A week to savour

Scenes, sounds and tastes from days cooking in the Luberon

May 07, 2024

And then you’re back — back saying hello as soon as you enter a store, any store; back sitting in the clear, bright, piercing sunshine in amongst a crowd of people chatting away, smoking away, with a vermouth and a plate of panisse; back where couples kiss on the streets and men greet with bisous. To be back in Marseille. M.F.K. Fisher’s words swirl about my mind as I wander down La Canebière, the main strip that opens out to the grand Vieux Port (Old Port), “I first spent a night there in late 1929, and since then I have returned even oftener than seems reasonable,” says Fisher of her long-term love affair with the sun-drenched city by the sea. How often I’ve come to this city in these last two years, how strongly I feel a pull to this city, I wonder how reasonable. Though what is reasonable? A life of reasonable, moderate, sensible, logical, rational — well, these are not words I wish to associate my life with, even if I wanted to, it simply could not be.

Back driving through fields of grape vines and fields of olive trees, the wild red poppies of spring in the Luberon dotting and dancing along the sides of the road, up the winding hills with the occasional borie or occasional lilac tree flashing by. And you land in the village of Saignon, outside a large home on the main road that runs through the village, the façade covered in wisteria, the shutters a light blue. And it’s Elizabeth David’s words in French Provincial Cooking that come to mind, “Provence is a country to which I am always returning, next week, next year, any day now, as soon as I can get on a train.” I was here, in the village over, exactly one year ago with my wonderful parents, and it’s quite astonishing to be back.

Here for a week, a week of cooking. First there’ll be a dinner party that Ruth somehow manages to pull together amidst organising a week-long retreat with a group of brilliant people who happen to be in the area — in amongst the guests is local Libby Travers who arrives with perhaps six healthy wedges of cheese she’s so thoughtfully selected, a bunch of crunchy radish and an anchovy and garlic butter she’s made, oh and a much-loved copy of Elizabeth David’s French Country Cooking that she gifts me. Elizabeth sits on the shelf with me all week in that long and narrow kitchen that soon feels like my own. Manon Monge arrived with a bottle of her olive oil, one of 500 litres that she harvested from her olive grove last season; there’s Sophie Zalokar, a fabulous woman who was an apprentice of Maggie Beer’s in the 80’s who currently runs the food projects and events at boutique hotel and kitchen Holmen Lofoten up on the very tip top edge of Norway, practically the edge of the world. And there’s Ruth Ribeacourt and her co-pilot Indie Miller — the women behind this mystical week. Ruth is the creative mind behind the magazine Faire — she’s a photographer, she’s a connector, she’s a storyteller, she’s a powerhouse and an absolute joy to be in the company of.

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The morning after the dinner party is market morning down in Coustellet — the best market of the Luberon area in that it’s full of local producers who have grown their food with such care. Piles of lush chard, bunches of radish, rounds of white and green asparagus fastened with string standing upright, punnets of the first-of-the-season strawberries, piles of sweet peas and glass cabinets holding rounds of chèvre or glass cabinets holding chickens with their heads neatly tucked in under their wings. These are the stars for the week ahead, grown and cared for by the people of the region — the goods and the people that gave me the pleasure and privilege of cooking for a group of sixteen talented and creative women that were arriving in the coming days from all over the world.

The menus were in my mind, they’d been bubbling away for months, they were on lists, but naturally, they evolved slightly once we’d been to market. They went something like this, just don’t mind the notebook scribbles:

I got to know the kitchen like it were my own. Mornings started with a breakfast table of piles of Ruth’s moreish granola sitting next to a bowl of yoghurt and a bowl of strawberries; then there were the fresh baguettes and pastries sitting next to the salted butter and confiture selection. Orange juice and grapefruit juice to be sipped alongside hot cups of coffee. As breakfast time came to a close, up to the artelier the ladies would go. I’d spend my days in that kitchen with the sounds of Bob Dylan or Beyoncé blaring and the smells of stocks or sautéing onion wafting.

There was a chicken stock day and a beef stock day, some of my most favourite things to make. The chicken stock destined for a dinner of braised chicken with prunes, olives and lemon served with garlicky greens and buttery mash, then for a lunch of my take on a soupe au pistou — chicken, white beans, spring greens served with a big dollop of pesto, some garlicky croutons and a drizzle of olive oil (recipe below). The beef stock destined for a beef daube, a recipe of Danielle Alvarez’s in her latest book, Recipes for a Lifetime of Beautiful Cooking, written with writer Libby Travers. It’s pure pleasure to make — from plucking the rosemary, thyme and bay leaves and wrapping butcher’s string around them for a bouquet garni; to simmering down the beef stock to a thick saucy jus; to poking a fork into the big casserole after three hours of cooking to fish out a piece of beef to taste and it being so tender you actually need a spoon. The dinner for our final supper party. Dessert was chocolate mousse served with a drizzle of Manon’s olive oil and a sprinkle of fleur de sel, and yes, a wedge of comté. The mousse was supposed to have lilac’s from the garden sprinkled over it, but in the excitement they got left on the kitchen bench. Next spring.

There was a kilo of peas to pod, of which I did sitting on the stoop in the sunshine out the front. These went into a spring salad with blanched green and white asparagus and green beans topped with goat’s cheese, all dressed with a preserved lemon and lavender honey dressing (recipe below) inspired by one of Diana Henry’s in her How to Eat a Peach — if there were a fire in my house, this would be one of the three cookbooks I’d grab. The same dressing was used for the previous night’s dinner, this time for a warm salad of roasted chickpeas and roasted fennel — part of Med fest that went something like: chickpea and fennel with a preserved lemon and honey dressing, pumpkin with tahini yoghurt and hazelnuts, spiced cauliflower, couscous all lemony and herby with heavy glugs of olive oil, a lemony harissa yoghurt (recipe below) and pickled red onion, and a big bowl of hummus. Dessert a plate of a silk-wrapped plump-as-can-be date, a petite pile of candied walnuts, a wedge of comté and a piece of Biomomo Hashimoto rosemary and fig dark chocolate. A dinner that collaborated with artist Sati Mougard, a very talented Provence-based glass blower who also works with wax. On the wall above the mantlepiece Sati hung a wing she’s made out of sage leaves and beeswax — astonishing — and on the tables she lay her glass pieces for us to all admire and converse over as we sipped the night away.

There was a greens and herb pie inspired by my mother’s spanakopita followed by Diana Henry’s chocolate and olive oil cake for dessert. There was a grand aïoli lunch — platters of boiled cauliflower, fennel, carrot, potato, zucchini, green beans, all drizzled with a zippy mustard vinaigrette to dip into bowls of aïoli, served alongside baked lemony cod.

Food and feeding is of course about providing something delicious, but I’ve come to know that what’s really important, what gives meals meaning and what truly nourishes, is food that has been brought into the world with care — something that is becoming increasingly hard to find in our lives of fast and easy. It seems we’ve forgotten how to feed ourselves, relying on what the latest cookbook has made looked pretty on a page or what the supermarkets claim to be in season in the same way they claim to be ‘the fresh food people’. Cookbooks are brilliant, obviously, as is the privilege of having access to food anytime of the day, but I fear both have gotten in the way of what cooking always was and always should be — feeding yourself with what is around you depending on the time of year, and letting what is growing dictate what is cooking, not the other way around. Go to farmer’s markets and find a grower that produces with care and let them dictate what you cook — it only takes one market grower. Go home with your bounty and flick through your beautiful cookbooks looking for the ingredients that you’ve now got sitting on your kitchen bench — have some nuts on hand, along with some grains or pulses, some healthy potatoes, maybe some goat’s cheese and definitely some good olive oil. And herbs. This, to me, is how we need to cook, to care for ourselves and to care for our world.

It was a week full of ingredients that to me, are pure pleasure, pure luxury, and are very much of the region — olive oil, lavender honey, lemon, rosemary, thyme, olives, then the spices and the dates of the south. To cook with ingredients that have been produced with such care, or ingredients that have been produced by people you’ve had the pleasure and privilege of sharing a table with, well it’s hard to know how it could be any better. I suppose the only way it could be any better is if you’re feeding brilliant people, in a beautiful kitchen, somewhere in Provence. Lucky me.

A RECIPE: Chicken soupe au pistou

As Elizabeth David explains in her first book, A Book of Mediterranean Food written in 1950, the origin of soupe au pistou is Genoese, but became ‘naturalised’ in the city of Nice and the surrounding region. This makes sense as pesto hails from Genoa. It’s a soup you’ll find in Provence during summer with tomatoes, courgette, green beans, and is of the cucina povera way of cooking. This here is a spring version using chicken — I would’ve loved to have used peas instead of the beans but needed to save the little petit pois for another meal, so. A soup to play with, to substitute as you need, as the seasons evolve — cabbage and kale in winter, tomatoes and zucchini in summer.

I’m going to say it: don’t skip making the chicken stock here. Yes you can buy it (in those depressing cartons), but the soup won’t be the same. You won’t get the same flavour, you won’t get the tender chicken that comes off the carcass, you won’t get the most out of that chicken, you won’t nourish yourself in the same way, and you sure as anything won’t get the pleasure that is putting a stock on and letting it simmer away one afternoon. It’s the truth.

SERVES FOUR

CHICKEN STOCK
1 whole chicken (broken down into breasts and Marylands — you can ask your butcher to do this)
1 carrot, chopped into large chunks
2 sticks celery, chopped into large chunks
1 brown onion, quartered
2 bay leaves
2 sprigs each rosemary and thyme
1 tablespoon black peppercorns

SOUP
1 brown onion, diced
2 leeks, washed and sliced, greens discarded and kept for stock
2 cloves garlic, finely diced
1 bunch parsley, stems finely chopped and leaves set aside for garnish
1 zucchini, cut into 1 cm rounds
2 large potatoes, cut into large cubes
1/2 cup green beans, sliced into 3 cm pieces, or 1/2 cup green peas
1 400 g tin cannellini beans, drained and rinsed (or cook your own from dried)
Extra virgin olive oil

PISTOU
1 cup basil leaves
1 clove garlic, roughly chopped
3/4 cup pine nuts (or pistachio)
1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil
Zest and juice of half a lemon
1/2 cup finely grated Parmesan
Flaked sea salt

If you haven’t asked your butcher to break the chicken down for you, do this yourself. You want to cut both the legs, also known as the Marylands (both the drumstick and thigh with skin on) off, as well as the two breasts. Wrap these and place them in your fridge or freezer for a future meal (during the retreat, I used these for a dish of braised chicken with prunes, olives and lemon). You should be left with a chicken carcass with its wings still intact.

Place the carcass in a large heavy-based saucepan, a Le Creuset-type of pot. Add in your stock vegetables — the carrot, celery, onion, bay, herbs and peppercorns, along with the greens from the leek for the soup. Cover this with water so it’s all just submerged. Place the pot over a medium heat and bring it to a simmer before turning the heat down to low and leaving it to gently cook away for about 2 hours. Once cooked, strain the liquid into another bowl, discard the vegetables, and once the carcass is cool enough to handle, pick off the bits of chicken — you’ll be surprised by how much you get. Set all of this aside while you start on your soup. (You can do this step a day in advance).

For the soup, in the same large heavy-baed saucepan, go in with a good glug of olive oil, about 2 tablespoons. Add in your onion and leek and season with a pinch of salt. Let this sauté, covered, for 10 minutes, until soft and translucent, then add in the garlic and parsley stems and stir. Let this cook for a few minutes.

Add in your zucchini, green beans, potato and cannellini beans with a pinch of salt and stir. Let this cook for a few minutes before you pour in your stock. Leave this to bubble away for a 20 minutes or so, until the vegetables are tender. Use your judgement on how much stock you need — if you like your soup thicker, use less, or add water if you like it with more liquid.

For the pesto, in a blender, lightly blitz half of the pine nuts so they’re still quite chunky and add them to a mixing bowl. Now add the basil, olive oil, lemon zest and juice, and the remainder of the pine nuts. Blitz until smooth, adding extra olive oil if it needs an extra little kick to blend. Once smooth, add this to the bowl with the chunky pine nuts, along with the Parmesan, and stir to combine. Taste and season with salt if needed — the Parmesan should provide the saltiness here but always worth a wee check. Again, if you’d like it a runnier consistency, simply drizzle this with olive oil once it’s in the bowl. Keep any extra pistou in your fridge for pasta, sandwiches or a dip.

Once the soup has cooked for 20 minutes I like to mash some of the cannellini beans to thicken the soup slightly. Add in your reserved shredded chicken that you removed from the carcass and cook until the chicken is nicely heated through. Give everything a good crack of black pepper and taste for seasoning.

To serve, place the soup in bowls and top with a good dollop of the pistou, a good glug of olive oil, some extra basil leaves if you have them on-hand, a good crack of black pepper and a squeeze of lemon juice. A sprinkle of Parmesan wouldn’t be bad either.

NOTE: I served this with garlic croutons: roughly chop a stale loaf of bread (I used baguette, but use what you have, sourdough also fab) and toss them on a tray with a good glug of olive oil and two cloves of minced garlic along with a wee sprinkle of flaked sea salt. Toss to combine, making sure that every piece is coated in a but of olive oil. Place the tray in a 180C oven for 15—20 minutes, or until golden and crisp. Serve on top of soup with a dollop of the pistou.

A PLAYLIST: Tunes I played throughout the week, tunes for pottering in the kitchen, for long nights at the table around platters of cheese and bottles of wine.

A RECIPE: Lemony harissa yoghurt with herbes de Provence

I served this as part of a Mediterranean feast — chickpea and fennel with a preserved lemon and honey dressing, pumpkin with tahini yoghurt and hazelnuts, spiced cauliflower, couscous all lemony and herby with heavy glugs of olive oil, pickled red onion, a big bowl of hummus, and yes, this lemony harissa yoghurt. It’s a wonderful condiment in this type of meal, but equally, is great as a dip with crudités or served alongside slow-cooked lamb. A good thing to have in your fridge — it will last a week or so.

1 cup (260 g) Greek or natural yoghurt
Half a preserved lemon, flesh remove and rind finely chopped
1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil, plus extra to garnish
1 tablespoon harissa
1 tablespoon herbes de Provence
Flaked sea salt, to season
Rind of lemon (for garnish — optional)

In a mixing bowl, combine the yoghurt, preserved lemon, olive oil and a pinch of salt. Stir to combine and taste for seasoning.

Place the yoghurt in your serving bowl and spoon the harissa over half of the yoghurt in a bit of a swirl — the contrast is beautiful. Over the harissa sprinkle the herbes de Provence and finish with a good drizzle of olive oil, and if you have a lemon on hand, a sprinkle of lemon zest.

Serve as you please.

A RECIPE: Preserved lemon and lavender honey dressing, inspired by Diana Henry

I use this dressing for all kinds of salads — from a warm vegetable salad of roasted fennel and chickpea to a spring salad of fresh peas, white and green asparagus, green beans and goat’s cheese. It’s a wonderful shake up from a classic vinaigrette.

2 small preserved lemons, plus 2 teaspoons juice from the jar
2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar (or white wine vinegar)
1 1/2 tablespoons lavender honey (or regular honey)
5 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
Flaked sea salt, to season

Discard the flesh from the preserved lemons and finely chop the rind into a pulp. Whisk in the preserved lemon juice along with the vinegar, honey and olive oil. Add a pinch of salt and taste for seasoning.

Dress your salad or vegetables as you desire.

This week was for Ruth Ribeacuourt and Sarahbeth Larrimore’s Queen Robe retreat, with their co-pilot Indie Miller. Ruth has a magic way with these retreats, this is the second I’ve been on, and both are weeks I’ll treasure for years to come, with every single person leaving feeling full, not from the food we’ve had such joy creating, but from the creativity, the connection that Ruth so generously fosters. Sarahbeth is a most talented, most special teacher of textiles, of empowering women to design and sew, who is based in North Carolina. We plan for this Queen Robe retreat to be the first of many so keep an eye out on Faire’s pages for the next one — I can promise you’ll be in for one wildly wonderful treat.

Bisous,
H.