Encore Provence by Peter Mayle Read Free Book Online

plastic skin. Even so, not all supermarkets are alike. Plenty of them in Provence have fresh cheese and their own bakeries, even if the cookie selection may not be up to the D’Agostino standard.
    In fact, most of the serious cooks we know use supermarkets only to stock up on basic commodities. They buy their meat, bread, oil, wine, and produce from small specialist shops, as their mothers used to do. And if they live in or near Avignon, they shop at Les Halles, one of the best food markets one could hope to find, in France or anywhere else. It’s on the Place Pie, right in the center of town; not far, as it happens, from where Reichl was staying.
    For twenty-five years, the market has provided a permanent outlet for local suppliers, and the forty stalls offer a stunning choice of meat, poultry, game, breads, cheeses,
charcuterie
, fruit, vegetables, herbs, spices, and oils—and a fish counter more than thirty yards long. Every weekday it opens at six and closes at noon. But parking is difficult in Avignon during August, and perhaps for that reason the market was ignored. A pity.
    Never mind. If inspiration or the will to shop falter, there are always the local restaurants. Avignon has several which compare favorably with good New York restaurants—Hiely, L’Isle Sonnante, or La Cuisine de Reine are just three—but these somehow managed to elude the Reichl eye. Instead, we were told about a whimsical menu, read but not tasted, consisting of nothing but tomatoes. (Let us hope they were ripe.) This presumably prompted her remark about mediocre restaurants in major cities. It’s enough to make you despair of keeping body and soul together during your stay in Provence.
    But now, disillusioned and faint with hunger, we come to the most extraordinary revelation of all. Here it is in black and white, backed up by the considerable authority of the
New York Times:
“I had been dreaming of a Provence that never existed.”
    The sentence hit me with the force of an unripe tomato between the eyes, as you can imagine. Where had I been living all these years? And what about those other misguided writers? The Provence that Daudet, Giono, Ford Madox Ford, Lawrence Durrell, and M. F. K. Fisher knew and wrote about—the Provence that I know—doesn’t exist. It never existed. It is a sunny figment of our imaginations, a romanticized fantasy.
    I’m afraid that much of the blame for this monumental deception has to be laid at the door of a native son of Provence—alas, yet another overwrought and fanciful writer—Marcel Pagnol. Reichl is a keen admirer of his, and she shares her admiration with us: “The Provence I am most attached to is that of the great filmmaker Marcel Pagnol. It is a scratchy black-and-white world where men in cafés amuse themselves by hiding rocks under hats and waiting for someone to come along and kick them.”
    This, it seems to me, is like expecting contemporary America to resemble a Frank Capra movie set, but I felt that I should make some inquiries, and I cannot argue with the results. In fairness, I must report that hat-kicking, as a crowd-pleasing spectacle, has gone the way of the guillotine. A search through the archives in the mayor’s office of my local village failed to reveal a single recorded instance of hats being kicked in public. When I asked the oldest man in the village bar if he had ever been amused by the kicking of hats, he looked at me sideways, took his drink and moved away. Even in the most remote villages of Haute Provence, where you might imagine coming across the odd, forgotten nest of hat-kickers, you are unlikely to find men in cafés amusing themselves with anything other than conversation, cards, or
boules
. First, bad food. Now this. Another dream shattered.
    Nevertheless, there are visitors to Provence who seem able to look beyond fuzzy expectations and derive considerable enjoyment from what actually does exist. Unfortunately, they are tourists, and they are not welcome in