Provence / Soupe au Pistou
I used to sleep through the night—seven, eight, nine hours of pure rest, curling beneath the downy duvet on our bed, lulled even further into my dreams by the deep, even breaths of my husband next to me. Our bedroom windows edged the courtyard, and the room was dark and quiet, a calm oasis of retreat, unlike the rest of the apartment, which faced the busy boulevard and was bright and noisy. I loved our bedroom, loved changing into my pajamas and crawling between sheets that smelled of laundry detergent, loved reading a few pages of my book until my head started to droop, whereupon I would turn out the lamp, kiss my husband, and drift away. But then Calvin left, and I stopped sleeping.
Insomnia. It was like a foreign movie I never wanted to see, filled with dark images that ran on an incessant loop through my exhausted brain. I worried about the dangers of Iraq—helicopter crashes, enemy fire, friendly fire—each fear exploding in my mind with a blinding charge. I worried about Calvin’s health: the constant pressure, the cafeteria diet of fried food, the lack of exercise. And then there were the other worries: my aging parents, my stalled writing projects, my health—dear God, my health. My stomach growled. Did I have an ulcer? I felt dizzy. Was it the flu? Or was I having a stroke? I searched phantom symptoms on my cell phone, the glow of the screen lighting up my face, driving sleep further and further away.
I avoided bedtime, watching TV or surfing the Internet, staying up later and later until the clock edged past one o’clock, two o’clock, late enough for me to hope that I’d fall asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow. Eventually I’d crawl into bed, read a few pages of my book hoping my eyes would close—they never did—turn out the lights and stare at the ceiling for a couple of hours. I’d finally drop off around four o’clock in the morning and then force myself to wake up a few hours later.
But on the night before Calvin came home for vacation in August, something else kept me awake until the small hours—not just anxiety but also excitement. By the time I climbed into bed, his flight from Baghdad had landed in Amman and he had begun the final leg of his thirty-hour journey home. I stared at the ceiling as time dripped away in a slow leak, impatient to throw my arms around him. Even though we had chatted with each other every evening by Skype, even though we knew the minutiae of each other’s life right down to what we’d eaten for lunch, even though Calvin seemed unchanged—brimming with encouragement, quick with a pun—I needed reassurance that our months apart hadn’t distanced us. I needed the wobbly image on the computer screen to become real again.
Calvin arrived home in the soft violet light of early morning, before the city had started to shimmer in the noonday heat, waking me with a lively trill of the downstairs bell. It seemed to take him forever to walk up the stairs, but then there he was, his brown hair slightly ruffled, with scratchy cheeks and the faint eyebrows that were so incredibly dear to me. I saw only a glimpse of them before I flung myself into his arms for a hug that squeezed all the anxiety of the last few months out of me.
“Did I wake you up?” His voice was muffled against my hair.
“I was so excited last night I couldn’t sleep. I finally drifted off at about four. Are you tired? Hungry?”
He mumbled something else. “Hungry,” I thought he said. Or maybe he said “Happy.” They both made sense. For the first time in months, I felt genuinely hungry and happy, too.
* * *
Parisians take croissants very seriously. So seriously that some will never, ever reveal the address of their favorite boulangerie for fear it will become too popular. I’m willing to bet that friendships have been lost over diverging viewpoints on the ratio of crunch to yeasty tenderness. But I promise you there is no croissant as crisp and flaky or as sweetly buttery as the one you eat, still warm from the oven, on your first morning in Paris after a long absence. Outside Poilâne bakery I watched Calvin eat his, shattering the shell to reveal supple layers of pastry. One, two, three bites and it was gone, leaving only a drift of golden flakes as evidence. He licked the crumbs from his fingers, and when he smiled, his whole face seemed to relax.
As we walked past the prim boutiques that line the rue du Cherche-Midi, I bit into my own early-morning treat, a pain au chocolat, and brushed the crumbs from my shirt down to the sidewalk. For once there were no Parisians to censor me for eating on the street, no sarcastic calls of “Bon appétit!” as I walked and chewed. Lost in its early-August haze, the city was empty.
We turned the corner onto rue de Vaugirard, passing a gaping construction site, a lone bustle of activity. Suddenly a booming crash destroyed the calm—a falling load of concrete debris perhaps, or a backhoe knocking the metal edge of a Dumpster. Beside me I felt Calvin jump, a sharp, quick movement as if I’d pinched him.
“What’s the matter? Are you okay?”
“It was just kind of loud.” He shrugged, but his eyes looked wide.
I squeezed his arm, but the truth was, his reaction had made me feel a little wide-eyed myself, all quivery limbs and nervous energy. Now I realized that the endless days and weeks, the duck-and-cover alarms and convoy attacks, the safety and suffocation of an insulated compound, the complete absence of children’s voices and leafy trees and cooking smells, the sixty-five-year-old roommate jockeying to use the bathroom first every morning—it had all taken its toll. I would never truly understand Calvin’s life in Baghdad. His experiences there, both the prosaic and profound, were shared by his colleagues, not by me, his wife.
While I kneaded my fretful thoughts, Calvin seemed awfully quiet, too. We paused at an intersection to wait for the light to change.
“I wanted to ask you something.” He fixed his gaze on the oncoming traffic.
“Sure.” My hands felt damp and I surreptitiously wiped them against the hem of my shirt.
“Could you make spaghetti and meatballs for dinner tonight?” Now he glanced over at me, his face brimming with hope, as if only I could help him.
I grabbed his arm, hugging it close. “Of course!”
The light changed, and we crossed the street, heading in unspoken agreement toward the grocery store, where we bought ground meat and canned tomatoes, parsley and Parmesan cheese. After all, life-changing work experiences come and go. But homemade meatballs and red sauce are forever.
That night we gorged ourselves on wine and meatballs and glorious forkfuls of tomato-drenched, cheese-dusted pasta. We stored the remaining meatballs, along with their precious sauce, in the freezer. Because the next morning we were off, following a heavily trodden path toward sunshine and dry heat, droning cicadas and the purple haze of blooming lavender fields. Like so many Parisians before us—like all of them really, if the city’s empty streets and métro were any indication—we were heading toward vacation.
* * *
I know it’s a little, well, cliché to be captivated by Provence, a region that has made the fortune of not a few travel writers. But I am—I can’t help myself. These are some of the things I love: Proud pink villages perched on hilltops. The relief of moving from sharp light and heat into cool shadows. Unapologetic ice cubes tinkling in a glass of rosé. Hell, unapologetic enjoyment of rosé. The gusty wind known as the mistral, rough and cleansing. Unfiltered olive oil decanted into recycled juice bottles, bought at a roadside stand. Lavender-scented breezes tumbling into car windows. Tangy Provençal accents. Vineyards and fields shadowed by the looming bulk of the Luberon Mountains. And most of all, the thing I dream about fifty weeks of the year: open-air markets that brim with bright summer produce—speckled beans, soft-skinned peaches, mint-scented tomatoes—all bursting with delicious possibility.
We had first visited the village of Bonnieux four years earlier, when we were living in Beijing. Back then I could barely pronounce the word merci, yet the Luberon region, located between Avignon and Aix-en-Provence, instantly felt familiar and beloved. Partly it was the hot desert brightness, reminiscent of my Southern California childhood. Or maybe it was the food and wine and the sweet art of doing nothing. Whatever the reason, I felt at home there. And yet there was also something else, a European exoticism that captivated me—a cheese course before dessert, shops shuttered in the afternoon heat, a game of boules played in the dust of the village square.
On that first visit, we inhaled soft air into our scarred lungs, reveled in the stars and silence, devoured plates of fresh fish, salad, and fruits, raw and unpeeled. When our vacation ended and we left Provence, I felt like weeping. “We’ll come back,” Calvin promised, partly as a way to comfort his overemotional wife but also because he’d loved it, too. And we had come back. For four years in a row, we’d rented the same stone house from a friend’s mother, who had also become a friend. Now we were back once again, more in need of a vacation together than ever before.
At the Avignon TGV station, we stepped down from the train and into a blast of air so arid and hot it could have come from a hair dryer. We found our rental car at an agency located just steps away from the station and headed east toward Apt, whizzing along country highways, searching for familiar landmarks. There was the cornfield that bordered the road, the red-earth cliffs cresting against the sky, then the olive grove with a vintage truck parked outside. Each of them felt significant, concrete proof that our vacation had begun.
The engine of our tiny Smart car strained as we ascended the hill to Bonnieux. We passed the pigeonnier and, across from it, the farm stand run by the white-haired woman who’d given me a recipe for courgette-flower fritters. On our left the solid church, built during the late nineteenth century and considered ugly by locals; straight ahead a roundabout. And then, in rapid succession, the newsstand, the hotel (the nice one), the other hotel (the not-so-nice one), the baker, the butcher, the café, the pharmacy. I ticked off each shop as we drove by, relieved to find they’d all survived another off-season.
I parked, and we climbed out of the car, clambering down a steep road, picking our way between potholes and slimy patches of figs fallen from the tree above. We retrieved the key from its hiding place and entered the refreshing darkness of the house, breathing in the clean scent of lavender that filled the entryway. For a minute I hesitated. What should we do next? Unpack our bags? Walk to the village épicerie? Drive into Apt to stock up on wine? But then the cool silence of the house crept through me, and I allowed myself to stand there for a long time, rooted to the stone floor in the hall. After all, we were on vacation.
* * *
The French love of vacation is well documented, an institution as sacred as Sunday lunch en famille, one that’s alternately mocked and sighed over by other, non-European nations. It’s true the French take a lot of leave—at least five weeks a year, compared with the two enjoyed by most Americans—parceled out in the summer, at Christmas, in the February ski season, at Easter, and at Toussaint (an autumn holiday I’d never even heard of before moving to France). But the right to a vacation is in fact a rather recent French institution that dates from the 1936 Matignon Agreements, which made congés payés, paid holidays, a legal obligation. In contrast, the United States has no federal law requiring employers to grant annual leave.
Les Accords de Matignon were a pet project of the Popular Front, the 1930s leftist political party led by Prime Minister Léon Blum. The laws gave workers a broad range of rights, increasing wages, introducing the forty-hour workweek, raising the school-leaving age to fourteen, and recognizing trade unions. But the most popular, enduring symbol of the Popular Front’s commitment to social reform was the guarantee of two obligatory weeks of paid vacation, which over the decades stretched to five.
In the summer of 1936, floods of working-class travelers took advantage of the new policy, streaming south to resort towns previously the exclusive domain of the bourgeois. The government encouraged the exodus, organizing price reductions for holiday train tickets and creating newsreels of happy travelers crying “Vive la vie!” Blum patted himself on the back, saying he had “injected a little beauty and sunshine into lives of hardship.” And thus the French tourist industry began to blossom.
With the spread of automobiles, more people headed south to the Mediterranean Sea—Charles Trenet even wrote a song, “Route Nationale 7,” which paid homage to the “highway of vacations” that led from Paris to Italy. These sun-bronzed vacationers ignited an interest in regional cuisine—particularly for Provençal cooking—that eventually became a French passion.
I, too, had heard its siren call years ago, long before I ever set foot in Bonnieux, when I was only twelve years old. I had begged my parents to let us take a family trip to Provence that summer. Why? What about the south of France could have appealed to a girl who hated hot weather and insects, one who preferred reading over bicycling to the playground with the other neighborhood kids? Actually, I suspect that’s the answer—I’d probably read something in a magazine or a book, some clever sketch of words, now long forgotten, that captured the region’s beauty.
Despite my zeal, my parents were dubious. They’d been wary of my travel enthusiasms ever since suffering at my hands the previous summer, when I’d begged them to make a three-hour detour to visit the Tillamook cheddar-cheese factory in Oregon. I had pictured hand-pressed wheels of cheddar, spotted cows, and three-legged milking stools. Instead we encountered fractious families crowding the windows overlooking the factory floor. The gift shop marketed its cheddar so aggressively that even my cheese-averse mother felt coerced into buying a wheel. (Over twenty years later, my parents still haven’t let me live that one down.)
But my uneven track record wasn’t the only thing stopping us from donning berets and hopping the next plane to Marseille. There was also the problem of France—or rather my mother’s aversion to it. She still bore deep emotional scars from her childhood in Shanghai’s French concession, remnants of the psychological abuse meted out by her half-Chinese, half-French stepmother. Niang had worn her Frenchness like a fur coat, preening and posing with it, stroking it to a high luster. Never mind that Niang’s father had come from Corsica, the rugged island that had struggled for independence from France, or that he’d probably moved to China to escape poverty and cultural prejudice. In 1920s Shanghai anything was possible for a foreigner, even for a Corsican who wished to reinvent himself as a Frenchman. By the time Niang was twenty, slim and beautiful and stepmother to five children she detested, she had become French. She gave my mother a French name—Adeline—and sent her to a French kindergarten, before packing her off to boarding school and never allowing her to come home during the holidays.
For my mother, carrying this colossal load of unhappy childhood memories, France became like an allergy, something she preferred to avoid as if it made her eyes itch and her nose run. At age twelve I didn’t really understand why, but her aversion was obvious, displayed in crackly little blasts. “You want to visit France? My stepmother was French,” she’d say, in the same tone she used when I brought home a B on an algebra exam. Perhaps Freud would say that was part of my attraction to France—that tinge of the taboo, the temptation of forbidden fruit.
As the school year dwindled down and my mom signed me up for an intensive SAT prep course—“You can never start too early!” she’d said, even though I was only finishing seventh grade—I began to brace myself for the lonely summer months ahead. My parents worked long days, my mother as a physician and my father as a microbiology professor, and now that I was old enough to stay at home alone, there seemed to be an awful lot of hours to fill outside of college-preparatory work. I had just resigned myself to a few months of algebra drills (relieved by a secret stash of Sweet Valley High novels) when my parents surprised me with a late birthday present—plane tickets! What made them change their minds? Had I actually convinced them of the educational value of a trip to France? I’m still not sure. Whatever the case, several weeks later the three of us found ourselves in Aix-en-Provence during an August heat wave.
France surprised me. It was hot; I remember that so clearly, a kind of airless, choked heat that I had felt on our trip to Paris seven years before. The heat settled in the antique crevices of our rented apartment, drawing close and unrelenting at night, especially with the flocks of French mosquitoes feasting on us. By day the sun was so strong it shimmered, causing a haze around Mont Ventoux. We sat under the plane trees on the Cours Mirabeau and drank tall glasses of lemonade, ordered up by my mom. That was the other surprise—my mother could speak French! I hadn’t remembered that from our other trip. I couldn’t believe she’d allow the devil’s tongue to fall from her lips, and yet there she was, booking bus tours of Roman ruins and interrogating the waiter as to whether there was cream in the potage aux légumes.
“Mom, you speak . . . French?”
“Just a few words that I learned in kindergarten.” She shrugged and shot me a look that said, Don’t get any ideas, buster.
Most of our meals were, I’m sorry to say, totally unremarkable. This was long before the term “foodie” had been coined, before Internet chat forums, Zagat guides, or even Rick Steves. Unfamiliar with the city, we found ourselves dining in mediocre restaurants planted squarely on the beaten path. And yet food is so ingrained in French culture—especially in fertile Provence—that I still came away from that trip with three indelible gastronomic memories.
The first took place at the home of Simone and Jacques, the French cousins of one of my mom’s medical-school classmates. They invited us to their home in Marseille, where we sat in the garden and watched the sun drop into a grove of umbrella pines. Simone and Jacques were Jewish, part of Marseille’s vibrant Sephardic community, and for dinner they had prepared a chicken tagine with preserved lemon. I can still taste its bitter, tart brininess, so clean and exotic—so contrary to what I thought of as French food and yet, Simone assured us, very typical.
The second unforgettable meal was at another home, that of Bernard and Véronique. Bernard had been a student researcher in my father’s microbiology laboratory at UCLA. After a few years in Los Angeles, he’d returned to his native Provence, to the brush-covered hills that formed the arrière-pays, or backcountry, above Marseille. We sat in the garden at a long table under a grape arbor, and Véronique, Bernard’s wife, served us roasted birds, as tiny as golf balls. We ate them with our hands, pulling the miniature limbs apart, crunching the bones between our teeth. The birds were called ortolans, and Bernard had caught them himself, baiting small traps with winged ants just like his father and his grandfather and probably his grandfather’s father before him. I didn’t know it then, but a meal of ortolans was a local tradition, one memorialized in Marcel Pagnol’s tender memoirs of his Provençal childhood, a celebration of the hunting, trapping, and boyhood high jinks set in the high hills above Marseille.
My third food memory from that vacation is of the morning market in Aix-en-Provence, the beautiful marché traditionnel brimming with flowers, vegetables, fruit, honey, and cheese. My parents and I wandered through its shaded stalls breathing in the peculiar aroma of lavender soap and roasting chickens, stopping to admire displays of cherry tomatoes tucked into straw baskets, the flash of yellow courgette flowers against dark-skinned squash. Unlike the chilled produce section of our grocery store at home, this market was alive with smells and wasps and people haggling over the price of a kilo of eggplants. My father eyed the piles of sun-warmed vegetables with the itchy longing of someone who loves to cook. Alas, our vacation rental’s primitive kitchenette prevented him from buying sacks of food and whipping up a feast for twenty. Instead he contented himself with just one purchase—a giant, fragrant bunch of basil. We displayed it in a vase on the dining table so its perfume could drift across the apartment.
After a couple of weeks, we returned home to Southern California, back to air-conditioning and ice machines and our double-doored refrigerator. School started again, and so did Chinese school on Saturdays. I stopped daydreaming about France. But somewhere in the back of my mind, I guarded those food memories, taking them out from time to time to give them a polish. They seemed to represent another existence, one of tradition, of history, of continuity, rooted in a small sliver of the world. In contrast, the tract homes and tidy sidewalks of our American suburb, the shrink-wrapped Asian vegetables at the Vietnamese grocery store, the strawberries available in January and the napa cabbage that appeared in July, all of it offered little connection to the land on which we lived. Instead of traditional recipes, the food we cooked and ate combined a hodgepodge of cultures and cuisines. Over time I came to realize the great freedom in this diversity, as well as the loss.
Thirty years ago you’d have been lucky to find a bunch of basil in Paris, even at the height of summer. Basil was a plant of the Midi, the colloquial name for southern France, and its fragrant leaves didn’t really travel north. For thousands of vacationers—including even my family—the aromatic herb represented summer holidays in Provence. And one dish in particular showcased its refreshing perfume: soupe au pistou.
I heard about the chunky vegetable soup during my first vacation in Bonnieux with Calvin. I was at the market, moving slowly so I could inspect the produce in each stall. The village hosted the market each Friday, attracting a mix of vendors and shoppers wielding baskets. Some were regulars, like the older woman with a zippy Provençal accent who greeted the salesmen with a “Bonjour” and a hearty handshake. Others were clearly tourists, like the young couple in shorts and bedraggled hair who paused before a pastel stack of overscented soaps. The stalls overlapped without reason—cheap and cheerful tablecloths fluttered next to rows of goat cheese; piles of espadrilles stood next to jars of honey. A display of fresh pasta smelled of egg yolks and raw flour, and a hint of marijuana emerged from the back of the vendor’s van. At the fish stand, the poissonnier could have leaped from the set of a Pagnol film, with his curled mustache, straw hat, and striped shirt. In front of him, a row of shiny fish stared blankly at the underside of the striped awning, the crushed ice below them dripping slowly into a dirty bucket.
At the vegetable stand, I spotted something unusual: pods shaped like green beans but longer and fatter, some a delicate, pale greenish yellow, others splashed in magenta and white.
“C’est quoi?” I tried to ask.
“Voulez-vous des cocos blancs ou des cocos rouges, Madame?” asked the vendeur. He had a blurry look in his eyes, clearly hungover from rising too early after a why-not-one-more-glass-of-rosé kind of evening. Actually, so did everyone in the market. Come to think of it, so did I.
“Comment? Cuisine?” This was before I could speak French, and my cheeks burned at the sound of my cavewoman grunts.
The woman standing next to me in line took pity on me—or maybe she just wanted to hurry me along. “You can make zee soupe au pistou,” she said. “Like a vegetable soup. You need some of zis.” She handed me a couple zucchini. “And some beans and a beeg, beeg pot of basilic. Vairy, vairy deeleecious.” She paused, searching for words. “Eet is zee essence of summair.”
Before I knew it, she had dictated a recipe, selected my vegetables, picked out exact change from the handful of coins I produced out of my pocket, and sent me on my merry way.
When I got home, I split open the pods and discovered a strand of fresh shell beans inside, as round and plump as if they’d already been cooked, the white ones tinged pale green, the red ones—called borlotti, or cranberry beans—spattered in hot pink. This was how beans grew, I realized with a jolt—encased in these beautiful shells. As a city girl, bean horticulture was something I’d never before considered.
When it came time to prepare the soup, the woman’s voice swirled faintly through the foggy recesses of my hungover brain. Did I cook the beans first? How should I cut the zucchini? And as for the beeg, beeg pot of basil . . . well, I had no idea what to do with that. I cobbled together a vegetable soup of carrots, leeks, beans, zucchini, and a few roughly chopped leaves of basil floating on top. It tasted earthy and wholesome, kind of like minestrone. But comparing it with the essence of summer seemed like a grandiose exaggeration.
“I must’ve gotten the recipe wrong,” I said glumly, transferring the leftovers to a vat-size plastic container. “That soup was more like essence of Progresso.”
“I really liked it,” Calvin said. (Four meals of soup later, his enthusiasm had dimmed considerably.)
Even after a few more summer vacations in Provence, soupe au pistou continued to elude me. I longed to taste this “essence of summer,” and yet every time I asked for it in a restaurant, I was told it was a plat de famille, cooked and eaten at home. Now, on our fourth visit to Bonnieux, I was determined finally to taste it. But . . . how? Unless I kidnapped a Provençal grandmother and held her hostage in the kitchen, it seemed unlikely. And then one morning, while buying milk at the village épicerie, I spotted a fluorescent yellow poster. FÊTE DE SOUPE AU PISTOU À BONNIEUX, it announced in uneven handwriting.
I pounced on Calvin as he examined bars of milk chocolate. “The village is having a soupe au pistou party!” I said breathlessly.
“Hmm? Oh, that’s nice.”
“We have to go! This is my chance to finally taste the essence of summer!” I held up my phone. “Let’s call and reserve right now!”
Calvin took a step back, but after six years of marriage he knew better than to question me when I had the excited, slightly rabid gleam of culinary obsession in my eye. He took the phone, called, and left a message.
But then I started thinking. What if instead of simply eating soupe au pistou at the fête, I actually helped prepare it? What if I cooked soupe au pistou for the entire village?
That is how I found myself chopping and peeling vegetables with a group of formidable Provençal women. At five-thirty in the morning.
The head chef of Bonnieux’s soupe au pistou fête is a diminutive, deeply tanned woman named Mauricette. She has soft brown eyes and a sweet smile, but she runs a very strict kitchen. Whenever she came over to inspect our chopped vegetables, an anxious undercurrent ran through the group of volunteers.
“Are these potatoes the right size, Mauricette?”
“Am I peeling enough skin from the courgettes, Mauricette?”
“We’re supposed to remove the seeds from the tomatoes!” one woman said accusingly to her neighbor. “Isn’t that right, Mauricette?”
About ten of us had gathered at the home of Xavière, a robust woman who played soup producer to Mauricette’s director. The sky was still dark when I parked my rental car on the edge of a fig orchard and made my way to the cement patio next to the house. In the dim light, I saw a long table groaning with tubs of white and cranberry shell beans, as well as haricots verts, or snap beans, cut into segments. A few feet away, under a grape arbor, stood two industrial-size pots of water, each perched on a powerful portable gas burner. This cooking area was Mauricette’s domain. In the six hours it took to prepare the soup, none of the other women approached it.
As the sky brightened, the volunteers arrived one by one, each armed with her own cutting board, knife, and vegetable peeler. They were all local Bonnieulaises, all members of the Association la Boule Dorée, a local pétanque, or boules, club that organized the village soup fête as an annual fund-raiser.
Mauricette introduced me to the group. “She’s an American journalist who wants to learn how to make soupe au pistou.” At the words “American” and “journalist,” eyebrows rose and a chill descended. Only a Parisian would have received more scrutiny. I tried to look as friendly as possible, mostly by smiling a lot, though this had the danger of making me seem simple. Don’t slip up and call them “tu,” I reminded myself. Vous, vous, vous. Switching from the formal to informal form of “you” was a delicate decision, even for French people. Unfortunately, I had the bad habit of confusing the two when I got nervous.
We began by preparing the zucchini—about 130 pounds of it—peeling the dark skin away into tiger stripes. I helped chop the squash into a large dice, adding the pieces to a communal bowl. I could feel the eyes of the other women watching my knife move across the cutting board, and I concentrated hard on not cutting myself.
“Votre couteau n’est pas trop grand, Ann?” said a white-haired woman with eyes like a hatchet.
She thought my knife was too big? I glanced down at it, a dainty chef’s blade. “Tu . . . uh, vous trouvez?” I stammered. Really? She thought so? “Non, ça va aller.” I gave her a mild smile. She puffed her cheeks up and went back to peeling squash. A teenage girl with goth-black eyeliner handed me another pile of vegetables to chop and pulled a little face, as if to say, Ignore her.
Obtaining an introduction to the party of soup-making volunteers had seemed more difficult than wrangling an invitation to a White House state dinner. I’d summoned all my American resourcefulness and puppy-dog charm, calling the local tourist office, befriending the village on Facebook, all to no avail. Finally the manager of our rental house, a dynamic woman named Solange, took pity on me. Three phone calls later, I had an interview with Mauricette to present my soup-making credentials. Solange came with me to smooth the path—and to provide French vocabulary before my own could fail me.
“Si je peux vous aider, je serais ravie,” I said with my most earnest expression. If I could help you, I’d be delighted. . . . “Je suis entièrement . . .”
“Disponible,” Solange inserted neatly.
“Disponible,” I agreed. Available. For soup. Exactly.
I’m still not sure if it was the introduction from Solange, Mauricette’s curiosity, or the bottle of pure, grade-A maple syrup that I brought her (I’m not above a bribe, not when it comes to secret recipes), but somehow I was deemed acceptable. Mauricette took me under her wing and vowed to teach me her soup. As I was discovering this morning, however, an alliance with the boss can alienate you from other members of the team. Especially old hatchet eyes. She needled me with questions couched as concern. “You’re not cold?” she asked me, eyeing my thin sweater. Later she told me, “Watch out for your sleeves!” though they were nowhere near the food. I sent a sympathetic thought to her daughter-in-law, whoever and wherever she was in the world.
We finished chopping the courgettes and potatoes and moved on to plucking basil leaves—“No stem!” instructed Mauricette—the heavy fresh-licorice perfume competing with the raunchy odor of peeled garlic. As the sky lightened into a pale grayish blue, so had the atmosphere around the table. After tiny cups of weak coffee, everyone looked more cheerful.
I finally felt brave enough to pose a question to the group. “Do you ever add any other vegetables to the soup? Carrots or leeks?”
“Mais NON!” The table erupted. “Jamais de carottes, ni de poireaux!”
“This is a summer soup, made with only summer vegetables,” the woman across from me explained. “Courgettes, tomatoes, haricots verts, beans—fresh, never dried—potatoes, and pistou. C’est tout. Winter vegetables like carrots or leeks don’t belong in soupe au pistou. And we never add meat.”
“I once had soupe au pistou with meat,” Mauricette said in a musing tone. “My cousin’s wife made it. It was all pasta and cubes of ham!”
The other women stared, their mouths open in horror. “Oh, la-la-la-la,” someone said faintly.
“It was good, but . . .” Mauricette shook her head. “It had nothing to do with soupe au pistou.” Everyone clucked in agreement. “I still don’t know why she didn’t just ask for my recipe.” I eventually discovered that a ham bone, or a smoked pork knuckle, is sometimes added to soupe au pistou, namely in the rocky, mountainous region of the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence—a climate too cold to raise olive trees—where the meat probably replaces the calories and flavor traditionally added by a lazy drizzle of olive oil.
“What happens to the basil?” I asked.
“The leaves are blended with garlic and olive oil to make a sauce—pistou. That’s what we mix into the soup,” said Xavière.
“Ah, it’s pesto!” I exclaimed.
“Pistou,” Xavière corrected. She pronounced the word with care: “Pee-stoo.”
“Yes, like pesto. From Italy?”
Silence fell around the table. “The Italians can call it what they want,” someone sniffed.
Pistou, I later read, is the Provençal version of pesto; indeed, the word comes from the Italian pestare, which means “to pound.” It’s a sauce of crushed basil and garlic mixed with olive oil—a combination as ancient as the Roman ruins that dot the dry Provençal landscape. The poet Virgil wrote of pistou in the Eclogues, describing it as a mixture of herbs and garlic ground in a mortar. Today it’s more commonly made in a food processor—even in rural Provence, even by traditionalists.
There exists perhaps no greater culinary rivalry than the one between Italy and France. But no matter who invented the fork or first perfected the béchamel or balsamella sauce, it is true that the two cultures have influenced each other enormously, especially in Provence. Greek Phocaeans founded Marseille in 600 B.C., bringing with them olive trees and grapevines. Julius Caesar claimed the port less than five hundred years later, leading troops of Romans through the region. They built aqueducts and arenas, created cities like Arles and Avignon and Aix-en-Provence, and cultivated lavender, the flower that still defines the landscape.
Centuries after the decline of the Roman Empire, parts of France and Italy remained loosely entwined—neighbors who sometimes slept together—as in the case of Nice, which remained protected by the counts of Savoy (and, by extension, tied to the Italian Piedmont and Sardinia) until the late nineteenth century. By this time Nice was a bustling port, fiercely competitive with its northern neighbor Genoa. Is it any surprise that Liguria’s prized culinary invention—pesto—traveled about a hundred miles southwest to Provence?
The basic ingredients of pistou and pesto sounded similar to me, but I didn’t dare mention this opinion to the Bonnieux soup volunteers. I had an idea what they might say: “Je veux pas être chauvine, mais . . .” Already this morning I’d heard the phrase many times, always followed by an inexorable opinion. “I don’t want to be prejudiced, but . . . soupe au pistou is better than minestrone.” Or, “. . . Parmesan cheese and pine nuts have no place in pistou.” Or, “. . . you can’t call it soupe au pistou unless all the vegetables come from Provence.” I admired their loyalty even as I recognized the faint insularity. Because if you came from a region as stunningly beautiful and naturally abundant as Provence—a region that has been both saved and spoiled by the summer tourist season—wouldn’t you be fiercely proud and protective of it, too?
At this point we had started crushing the tomatoes into puree—an exciting process that involved grinding them through a hand-cranked contraption that removed the skin and the seeds—and some of the ladies were gathering up their cutting boards and knives to go home. I lingered and watched Mauricette stir pistou into the giant pots of soup with a wooden spoon attached to a long stick. The liquid turned from softly rust-colored—leached from the bright skin of the cranberry beans—into a vegetal green, velvety with melted courgettes.
“The end is always the hardest part,” Mauricette said, huffing a little bit. “Once the cheese is added, you can’t stop stirring.”
The soup’s final ingredient, Emmental or Gruyère, is a controversial addition. Some add it directly to the soup, while others pass a small bowl of it at the table, while still others don’t use any at all, feeling it detracts from the refreshing herbal punch of the pistou. Mauricette scattered a handful of shredded cheese across the surface of the soup and gestured to Fabrice, a visiting relative with strong arms, to come stir the vats of thick, bubbling liquid. “Don’t let it burn on the bottom,” she told him, and he respectfully obeyed her.
As she sprinkled and Fabrice stirred, Mauricette reminisced about her husband, who had passed away a few years before. “Wasn’t he handsome?” She’d shown me his photograph at five-thirty that morning when I’d come to her house to follow her car to Xavière’s.
I nodded. “Il était très beau.” And he had been, with a youthful bronzed face and a relaxed smile.
“Oh, how he loved soupe au pistou!” exclaimed Mauricette. “I used to make a big pot in the morning, and he’d look forward to it all day long.” She tipped the last shards of cheese into the steaming pot. “This soup, it’s a celebration of summer, you know.” Her eyes met mine, dark and serious.
Less than an hour later, I joined the crowd that had gathered for the fête in the village square. Rows of picnic tables covered in white butcher paper and dotted with plastic pitchers of rosé wine filled the sunny space. I could tell who the locals were because they stood in small clumps, gossiping in lowered voices while the vacationers picked their way around them, trying to find a spot to sit. Calvin and I joined Solange and her friends at a shaded table and unpacked the soup bowls and silverware we’d brought from home. Dotted throughout the crowd, I spotted the ladies from the soup-making committee, now attired in pretty summer garb. We waved at one another like old friends.
Mauricette arrived, clad in a fresh, bright T-shirt. (I was the only one who hadn’t taken the time to change out of my pistou-flecked clothes, I noted with some embarrassment.) And close on her heels came an enormous soup pot, swaddled in a blanket and tucked into the back of a van. We crowded in front of the pot like Dickensian orphans, bowls in hand, and received ladles of fragrant soup. I dipped my spoon in and scooped up a mouthful of tender vegetables in a broth laced with the heady scent of garlic and basil. The fresh beans were like none I had eaten before—thin-skinned and exquisitely creamy, with a faint flavor of chestnuts—while the more toothsome green beans contrasted with the smooth texture of melted courgette. It sang of summer, the soup, a product of the nourishing sun, the Provençal soil, a shared moment in a village square, high in the Luberon hills. When we finished our first bowl, there were seconds, and even thirds, and with each bite I discovered a bitter undernote of unfiltered olive oil, a robust burst of cheese. I ate because the soup was delicious but also, perhaps, to prolong the moment a little longer.
As a dry breeze blew across our table and the pichets of rosé emptied, Calvin chatted with a retired Swiss diplomat and Solange and her sister argued the merits of their mother’s soupe au pistou recipe. The crowd acknowledged Mauricette with enthusiastic applause, which she accepted without any pretense of modesty. People began to wander off, some to take naps, others to join the fiercely competitive boules tournament starting in a dusty square next to the church. Sleepy from lunch, I gazed a little blankly at the remaining crowd of village families and tourists. I kept thinking of something Mauricette had said earlier, when I’d asked her why she gave her time and energy to organize the village fête each year. “Pour faire plaisir,” she’d replied without hesitation. To give pleasure.
* * *
The village soupe au pistou fête marked the midway point of our vacation. We still had about a week, but now our slow breakfasts at the kitchen table, our languid afternoons by the pool felt a little less luxurious. One morning we got up early to follow the market to Gordes, parking at the edge of town and joining the line of people climbing to the village center, buying a basket of tomatoes for dinner, a few lavender sachets for gifts. Another day we explored the ruins of an ancient Roman fort, scrambling down a secret staircase carved into a side of rock. We lunched at my favorite local restaurant, a simple café with a view of a hayfield where the omelets were plump and tender and laced with finely chopped herbs. We read Tintin comics and swapped them with each other; we sipped rosé wine in Solange’s thick-walled Provençal house; we listened to the Beatles while cooking dinner; we ate in the garden at a table aglow in candlelight. And suddenly the days had dwindled and we had only three left, then two.
That evening, as I sat in the garden, an ice cube bobbing gently in my predinner glass of rosé, I had a sinking feeling, as if everything was slipping away too fast. Soon we’d return to Paris, and I’d return to working at the library and preparing for the launch of my novel, and a day later Calvin would board a plane to Amman and then continue traveling east in his return to Iraq.
I sipped my wine, ate an olive, black and oily, and tried to focus on the silky air, my hair still damp from a late-afternoon swim, the bats swooping in the fading light. But an urgent flutter descended forcibly into my stomach. Vacation would be over soon, and with its end came the frisson of excitement and anxiety brought on by the thought of work. Calvin felt it, too, I could tell, a growing itch to get back to the office and continue the ambitious march.
During the past two weeks, we had indulged in love in Provence—love of place, of pastimes, and of each other. But without work to anchor me, I was beginning to feel a little unbalanced. And yet going back to work and the daily routine also meant being thousands of miles away from my husband. Without love, my work felt a bit meaningless; just as when I cooked for myself—the food never tasted as good.
The next morning I lingered in the market as if selecting the perfect pincushion goat cheese could erase the nine months that remained of Calvin’s tour in Iraq. At the vegetable stand, I looked for all the ingredients for soupe au pistou—fresh beans, tomatoes, courgettes, basil—checking them off a mental list even though I had no intention of making the soup. But when the vendeur hovered over a pile of cocos rouges, I suddenly heard myself asking for five hundred grams of them. And five hundred grams of the white beans. A kilo of courgettes, a kilo of haricots verts, a big pot of basil. I lugged everything home, carried a bowl into the garden, and started shelling beans. Calvin came and joined me, and we worked together, pausing now and again to take photos of the pink-speckled beans against the green glaze of their pottery bowl. We trimmed green beans, crunching a few squeaky segments between our teeth, peeled and chopped zucchini, and plucked basil leaves until our thumbnails turned black.
I told myself I wouldn’t think about anything but the soup—the beauty of its ingredients, the scent and sizzle and simmer of them as the heat softened their color and texture. But of course that was impossible. Living mindfully and in the moment is a learned skill, one I hadn’t yet developed. Also, soupe au pistou takes a really long time to make.
I could feel my anxiety rise as we accomplished each step and moved on to the next one, shelled the last bean, peeled the last squash, plucked the last basil leaf. Calvin started to feel it, too; his shoulders appeared tense.
“I’m starting to get a little sad,” I admitted in a small voice as we picked sprigs of wild thyme from a corner of the garden.
“Me, too,” he said. “Don’t think about it,” he added.
Instead we ranked all the meals on our vacation, from the porcini mushroom lasagna we’d eaten on our first night to the lunch of omelette aux fines herbes, the hamburgers grilled on a bed of rosemary, the soupe au pistou at the village fête.
“That was my favorite meal of the trip,” I said.
“Yeah, mine, too. Definitely.”
His voice sounded as wistful as my own. And with the courgettes disintegrating in the simmering soup and the pistou oxidizing slightly in the blender, I knew that we needed to reassure each other. We couldn’t hide our sadness about the coming months apart, nor could we indulge it. All we could do was keep moving forward, because the only thing that would end our separation was time.
A few hours later, we emerged from the kitchen a little disoriented, blinking at the dirty knives and spoons and cutting boards piled on the counters, the plastic bags of empty bean pods, the slimy strands of zucchini peel clinging to the sink. A pair of wasps circled the air with intent, zeroing in on the bowl of grated Gruyère.
And then there was the soup. It stood in an orange enameled cast-iron pot, cooling gently on the stove, waiting for the evening when we would eat it for dinner. It filled the kitchen with a perfume at once delicate and hearty, a basil-scented work of love, a profusion of summer vegetables made tender with time and patience, a small moment of pleasure to look forward to for the rest of the day.