Provence A-Z (eBook)

It has been called the black butter of Provence (although it may frequently be green), and it is one of those happy gastronomic inventions that sharpen both appetite and thirst. Normally, therefore, you will find it served with your apritif before you get down to the serious business of making your way through the menu.

The name comes from the Provenal word tapeno, or caper, and capers are an essential part of every tapenade recipe. Other ingredients can vary slightly according to taste, but I recommend following the instructions of Monsieur Meynier, the Marseille chef who invented tapenade more than a century ago. Here's his original recipe:

200 grams black olives, pits removed
100 grams unsalted anchovy filets
100 grams tuna in oil
large spoonful strong mustard
pinch of fines herbes
200 milliliters olive oil
a glass of Cognac

Take 200 grams of black olives, with their pits removed. Crush the olives, using mortar and pestle, together with 200 grams of capers, 100 grams of unsalted anchovy fillets, 100 grams oftuna in oil, a large spoonful of strong mustard, 'pas mal de poivre,' and a pinch of fines herbes.

As you crush, add, little by little, 200 milliliters of olive oil.

The final touch: mix in a glass of Cognac.
The resulting thick and wonderfully pungent black paste, gleaming with oil, is traditionally spread on small pieces of toast. But it would be a shame to restrict tapenade to toast. Try it with hard-boiled quail's eggs, with tomatoes, with fresh goat cheese, with plain grilled fish, or a cold vegetable omelette. I have also seen it used as a dip for potato chips and eaten, on its own, by the spoonful. It is that good.

Accent

There is a popular misconception that the language spoken in Provence is French. It resembles French, certainly, indeed, in written form it is almost identical. But remove it from the page and apply it to the ear, and Provenal French might easily be another language. If words were edible, Provenal speech would be a rich, thick, pungent verbal stew, simmered in an accent filled with twanging consonants, a civet, perhaps, or maybe a daube.

Before coming to live in Provence, I acquired a set of Berlitz tapes in order to improve my grasp of French, which I hadn't studied since my schooldays. Evening after evening, I would sit and listen to cassettes of the most mellifluous, perfectly enunciated phrases--spoken, I believe, by a lady from Tours. (I was told that the accent of Tours is considered a jewel among accents, the most polished and refined in France.)

Every morning in front of the mirror while shaving, I would do my best to imitate this accent, pursing my Anglo-Saxon lips until they could pronounce something close to the Gallic u, practicing the growl from the back of the throat that is so necessary for the rolling Gallic r. Little by little, I thought, I was making progress. And then I left England to come south.

It was an instant farewell to the lady from Tours, because the sound of the words I encountered in Provence was unlike anything I had heard before. And to make matters even more incomprehensible, these words were delivered with an incredible velocity, a vocabulary gone berserk. My ears were in shock for months, and for at least a year I was unable to conduct any kind of sustained conversation without a dictionary. This I used much as a blind man uses a white stick: to identify obstacles and try to find my way around them.

To this day, many years...