“Vieilles Recettes de Cuisine Provençale”

I HAVE MORE BOOKS ABOUT food than shelves to put them on; I do get rid of books, but then I get more. Once, I imagined, just theoretically, what I would keep if I eliminated all but a few of my cookbooks, and I came up with nine. Two were about Provence, the only repeated region, and I zeroed in on one. I love the climate and beauty of Provence, despite so much development near the sea, and the mix of cultures going back to pre-Roman Greeks. I also love the basic, sometimes rustic, nature of the old cooking. And yet, although a handful of items are internationally familiar — bouillabaisse, ratatouille, aioli, tapenade, salade niçoise — the old food is less and less known and understood. What’s being lost is the sense that it’s the home cooking of poor people. It uses vegetables and little meat; by the coast it exploits especially inexpensive, non-“noble” fish (at least, the fish used to be inexpensive — sardines, mackerel, mullet, goby, scorpionfish, gurnard). Its favorite herb is savory — it never adds the lavender that infiltrates tourist packets of herbes de Provence. And for fat, along with olive oil there’s lard, except in the driest enclaves hard against the water, such as Cap d’Antibes, where there were and are olives and no pigs. These (slightly revisited) were my thoughts about Provençal cookbooks as I looked for what I might keep.

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