Omelette and a Glass of Wine (41 page)

At dawn they will be unloading their melons and asparagus, their strawberries and red currants and cherries, their apricots and peaches and pears and plums, their green almonds, beans, lettuces, shining new white onions, new potatoes, vast bunches of garlic. By six o’clock the ground will be covered with
cageots
, the chip vegetable and fruit baskets, making a sea of soft colours and shadowy shapes in the dawn light. The air of the Place is filled with the musky scent of those little early Cavaillon melons, and then you become aware of another powerfully conflicting smell – rich, clove-like, spicy. It is the scent of sweet basil, and it is coming from the far end of the market where a solitary wrinkled old man sits on an upturned basket, scores and scores of basil plants ringed all around him like a protective hedge. With a beady eye he watches the drama of the market place. The dealers, exporters and wholesalers walking round inspecting the produce, discussing prices, negotiating; the hangers-on standing about in groups smoking, chatting; the market police and official inspectors strolling round seeing that all is in order.

On the whole the scene is quiet, quieter at least than you would expect considering that this is one of the most important wholesale fruit and vegetable markets in France, the great distributing centre for the
primeurs
of the astonishingly fertile and productive areas of the Vaucluse and the Comtat Venaissin. – areas which less than a hundred years ago were desperately poor, inadequately irrigated,
isolated for lack of roads and transport, earthquake-stricken, devastated by blights which destroyed the cereal crops and the vines.

It was with the building of the railways connecting Provence with Paris and the north, with Marseille and the ports of the Mediterranean to the south, that the possibilities of the Rhône and Durance valleys for intensive fruit and vegetable cultivation first began to be understood. New methods of irrigation, the planting of fruit trees in large areas where the vines had been stricken, the division of the land into small fields broken with tall cypress hedges as windbreaks against the scourging mistral, the ever-increasing demand in Paris and the big towns of the north for early vegetables, and the tremendous industry of these Provençal cultivators have done the rest. And to such effect that last year eighty thousand kilos of asparagus came into Cavaillon market alone between 15 April and 15 May; in the peak month of July three hundred tons of melons daily; five hundred tons of tomatoes every day in July and August. Altogether some hundred and sixty thousand tons of vegetables and fruit leave Cavaillon every year, about fifty per cent by rail, the rest by road. And Cavaillon, although the most important, is by no means the only big market centre in the neighbourhood. Avignon, Châteaurenard, Bollène, Permis, all dispatch their produce by special trains to the north; vast quantities of fruit are absorbed locally by the jam and fruit preserving industries of Apt and Carpentras; and every little town and village has its own retail vegetable and fruit market, every day in the bigger towns, once or twice a week in less populated places.

But now seven o’clock strikes in the market at Cavaillon. The lull is over. This is the moment when the goods change hands. Pandemonium breaks loose. The dealers snatch the baskets of produce they have bought and rush them to waiting lorries. A cartload of garlic vanishes from under your nose. A mountain of melons evaporatesinawink. If you try to speak to any body you will be ignored, if you get in the way you’ll be knocked down in the wild scramble to get goods away to Paris, London, Brussels, and all the great centres of northern and eastern France. Suddenly, the market place is deserted.

At eight o’clock you emerge from the café where you have had your breakfast coffee and croissant. The market place is, to put it mildly, astir once more. It is surrounded by vans and lorries disgorging cheap dresses and overalls, plastic kitchenware, shoes and scarves and bales of cotton, piles of plates and jugs, nails and
screws and knives, farm implements and packets of seeds, cartons of dried-up-looking biscuits and trays of chemically-coloured sweets.

You dive down a side street where you have spied a festoon of pretty cotton squares, and there, under gaudy painted colonnades, lilac and orange, cinnamon and lemon and rose, in patterns more typical of Marseille or the Levant than of Cavaillon, the retail market stalls are already doing business. The displays seem rather tame after the wholesale market and there is not a melon to be seen. It is too early in the season, they are still too expensive for the housewives of Cavaillon. Five thousand francs a kilo they were fetching today, and a week later in London shops 12s. 6d. each for little tiny ones. But the street opposite the painted colonnades leads into the square where more and more food stalls are opening and the housewives are already busy marketing. Here you can buy everything for a picnic lunch. Beautiful sprawling ripe tomatpes, a Banon cheese wrapped in chestnut leaves, Arles sausages, pâté, black olives, butter cut from a towering monolith, apricots, cherries.

It is still early and you can drive out towards Apt and branch off across the Lubéron. The roads are sinuous but almost empty, and they will take you through some of the most beautiful country in Provence. Perched on the hillsides are typical old Provençal villages, some, like Oppède-le-Vieux, crumbling, haunted, half-deserted, others like Bonnieux with a flourishing modern village built below the old one, and up beyond Apt, through the dramatic stretch of ochre-mining country, the strange red-gold village of Roussillon appears to be toppling precariously on the edge of a craggy cliff. Round about here, the network of caves under the ochreous rocks has been turned into vast
champignonnières
, and at the modest little Restaurant David (no relation) you can eat the local cultivated mushrooms cooked
à la crème
or
à la provençale
with, naturally, olive oit, parsley and garlic. And the Rose d’Or, a little hotel opened only a few weeks ago, promises a welcome alternative to the establishments of Apt, Aix and Cavaillon.

POT-AU-FEU PROVENÇAL

A simple pot-au-feu is typical of the real old Provençal cooking of the days before Provençal specialities became chic restaurant food and got fussed up and transferred into goodness knows what fantasies. Even an inexperienced cook can make a pot-au-feu in its basic form. And with a little extra trouble it can be turned into a
splendid party dish – not for a grand formal party to be sure, or even a buffet party, but the sort of meal for intimate friends when you can put all the food on a huge scrubbed kitchen table and everyone sits round and helps themselves. It is a heartening sight, evocative of all the sun and bright colours of Provence; it is economical because it is one of those composite dishes which you gradually build up, to which you can make additions or subtractions and for which the planning of the colours, flavours, extra salads, vegetables, sauces, becomes perfectly intoxicating – but steady, keep a hold, or you’ll find you’ve made enough food for thirty, and you’ll have to order another case of wine and invite twenty more guests …

For the basic pot-au-feu, then, you need 2½ lb. approximately of flank of beef, 2½ lb. of shoulder, middle neck or breast of lamb (it is the lamb which gives it its essentially Provençal character), 1 lb. of shin of veal. All these meats are best cooked with bone. The flavouring vegetables are 2 each of large carrots, leeks, onions and tomatoes; a bouquet of herbs consisting of parsley stalks, a piece of celery, a bay leaf and a crushed clove of garlic all tied together; 1 tablespoon of salt. If the pot-au-feu is for a special occasion you include as well a boiling chicken, but since so many kitchens aren’t equipped with a soup pot large enough to hold a chicken at the same time as all the meat, this may have to be cooked separately.

Tie the beef and lamb into compact rolls or squares so that they retain their shape during cooking and will be easy to cut. Put them with the veal bone, and the chicken if there is room, into your biggest soup pot and cover with 4 or 5 pints of water. Bring gently to simmering point. As the grey scum rises, skim it off. When the scum becomes white and foamy, stop skimming. Put in the vegetables, the bouquet, the salt. At this stage you can add a glass of white wine if you have it to spare. Cover the pot. Cook at very low heat either on top of the stove or in the oven for 3 to 4 hours, until the chicken and meat are very tender. Take out the chicken and meat, put them in a deep dish and sprinkle them with olive oil and salt while they are still hot. The vegetables will be cooked to rags and can be discarded. Strain the stock into a bowl.

Next day, remove the fat from the stock (keep it for frying bread, potatoes, etc.) and if you have not already cooked the chicken, simmer it, with its giblets and feet, in the stock for about 3 hours. Or if you are using a roaster instead of a boiler, 45 to 50 minutes will cook it. As a matter of fact, although it is an extra extravagance from the point of view of fuel, the chicken will be very much nicer
cooked the same day as it is to be eaten, before it has had time to harden up.

To serve the meat, you cut it all from the bones, slice it in very fine thin pieces, and keeping the beef, lamb and veal separate, sprinkle each with more oil, chopped parsley, shallots. Arrange them with the jointed chicken, all on one huge dish.

In bowls all round you have some or all of the following: a salad of chick peas, an aïoli, black olives, capers (these are the four typical, native Provençal dishes), a spicy tomato sauce, a grated carrot salad, a Jerusalem artichoke salad, potatoes, beetroot, celery, sweet red peppers, gherkins, hard-boiled eggs – it depends what is available, how many people you have to feed, on your own and your guests’ tastes. And for a first course all you will need is either the broth from the pot-au-feu, which will have a very fine flavour and which you can thicken if you like with a little rice – there should be enough for seven or eight people – or perhaps a dish of mussels, or a light fish soup.

SALADE DE POIS CHICHES

Chick peas are those knobbly corn-yellow peas rather the shape of nasturtium seeds, which the Spanish call
garbanzos
and the Italians
ceci.
At one time they were very much cultivated in Provence and are still popular there. In England they can be bought in Soho shops; they make delicious soups and salads.

Soak ½ lb. of chick peas overnight in plenty of cold water into which you stir a tablespoon of flour. Next day put them in a saucepan with the same water, plus a half teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda. Simmer them for an hour. Skim and strain them. Rinse out the saucepan, fill it with 3 pints of fresh water, bring to the boil, add a tablespoon of salt, put in the chick peas and simmer another 1 to 2 hours, until the peas are perfectly tender and the skins beginning to break.

Strain them (keep the liquid – it will make a good basis for a vegetable soup), put them in a bowl and while still hot stir in plenty of olive oil, sliced onion, garlic, parsley, and a little vinegar. If you can’t get chick peas, the same sort of salad can be made with haricot beans.

AÏOLI

Most readers will probably already be familiar with the famous garlic mayonnaise of Provence, so just as a reminder you will need,
for eight people, a minimum of 2 large cloves of garlic – but more if you have avid garlic-eaters to entertain – 2 egg yolks, at least a half-pint of good olive oil, salt, lemon juice.

You first pound the garlic to a mash, then stir in the yolks, add a little salt, then the oil, exactly as for a mayonnaise. Lastly, the lemon juice. This beautiful golden ointment-like sauce is really the pivot and
raison d’être
of the whole affair, so you need plenty of it.

THE OLIVES AND CAPERS

The black olives of Provence are small, wrinkled, salty; all the tang of the South is in them. If you can’t buy these little black olives in Soho, at least avoid the great brownish ones sold in most delicatessen stores; they really haven’t anything of the same character. But there are two bottled brands (Sharwood’s and Noel’s) which are quite good.

As for capers, another typical product of Provence (the best are the
non-pareilles
from the Var and the Bouches du Rhône), buy the finest French ones. Simply serve them in tiny bowls or hors-d’œuvre dishes, or pile up little mounds of them beside the sliced lamb and beef.

COULIS DE TOMATES À LA MOUTARDE

This is really an alternative to the aïoli, in case you have anti-garlic guests. But it is an excellent sauce in its own right, hot with a boiled chicken, beef, lamb and fish, or cold as in the present case. Ingredients are 2 lb. of tomatoes, a small onion, 1 clove of garlic, 1 carrot, a little piece of celery top, half a dozen parsley stalks, a teaspoon of dried basil, a dessertspoon of salt, 2 tablespoons of olive oil, 4 teaspoons of yellow Dijon mustard.

Heat the oil in a wide shallow pan, put in the sliced onion, carrot, chopped celery and parsley stalks. After two or three minutes add the sliced tomatoes, garlic, basil and salt. Cook gently, uncovered, stirring from time to time, for about half an hour, until most of the moisture has evaporated and the tomatoes are in a pulp. Sieve the mixture in a food mill. Taste for seasoning – it may need sugar – then stir in, a little at a time, the mustard.

Vogue
, January 1960

The Markets of France: Yvetot

Duclair is a little town on a loop of the Seine twenty kilometres outside Rouen towards Dieppe. It is not particularly picturesque and the main road and the ferry over the Seine make it noisy. But I always try to stay the night there on my way down through France and on the way back again because of the Hôtel de la Poste where the Swiss proprietor and his pretty Norman wife provide such a warm welcome and such good food. Their big airy dining-room overlooks the river, their delicious pâté of Rouen duckling cooked with port is brought to table in the gigantic old terrines in which it has been baked, their hors-d’œuvres are always fresh, well chosen, original and beautifully served, ducks and chickens are roasted on a spit in the old Norman fireplace in the kitchen.