aumérade, Castel Roubine, Domaine de Lacroix, Tavel Réserve de St-Estello (‘
Pour épousailles et fiançailles, Rien qui ne vaille Ce bon vin vieux, Béni de Dieu
’), Bouquet de Provence, Blanc Coquillages, Château de Fontcreuse, Clos Mireille, Petit Duc, Prince d’Orange, Côtes du Ventoux 1956 (‘
Au Pied du Mt Ventoux Je suis né et j’ai vieilli pour vous
’), Clos de les Dames de Baux, Roustidou (now there’s a good name for a carafe wine; it tasted uncommonly like Algerian, and made a splendid picnic drink), Château de Beaulieu, Château Rayas, Château Roubaud (a trusty friend, that one), Côtes de Provence BIG, Gigondas Pierre Amadieu (the one I go for when it’s on the list), Chante-Perdrix Cornas 1955, red, ravishing with a grilled chicken at the restaurant David (no relation) at Roussillon in the Vaucluse. Cornas is on the west bank of the Rhône near St-Péray and opposite Valence, so it is still a long way north of Provence, but it is round about here, at least if one drives down N8 instead of the terrifying N7, that one begins to sense the Midi; and like the Hermitage from Tain on the other bank, the wines of Cornas and the Côte Rôtie are always associated in my mind with Provence and on my table, when I can get them, with Provençal food.

The Spectator
, 13 July 1962

Golden Delicious

As Sunday lunches go in the village hotels of the Vaucluse department of Provence, the meal we had in the Hostellerie du Château at Beaumes de Venise was far from a bad one. Memorable it was not, except for two points neither of them relevant to the cooking and one of which has only now, seven years later, become manifest.

It was the early summer of 1956. The calamitous frosts of the previous winter and spring had wrought havoc with the countryside which was fearful to see. The slopes and valleys of the Vaucluse and of all that country east and north-east of Avignon to Cavaillon, Apt, Pernes-les-Fontaines, Le Thor and Carpentras, which was once the papal county of Venaissin, should have been silver and freshly grey-green in the early June sun. The whole landscape was gashed with ugly black wounds. Hundreds of olive trees, withered and blighted by the frosts and the all-blasting mistral winds which followed them, had been cut down or were standing like ancient skeletons in that fertile and beflowered landscape which is the heart and core of Provence. The tall rows of dark cypress trees, windbreaks against the destroying mistral, were unnecessary reminders that life in Provence is not always quite so idyllic as it may look to two English visitors driving one Sunday morning in early June from Malaucène near the foot of the Mont Ventoux toward a village so irresistibly named Beaumes de Venise. For the odd thing was that after we had lost our way three times in the identical piece of country, it dawned upon us that this piece of country
was
idyllic, almost too good to be true. In this pocket of land apparently untouched by the ravaging winter were no scars, no dead or doomed trees. The olives were bright with life and thick with young leaves. The crippled landscape was here restored and complete.

It was perhaps the sense of relief that somewhere at least in Provence that year there would be an olive crop and peasant farmers whose livelihoods had not been utterly destroyed that made Beaumes de Venise, when eventually we reached it, rather less interesting than the little piece of country we had passed through on our way. Subsequent inquiries revealed that the olives and the olive oil of Beaumes de Venise have a substantial local reputation; and we did, I remember, remark upon the excellence of the salad and upon an unusual anchovy-flavoured, oil-based sauce offered with the
routine Sunday roast chicken that day at lunch. Nothing extraordinary about that. In this region, salads with good olive oil dressings, and mayonnaise sauces tasting perceptibly of fruity oil are, or were in the days before the frost destruction, the rule rather than the exception as they are in Northern France. As for the wine, I do not remember what we drank. Probably it was that reliable wine of Provence restaurants, red Gigondas from the vineyards north of Beaumes on the far side of the Dentelles de Montmirail. The wine we did not drink was, as it turned out, the remarkable one. We did not drink it because we had never heard of it, and if it was on the wine list of the hotel – which according to Michelin it now is – we did not notice it.

The wine of Beaumes de Venise is a natural sweet golden wine made from muscat grapes with their own appellation of
Muscat de Beaumes
and unmixed with the Hamburg muscat which coarsens many of the sweet wines of Provence. Nobody, it seems, quite knows when the muscat grapes of Beaumes de Venise were first planted nor how the sweet wine from the vineyards of this tiny area protected by a fold in the hills from the savage north winds acquired its reputation. Certainly that reputation has always been a local one only. There are no more than three or four hectares under vine cultivation, a production of two hundred hectolitres a year and only two growers. From one of these growers, M. Combres, Mr Gerald Asher of the firm of Asher, Storey and Co., 127 Lower Thames Street, ECI, to whose admirable sense of enterprise we already owe the import of so many interesting French regional wines hitherto unknown or unobtainable in this country, has bought the muscat wine of Beaumes de Venise. It is, I believe, the first time this wine has ever been exported. As far as I am concerned its journey was worthwhile.

The custom of drinking a little glass of rich wine with a sweet dish or fruit seems to me a civilized one, and especially welcome to those who do not or cannot swig brandy or port after a meal. The great dessert wines of Bordeaux and the Rhine are rather beyond the reach of ordinary mortals and are in any case wines which demand a certain ceremony. Your meal has to work up to them. The wine of Beaumes, although so rare, seems somehow more within the scope of the simplest or even of an improvised meal. It retails at about 22s. a bottle, which seems reasonable enough since an opened bottle, securely recorked, appears to remain in good condition for some while. A few days ago I shared with a friend the final glasses from a
bottle opened before Christmas. With it we ate a fresh apricot tart. The musky golden wine of Beaumes – according to Mr Asher, and I see no reason to quarrel with his judgement, ‘its bouquet is penetrating and flower-like, its flavour both honey-sweet and tangy’ – and the sweet apricots, vanilla-sugared on crumbly pastry, made an original and entrancing combination of food and wine.

Why Venise? What balm or balsam in conjunction with what lakes, lagoons, canals? Neither and none. The name Venise, they say, has the same origin as Venaissin and Vénasque, that ancient and rather forlorn little village perched on an escarpment overlooking the twisting road between Carpentras and the Forest of Murs. All, it is supposed, stem from
aveniensis
or
avignonnais
. Beaumes is no balm or balsam. In the Provençal language
baumo
is a grotto. The Vaucluse country is honeycombed with caves and grottoes, many of them used for the cultivation of mushrooms. As a spectacle one set of holes in a rock is, I find, much the same as another. So that day we took it on trust from the
Guide Bleu
that the cliffs at the back of the village of Beaumes are ‘
percées de grottes
’. Still, it is not unpleasing to learn that the meaning of
baumanière
, as in the super-glossy three-star Hostellerie de Baumanière below Les Baux, is really
baume a niero
, in French
grotte à puces
, the grotto of the fleas.

The Spectator
, 10 January 1964

*

The dessert wine of Beaumes de Venise is now exported in quantity to Britain and the United States. Sometimes I wish it had not become so popular. At any rate I would advise avoidance of the product of that grower who bottles his wine in very fancy cordial bottles
.