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The turn off is small and miss-able, shielded by trees and shrubbery even at the start of the year. As we start up the winding, rutted driveway, I anxiously reach for the Tarte Tropézienne my partner Laila and I picked up in Cannes and placed—carelessly, in hindsight—in the backseat of our rented Renault. The layered dessert is both for research and pleasure: I’m here to write my cookbook, le SUD: Recipes from Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, and La Tropézienne is one of the recipes I’m aiming to perfect.
It’s a fitting task for a certain pegboard-covered kitchen. La Pitchoune, the house Julia Child built in 1965 in the hills above the Côte d’Azur, has been featured on television, in books, in movies. Now a cooking school and vacation rental, “La Peetch” is currently stewarded by American Makenna Held. She’s generously offered me the run of the place for January.
The kitchen remains as one imagines it did when Julia Child built it. Tart rings, copper pots, measuring spoons, and whisks line the four walls, with outlines marking a designated spot for every single item. Market baskets pile high in a corner; the screened door bangs shut in a way that feels like many have entered through it. And many have. I’m one in a steady line to have the honor and privilege of cooking in this space, a list that includes not just its famous first inhabitant, but also M. F. K. Fisher, Judith Jones, Simone Beck, James Beard, and countless chefs, cooks, and French cooking enthusiasts in between.
I’ve spent the past 18 months researching le SUD across the wide expanse that makes up Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur. From citrus and pasta on its eastern border with Italy, to socca and small, rounded Cailletier olives in Nice, to paella made with rice from the Camargue in Arles, Laila—who is also the book’s culinary researcher—and I have gone deep into the tables of the region. My master plan is to write my book in the mornings, explore in the afternoons, and get in that kitchen whenever I possibly can. La Peetch will, in essence, serve as my own type of writer’s retreat.
The best place to start—either in the work of writing about food in France, or the simple act of living life in Provence—is at the marché, and this proves a constant in my life here almost instantly. There are a number of markets to choose from in close proximity. In the weeks to come, I will settle into a routine: Fridays will be spent at nearby Valbonne’s weekly outdoor marché; a drive to the covered market on Cours Masséna in Antibes will be for whenever I can spare the hour round trip (it's a block from the sea, and one of my favorite in all of Provence); yet most days will lead me to the nearby Le Marché de nos Collines.
On the first of many runs to Collines, I pick up freshly-prepared tapenade, local walnuts, and La Tomme de la Brigue—an aromatic, almost vegetal cheese made with Brigasque sheep’s milk that I first fell in love with on an earlier research trip to Tende, in the Roya Valley. It’s the inspiration for our first workday lunch in the house—a quick green salad with a garlicky dressing paired with the aforementioned tomme and walnuts—before we step into our temporary offices. Laila has claimed the dining room table, overlooking the long, stone-covered terrace outside.
I set up in the kitchen, as I will every day going forward, and empty my market bags onto the wooden counters until they overflow with local produce, eggs, honey, baguettes, braids of garlic, and bottles of Provençal wine and olive oil. I grab a pair of scissors from the wall and pop just outside the backdoor to the terraced garden. There are tidy lines of herbs to clip, radishes to pull, and small, bright kumquats to snack on. It’s a cook’s garden and sparser in the winter, certainly, but impossibly lush by my bare-pots-of-herbs-on-a-Parisian-balcony standards. Back inside, I embark on developing an egg-rich brioche for La Tropézienne and begin scrubbing vegetables for Daube Provençal.
As the linen-covered bowl of dough slowly rises on a stool in the corner and the combination of onions, carrots, beef, and red wine simmers gently on the stovetop, I grab a bowl of potato chips and leave the fragrant, quickly approaching clichéd, Provençal scene to regroup with Laila outside for apéro on the terrace. In summer months, this same terrace overlooking the pool below is coated in lush greenery, the long table shielded in dappled light; today, the winter sun grows the shadows long on our glasses (I'm sipping a gin and sherry cocktail that later makes its way into the book as the Martini Provençal). I note the time, take a sip, and text Joann Pai, the book’s photographer, who will be arriving later in the month to shoot. This is the light I want to capture when she arrives.
The next morning—and each one that follows—is spent writing. My writing routine is the same with every book: wake up early, light candles, make coffee. But pre-sunrise in the Provençal countryside hits differently than those at home in Paris. The house and its surrounding landscape are blanketed in a darkness so complete that it’s disorienting. I fumble my way to the kitchen with my computer and I open the refrigerator to take in my first, slumped attempt at a Tarte Tropézienne. Last night’s test was a fail: the brioche too dry, the pastry cream too thin, seeping from the sides and onto the platter beneath. It’s the kitchen and its former inhabitant’s well-documented tenacity that inspires me to mark up the recipe and start measuring flour anew, as my coffee silently brews.
Later that day, I hop in the car and drive to Antibes in search of a specific slice of pissaladière we ate on a research trip last summer. It’s still there, at the boulangerie just down the street from the marché, the crusty, oily (in a good way), nearly burnt (also in a good way) caramelized onion and olive-topped slice exactly how I remember it: an ideal afternoon snack, and an ideal inspiration for the the recipe I’ll write for le SUD.
This combination of the familiar and the new, as I breathe the air of the place I’m writing about, allows me to connect to the material in a way that is deeply invigorating—somehow, I barely resent those 5 a.m. writing wake-ups.
In the following weeks, I make steady progress on the headnotes that weave together the book; style, shoot, and eat with my team on those produce-studded countertops (we are later also joined by photography assistant Kate Devine and kitchen assistant Lise Kvan); steadily line the teal shuttered window outside the living room with our emptied bottles; make multiple imperfect Tropéziennes—none worthy of ink on the page—and absolutely nail recipes for garlic roast chicken, pissaladière, and candied kumquats.
It won't be until I'm back home in Paris that I finalize both the manuscript and the recipe for La Tropézienne that now lives on page 232 of the book. But the spirit of my time in le Sud is in every bite.
