Soupe de poissons

Avenue George V, Nice, March 20, 2012—

ANOTHER FISH SOUP today? Mais oui! For one thing, its interesting to compare an ordinary quayside versioin in a workingclass town like La Ciotat with a more elegant version at the other end of the scale. Mainly, though, of course, I'm maniacal about Provençal soupe de poissons.

I began with a tartare of tuna, a delicious fish, expertly combined with concassée of tomatoes, judicious amounts of capers and thin-sliced scallions, and lemon juice. Then the soup, made just as Monday's but combining two soups at the last minute, red and darker, hearty, mellifluous, deep, and pointed. Marvelous.

Chassagne-Savigny, Bouchard et fils, 2009

•La Mére Germain, Quai Courbet, Villefranche-sur-mer

 

 

Lunch with Lulu; dinner in Nice

Avenue George V, Nice, March 19, 2012—

AN IMPRESSIVE, UNFORGETTABLE woman I've long wanted to know a little better, Lulu Peyraud, kindly invited us to lunch today in the country house her grandparents built near Bandol, many decades ago, on the estate known to the world of wine as Domaine Tempier. At ninety-four, she is remarkable: pretty and pert and hale and nothing if not hearty, she looks twenty-five years younger. Her daughter Véronique joined us, and cooked the chops on the fire you see above, on the hearth forming one long wall of the kitchen.

Canapés to begin with, with a glass or two of Champagne, in the comfortable, intimate little salon, filled with light and crowded (but not uncomfortably) with pictures and mementos; then a delicious series of courses that might have come from her book Lulu's Provincial Table. We began with poached fish and thin-sliced potatoes and apples in aspic, then went on to lamb chops grilled over the fire, sprinkled with herbes de Provence. Afterward, a small, beautifully selected cheese plate; then silky egg custard.

Champagne, J. Lassalle, in half bottle; Rosé, 2009, Rouge, 2007; both Domaine Tempier.

Then dinner chez our hosts in Nice: a big platter of roast lamb with sautéed potatoes, a simple salad, three or four perfect cheeses, and Amélie's splendid apple tart…

Wines too many to recall, including Solus, a deep, serious red Villanyi Merlot 2007, from Hungary

Soupe de poissons

Park & Suites Ëlegance la Ciotat, La Ciotat, France, March 18, 2012—

WHATEVER THE COUNTRY, there are the favorite dishes. Netherlands : herring, pannekoek, boerenkool… Rome: carbonara, caccio e pepe, carciofi… jamon in Spain, y judias…

We're finally in vrai Provence, and I finally have my fish soup. You jab a fork into a peeled clove of raw garlic, and drag it back and forth across the toasted slices of baguette. Then you heap spoonfuls of rouille on each slice — cayenne-charged mayonnaise — and put them on the bottom of your otherwise empty soup-plate.

The soup itself comes next: by preference at least three kinds of fish, local and fresh of course, cooked up with various flavorings important among which is fennel, then the bouillon strained off, the solids put through a sieve (or a food mill) and restored to the soup.

Then grated cheese, Gruyère is best, strewn on top, and then, my God, let's eat.

Afterward a nice green salad, and then a good night's sleep. Delicious. Maybe tomorrow we'll do it all again.

Vin blanc en pichet

•Restaurant Pizzerie la Grotte, Port Vieux, La Ciotat; +33 04 42 08 64 19

 

Dinner in the (provincial) hotel

Auberge de l'Escargot d'Or, Dieulefit, France, March 17, 2011—

THERE ARE SO MANY ridiculosities about the above byline I won't even begin to deal with them. My point is, we came on this improbable slapdash tour of France to find out if it was truly the case that the bad old days of clunky meals were over. I'm almost relieved to tell you that yes, there are things you can depend on, you can still get predictably second-rate meals here.

We're in what I'd call a non-touristy corner of the Drôme, north of the Var, here to look for. Soup-plate. I won't go further into that at the moment: suffice it that no one would come here for any other reason, unless perhaps for rambling — we're on a margin between Provence and the Alps.

Dinner in the hotel, because first it's fairly far out of town, second there weren't any promising restaurants in town. We're eating pension, which means we take the lowest order of menu, okay with me. We began, after the near-obligatory amuses of toasts and tapenade, with ravioles, tiny ravioli stuffed with cream, cheese, herbs, and sauced with cepes and girolles.

We asked for the lamb on the menu, but the five people at the next table had got there first, so we hasd ent recote, Lindsey forestière, with girolles and cepes and the sauce that had been on the ravioles, I with sauce dieulefitoise, which t urned out to involve a generous smearing of the local cheese, picodon. With them, roasted oversalted potatoes, bland battered and deepfried zucchini.

No salad. The cheese was, what else, picodin, a little past its prime, but with very nice honey. Dessert was an overcooked "crème brulée" — really more a clafoutis, innocent of fruit.

White (sent back: maderised) and red (rather a nice local Côtes du Rhone) in carafe

•Auberge l'Escargot d'Or, Route de Nyons, Dieulefit; +33 47 54 46 40 52

Crèpe

 

Hotel la Comédie, Montpellier, France, March 16, 2012—

THE LAST THING you want to do before going to a five-hour opera is eat a big dinner, so we just stopped in at the local crèperie, where I had my usual — a combination I particularly love, the “Florentine”: spinach, ham, crème fraîche, and one egg, sunny side up. It amuses my friends that I have a fondness for canned spinach, probably the result of enjoying the Popeye comic strip when I was a lad…

Local white en carafe

•Crèperie la Comédie, 12, Place de la Comédie, Montpellier; +33 04 67 92 30 94

 

Pintadeau

Hotel la Comédie, Montpellier, France, March 15, 2012—

FOUND A VERY NICE restaurant last night, whose chef knows how to source his ingredients and to prepare them for maximum taste. After the amuses, little glasses of well-flavored thick vegetable soup, we began by sharing a fine composed “salade méditerranée”: lettuces, delicious à la grècque artichokes, sun-dried tomatoes, pine nuts, and shavings of Parmesan cheese.

I went on to grilled Guinea fowl served as a ragoût on a bed of beautifully made gnocchi in a sage-flavored sauce and garnished with strips of Iberian ham; Lindsey's plat was completely Spanish: braised Iberian pork with green lentils and a sauce involving shallots, tomato, garlic, amd black pepper.

Only my cheese course disappointed: Chèvre, St. Nectaire, and a couple of soft cheeses cut too soon, all served too cold, with what seemed to me an irrelevant salad. I should have ordered a dessert.

Local white en carafe; coteaux de Languedoc “Le Marteau,” Pierre Clavel, 2009

•Le Grillardin, 3, Place de la Chapelle Neuve, Montpellier; +33 04 67 66 24 33

 

Confit on the farm

Hôtel Du Puy d'Alon, Souillac, March 14, 2012—

PRINCIPAL MEAL AT MIDDAY again today. It's so long since we've fasted, and we've been eating rather rich, you'll have noticed. But after visiting one of the famous Dordogne caves, when someone (who was not I) mentioned foie gras, our guide advised a farm on the road from Les Eyzies toward Sarlat. We wasted no time; we were there before noon.

We parked between the barn and the corn-crib, across D47 from the stone farmhouse, crossed the road, and stepped into a pleasant, plain room with a number of tables, only one of them occupied. The menu was simple enough, as you see. Lindsey chose the first variant, I the second.

But we were soon surprised to be served a good-sized marmite nearly full of a steaming, delicious onion soup, the sweet flavorful onions sliced very thin and cooked very long in a light but deep-flavored chicken stock, with lots of nice bread floating in it. There was plenty for two servings apiece.

My confit came with pommes de terre Sarladaise: sliced potatoes cooked long and slow in duck fat, with finely chopped garlic and parsley added toward the end of cooking. Nothing better. The confit itself was a little dry, very tasty, with ample fat which I'm afraid I mostly set aside. Both the potatoes and the confit were definitely country; no pretensions here to refinement — nor was refinement wanted.

The salad was tender new Bibb-like lettuce leaves in a delicate mustard vinaigrette with walnut oil amd finely chopped walnuts, and we opted for the walnut tart which Lindsey, who knows about such things, says was an Engadiner nusstorte, but I forgave it its Swiss association. Walnut trees are plentiful hereabouts; walnut oil is such an appropriate coupling with confit…

Ordinary local red

•Ferme Auberge Lacombe, Sainte-André-d'Allas, Dordogne; 05 53 30 43 39