Encore Provence (25 page)

By eleven o’clock the market was over. Many of the truffles that had been bought were already on trains, racing against further evaporation as they left Provence for Paris; or, in some cases, for the Dordogne, where they would be presented as natives of the Périgord. Truffles from this region are considered to be superior—like Cavaillon melons or Normandy butter—and therefore cost more. But café statistics, which I’m inclined to believe more than most, claim that up to fifty percent of the truffles sold in the Périgord originate in the Vaucluse, where prices are lower. Naturally, as with so much in the truffle business, this is unofficial. Any request for confirmation will be met by an innocent, unknowing shrug.

I know of only one fitting end to a morning spent in a truffle market, and that is a truffle lunch. You would certainly be well served at a specialist restaurant like Chez Bruno at Lorgues (“the temple of the truffle”), but Lorgues is a long way from Carpentras. Apt is closer, and in Apt you will find the Bistrot de France, a cheerful, busy restaurant on the Place de la Bouquerie. Posters on the walls, paper napkins on the tables, a convenient little bar just inside the entrance for those in urgent need, the smell of good things in the air—it’s a fine, warm place to walk into after hours of standing around in the cold. All the finer because, during the season, there is always one particularly good truffle dish on the menu.

We arrived just before twelve-thirty to find the restaurant already crowded with winter customers, people from the town and nearby villages, speaking the winter language, French. (During the summer, you’re more likely to
hear Dutch, German, and English.) Facing the entrance were two gentlemen sitting side by side but eating alone, each at his table for one. This is a civilized arrangement that I very rarely see outside France, and I wonder why. Perhaps other nationalities feel more strongly the primitive social urge to eat in small herds. Or it may be, as Régis believes, that a Frenchman is more interested in good cooking than in bad conversation, and takes every chance he can to enjoy a solitary meal.

The tall, thin waiter with a voice like warm gravel showed us to a table, and we squeezed in next to a couple intent on the slippery joys of raw oysters on the rocks. A glance at the short, handwritten menu reassured us that the truffle supply was holding up; all we had to do was decide on the first course, and from previous visits we knew the need for caution. The chef is a believer in
cuisine copieuse
—ample and sometimes more than ample portions of everything he cooks—and it’s easy to be overwhelmed before the main event.

Artichokes seemed safe enough. They arrived, half a dozen of them,
à la barigoule
, with parsley, celery, carrots, and ham in a warming, scented broth that went straight to the cockles of the heart. The people at the table next to us were by now eating their main course, a beef stew, using their forks to cut the meat and using pieces of bread, like edible cutlery, to guide each mouthful onto the fork. Bad manners in polite society, no doubt, but very practical if you want to eat a
daube
without sacrificing the juice.

One of the less obvious signs of a well-run, professional restaurant is the sense of timing displayed by the waiters, the rhythm of lunch. If the service is too slow, there is a tendency to eat too much bread and drink too much wine. This is bad, but the opposite is worse. If the service is too
quick, if the waiter hovers and bustles and tries to steal my plate before I’ve wiped off the gravy, if I can feel his breath on the back of my neck and his fingers drumming on the back of my chair while I’m choosing a cheese, it ruins everything. My palate barely has time to take in one taste before having to adjust to the next. I feel jostled and unwanted. Lunch has been turned into a speed trial.

Pauses are essential; a few minutes between courses to allow the appetite to recover and anticipation to set in, a chance to enjoy the moment, to look around and to eavesdrop. I have a terrible weakness for collecting snatches of other people’s conversations, and occasionally I’m rewarded with unusual fragments of knowledge. My favorite of the day came from a large but shapely woman sitting nearby whom I learned was the owner of a local lingerie shop. “
Beh oui
,” she said to her companion, waving her spoon for emphasis, “
il faut du temps pour la corsetterie.
” You can’t argue with that. I made a mental note not to rush things next time I was shopping for a corset, and leaned back to allow the waiter through with the main course.

It was a
brouillade de truffes
—the classic combination of lightly scrambled eggs studded with slices of black truffle, served in a high-sided copper saucepan that was left between us on the table. We were two. There was easily enough
brouillade
for three, presumably to allow for any evaporation that might have taken place on the journey from the kitchen. Fork in one hand, bread in the other, a grateful nod in the direction of St. Antoine, the patron saint of truffle growers, and we started to eat.

The flavor of a truffle is the continuation of its scent, complex and earthy, neither mushroom nor meat, but
something in between. It tastes, more than anything else I know, of the outdoors, and there is a nicely balanced contrast in the mouth between the crunchy texture of the truffle and the bland smoothness of the eggs. You will find truffles in dozens of more elaborate recipes, from a millionaire’s ravioli to a Sunday-best chicken, but I don’t think you can beat simplicity. Eggs, scrambled or in an omelet, make the perfect background.

We somehow finished the third person’s portion between us, and rested. The local corset expert was talking about the benefits to one’s
forme
of correct posture. The thrust of her argument, delivered between mouthfuls of apple crumble and cream, was that you could eat what you wanted as long as you sat up straight and wore sufficiently sturdy and supportive undergarments. I wondered if the editors of
Vogue
were aware of this.

The tempo of the restaurant had slowed. Appetites had been satisfied, although the more ambitious customers were still showing signs of life over the choice of desserts. I felt I should have a taste of cheese, a bite, just a little something to go with the last glass of wine. Modest servings, however, were not on the menu. An entire Banon arrived, a puck of cheese wrapped in dried chestnut leaves and tied with raffia, firm on the outside, softening by degrees to an almost liquid center, salty, creamy, and pungent. Somehow that, too, disappeared.

A wonderful, simple lunch. Nothing to it, really, apart from excellent ingredients and a chef with the confidence and good sense not to muffle their flavors with unnecessary sauces and trimmings. Leave well enough alone, serve plenty of it, and respect the seasons is his formula. When truffles are fresh, serve truffles; when strawberries
are at their best, serve strawberries. I suppose this might be considered a slightly old-fashioned way to run a restaurant. After all, in these modern times everything from asparagus to venison comes to the table by plane and is available all through the year. Heaven knows where it all originates—hothouses, food factories, or different hemispheres, I imagine—but there it is, whatever you want, at a price. Or rather, several prices.

It costs more, obviously. It won’t be as fresh as local food, despite the miracles of refrigerated travel and a process that I’ve heard described as ripeness retardation. And, worst of all, it ignores the calendar, so there is none of the anticipation, none of the pleasure to be had from the year’s first glorious dish of a seasonal delicacy. It’s a great shame to miss that.

Spring is coming. Soon the
courtiers
of Carpentras will put away their scales and their adding machines, the gendarme will be able to give his whistle a rest, and the market will close down. The poachers and their dogs will move on, doubtless to some other nefarious activity. The chef at the Bistrot de France will change his menu, and fresh truffles won’t be seen again until the end of the year. But I’m happy to wait. Even for truffles, I’m happy to wait.

It must be at least twenty years ago that garden chic began to spread, like a delicate high-priced creeper, across the plains and valleys of the Luberon.

It came in the wake of the refugees who made their escape every year from the dank climates of the north. There was no doubt that they loved their second homes in Provence. They loved the light and the dry heat. And yet, looking around them once the novelty of sustained, predictable sunshine had worn off, they found that there was something missing. The countryside—mostly the grays and greens of weathered limestone crags and wizened
scrub oaks—was striking and often spectacular. But it was also—well, a little
bare
.

There was lavender, broom, and rosemary, of course, and vines and cherry trees, maybe even a dusty, long-suffering almond or two. But these weren’t enough to cure the itch for something more lush. The refugees began to pine for conspicuous color and ornamental vegetation. They missed their shady bowers and their flowerbeds. They wanted what they would call a proper garden—a riot of roses, great swags of wisteria to soften all that stone, trees that were noticeably taller than they were. And so, with a brave disregard for local conditions, they set about planning decorative oases among the rocky fields and terraced hillsides.

The climate, the soil, and the lack of water were major problems; human nature, unwilling to wait for results, was another. Gardens created from scratch can take anything from ten to twenty-five years before they reach the desirable, photogenic state of luxuriant maturity. Plane trees, oaks, and olives need much longer. The classic recipe for a lawn—seed, then mow and roll for two hundred years—puts an even greater strain on a garden-lover’s patience. It was clear that nature was sadly lacking in vim and acceleration, and couldn’t possibly be left to her own devices. Who wants to spend a lifetime of summers surrounded by twigs?

The impatience of foreigners was, at first, a source of local bewilderment. What was the hurry, why the rush? In an agricultural society, accustomed to the slow turn of seasons and an annual growth rate measured in millimeters, the idea of tinkering with the pace of nature was unknown. But it didn’t take too long for the penny to drop, and the refugees’ urge for rapid results eventually turned
into a blessing. In fact, it has spawned an industry: instant gardens, shipped in and set up with astonishing speed, astonishing skill, and, it must be said, at astonishing cost.

More often than not, the process begins below ground level. Before anything can be planted, there is the question of what it should be planted in, and immediately we come up against the difference between fertile earth and plain old land. The first exploratory digs in the garden-to-be are not encouraging. Thin, parched stuff it is, more stone than anything else, sprinkled with reminders of the previous owner: fragments of crockery, rusty oil cans, twisted bicycle wheels, pastis bottles, the odd decomposing boot. That won’t do at all. What you need, Monsieur, for the garden of your dreams, are tons—many tons—of good rich soil. And of course, since water is the lifeblood of a garden, an irrigation system to keep it from drying out. Only then can we commence with the business of planting.

All at once, there are intimations of bankruptcy, and for some people this is the moment when they rediscover the simple charms of thyme and lavender, which manage to exist and even thrive without imported soil or imported water. But other, braver souls, more visionary, more determined, or just richer, take a deep breath, dig into their pockets, and carry on.

Bulldozers to level the land arrive first, leaving behind giant banks of rocks and roots and any bushes unfortunate enough to have been standing in the path of progress. These unsightly humps have to be taken away. The removal squad is then followed by convoys of trucks—trucks piled high with earth excavated from some distant, more fertile spot, trucks packed tight with roses, oleanders, and sacks of fertilizer, trucks with lawns rolled up
like carpets, trucks with ready-made topiary gardens of box and holly, beautifully barbered into cones and spheres. And then there are the cornerstones of garden architecture, the trees.

It is not uncommon to see mobile forests swaying along the roads before they disappear up secluded driveways: plane trees to make a long, sweeping
allée
up to the house, olive trees to guard the pool, lindens, cypresses, and chestnuts to charm the eye on a summer’s evening. They are all well past their adolescence and into early maturity, their root balls encased in giant tubs or bound in burlap. It’s an impressive sight. It will be an impressive garden—and a truly spectacular bill.

Over the years,
pépiniéristes
, or nursery gardeners, have sprung up throughout Provence like the buds of spring. They are even more numerous than real estate agents; hundreds of them take up eleven closely spaced columns in the Yellow Pages of the Vaucluse telephone directory. Their premises vary in size from a hut on the edge of a small field to more elaborate establishments set among several acres smothered in growth, and it was to one of these that I went in search of inspiration and a pot of geraniums.