Caroline Craig - Provence: Recipes from the French Mediterranean

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This is a guide to cooking the Provenal way. For people who want to recreate the flavours of the Mediterranean at home, who want to eat simply but well on a day-to-day basis, who love to cook food for special occasions and dishes that rhyme with the seasons. Its also for people who enjoy reviving old skills, such as making homemade red wine vinegar or canning tomato coulis using authentic recipes from a family that does all of this.

My French family have been working the land in Provence for hundreds of years. The values and lessons from the joys and trials of such a life have shaped the way I live, the way I feel about home and the way I cook for others. Growing up in the UK, to me Provence was almost a secret place, another life. I have a grandfather, Maxime (Pap Xime), whose knowledge of the land, its biodiversity and the medicinal value of its aromatic herbs is unparalleled. He mows the grass under his olive trees at night so as not to disturb any bees. He also makes a mean Nougat at Christmas. His mother Antoinette, sisters, Rgine and Edme, and his daughter, my mother Franoise, are the most talented home cooks, gardeners and foragers I have ever known. This book shares something of our lives here and the recipes I take to life away from Provence, so you can bring a bit of this magical place into your own homes and kitchens.

My maternal ancestors hail from the southern foothills of the Mont Ventoux. The sun beats hard and dry, but aromatic herbs, vines and fruit trees prosper. My mother grew up on a fruit farm called La Cointe surrounded by pine forests, fields and orchards, the same farm as her father, aunts, grandfather, grandmother and great grandparents before her. The rigours and natural ebb and flow of peasant life meant that the women in the family learned how to deal with a glut of produce, how to make something wonderful out of almost nothing, how to feed the masses and cook with a generosity that isnt about extravagance or showing off, but instead one of spirit, taking real joy in cooking for others and celebrating the produce.

We no longer live in that great farmhouse together as an extended family, but we pitch in with each others grape, olive, truffle and cherry harvests, share our produce and gather to eat signature Provenal seasonal dishes, whether made with ingredients from the market or our own potagers. Such rituals are in keeping with Provences cultural calendar of ftes lauding the land and its bounty: La Fte de la Lavande in Sault, La Foire aux Asperges in Mormoiron, La Fte de la Figue in Caromb.

When we move far away from our families, cooking the dishes from home is a way of feeling close to them and keeping our traditions alive. In many ways it is because I have lived away from Provence that I have come to understand what is so special about it. And though I live in Provence happily now, I dont know where life might take me next. This book contains the rituals I take with me wherever I go and the dishes I come to again and again for the simple reason that they make me feel happy. It is not a guide to running a smallholding and I have not (I hope) directed you to buy expensive imported fruit and vegetables exclusively from the Mediterranean. I cooked Provenal dishes for many years in London using Britains beautiful fruit and vegetables, outstanding free-range meat and, frankly, world-class seafood. This book simply tells of a way of using good ingredients, wherever we may live, using recipes passed down through the generations of my family.

Not everything is in this book. It will take me a lifetime to gather every old recipe and skill: my aunts muscat grape juice; the homemade saucisson and goats cheese my great grandmother Antoinette used to make; but I hope these pages are enough to inject Provenal joie de vivre into kitchens, and bring simple peasant cooking out of holiday nostalgia and into your kitchen, wherever you are.

Provence is at the crossroads of civilisations. In our fields, we find fragments of Roman amphorae, roof tiles from villas long since fallen and arrowheads from Neolithic human societies. Though its borders are drawn by politics, Provences soul is wide open: Mediterranean, Levantine, North African. It is the fruit and vegetable garden of France. These ingredients, combined with Provences unique identity, position and history, have resulted in a cuisine full of heart, balance and soul, a cuisine that showcases its peoples reverence for the produce, the changing seasons and the land. For me, of course, these are more than just recipes, they are tied to memories: when my great aunt Tata Edme first had twenty of us over for soupe au pistou on her terrace; the sight of my mother canning jars of apricot and plum compotes for winter; the poignant, intimate moment that a special recipe was passed down when an older member of the family decided that it was time.

My culinary education involved watching and helping the older generation of women in my family in the kitchen, seeing things transform in the pan, tasting, noticing how a recipe was adapted, more obviously according to the season or, more subtly, according to which particularly special ingredient in a dish was in need of highlighting. Like so many of their generation, my great aunts and great grandmother never owned a cookbook. Their cooking was learned, instinctive, the same dishes made slightly differently each time. Some things will remain a mystery. My sisters and I have tried to get definitive instructions from my grandfather for preparing black olives and it is never the same year-on-year. We laugh whenever we open a particularly perfect batch as he never remembers how he made them.

In many ways, this book is a snapshot of how we do things at a certain time. To cook well, we must adjust and tweak according to what is good and what is nice. Is it a delicate spring vegetable, needing only a little butter or olive oil and some fresh herbs, or a gutsy late summer vegetable, capable of standing proud alongside strong aromatics like bay leaves, garlic, thyme and rosemary? I have made suggestions for substitutions and alternatives where appropriate, but I hope that you will use this book as a guide, make the recipes your own and put your own stamp on dishes as you cook from it.

A typical family meal in Provence is not composed of one course requiring a vast quantity of one dish per person but instead a main course systematically preceded by one dish and followed by another, sometimes two, which balances it out. The word course sounds very formal and labour intensive for the average weeknight, but this is not at all the case in reality.