Southern France

We had many nice meals when we were staying with friends outside Uzès, including friends of theirs who kindly included us in dinner parties. But the highlight of the week was a lunch at one of their neighbors. It was a repast that shows how deep the culture of food goes with the French and how intertwined it is with social interaction.

We started with champagne -- what else? -- and munchies consisting of olives, saucisses and a saucisson roquefort. We sat at a table in the courtyard under a big tree that created lots of shade. The hosts had decked out three outdoor tables for a dozen guests, tablecloths of Provencal colors, and several glasses at each place.

The first course was the classic melon and prosciutto, though the melon was from the market and perfectly ripe, so unusually flavorful. (The host had been a farmer and grown melons himself, so he knew how to find just the right ones.) The ham was local jambon de pays.

What followed was an assiette de crudités that raised this humble dish to a new level -- cucumbers, tomatoes and wonderful beets with vinaigrette, all fresh from his own garden. In the meantime, our cook lit some dried oak branches and let them burn down to charcoal so he could grill lamb chops from the local market. These he served with individual vegetable (courgettes) casseroles. No salad course but some beautiful cheeses that we lingered over with much more wine. And then large portions of a creamy, smooth flan, more champagne, music, coffee, more wine. We started at noon and left at 4:45.


The other culinary highlight was our meal at L'Olivier in nearby Serviers. It was a small simple restaurant with a fresh and innovative cuisine. We ate in the courtyard. Because it is limited to five tables some of the dishes were no longer available. Andrea got the daily special of foie gras de canard in roasted fresh figs for a starter -- a very nice combination -- and then got the scallops as a main course. I took the sauteed crayfish tails with chervil and ginger for a starter and filet of sandre, a freshwater fish similar to perch, for the main course. We had a white Cote de Rhone with it. Dessert was an assortment of chocolate dishes, with the standout being a kind of pudding that was like the molten part of a molten chocolate cake.

On our last day, I fixed a meal for our hosts that I had often fixed in France, a grilled chicken with lemon from Roger Verge's Cuisine du Soleil cookbook, paired with his tomato salad and grilled eggplant. We got two poulets fermiers at the market, along with the tomatoes and eggplant. You butterfly the chickens, flatten them as best as possible, then marinate four hours in salt, pepper, olive oil and oregano on a bed of sliced onion with lemon slices covering them. You remove the lemon slices, grill the chickens on both sides, then return them to the roasting pan with the onion, put the lemon slices back on top and pop them in a very hot oven. The tomato salad is very simple -- you put a couple of tablespoons of salt on the tomatoes, immerse them in red wine vinegar, drain after half an hour or so then dress with olive oil.

Paris

We had many nice meals in Paris and especially nice times with old friends. We tasted some classic French specialties in places like Fontaine de Mars (the foie gras!), Perraudin and Wepler.

But for the blog I want to focus on two restaurants where young chefs are adapting classic French cuisine in new ways. Chef Gilles Ajuelos at La Bastide de l'Odeon, a small restaurant tucked in next to the Odeon where we had lunch the day we arrived, seeks to reinvent Provençal cuisine.

For starters, we had rillettes de saumon and a roasted eggplant timbale they called a millefeuille. Both were delicious -- the rillettes were fluffy on toasted baguette slices and the eggplant was al dente with a great vegetable flavor. What stole the show, though, was Andrea's tagliatelle with girolles. The homemade noodles were perfectly cooked and the girolles were redolent of garlic and butter without reeking of either, firm and tender without being chewy or tough and were simply delicious. I had a very nice mullet filet with a version of ratatouille also done as a timbale (yes, somewhat similar to my starter).

On Sunday, after a nice appero at Closerie des Lilas, we walked down to Christophe, another small eatery behind the Pantheon on Rue Descartes, for another inventive meal. Where Bastide was all warm Provençal colors, Chef Christophe Philippe wants to paint in earth tones.

I had a spring roll with cochon basquaise that was delicious and we were asking ourselves what was Basque about it because Andrea ordered the echine as a main course. It turns out there is no spice or rub, these are simply a breed of pigs that are raised in France's Basque country. So Andrea's echine (loin) had the most marvelous pork flavor, savoring of the marbling that characterizes this cut. It was a dark brown rectangle on a white plate, with another brown rectangle of polenta overlapping it. Not a presentation to my taste, but the flavors were delicious.

I had a similarly monochromatic main course with my sweetbreads and mashed potatoes, both an off-white on a white plate. It was certainly the largest portion of sweetbreads I've ever eaten and tender beyond belief, with that oh-so delicate flavor of this cut. The potatoes may have been the smoothest whipped potatoes I've ever had, with a strong earthy taste and just the right hint of butter. Andrea's starter, by the way, were some very green haricots verts with a slice of bacon, no doubt from those same Basque pigs.

Wines were a good deal here (three young diners at the table next to us went through at least four bottles), and we had a nice chilled red (sorry, forgot where it was from).

Both of these restaurants were among the 102 reviewed in Alexander Lobrano's Hungry for Paris. These chatty descriptions, apparently a collection of magazine reviews, are supplemented by a helpful "In a Word" summary and a "Don't Miss" catalogue of signature dishes. Equally helpful are the listings at the end. We found both these restaurants under the heading "Bistros, Contemporary", as opposed to "Bistros, Traditional" and other restaurant categories ("Haute Cuisine", etc.).

To my amazement, under "Foreign Cuisines" (a short list of four), Lobrano listed L'As du Falafel, which indeed was exactly the takeaway falafel place in the Marais that I always went to on Sunday and that we visited again on Sunday for a falafel sans pareil.

Rosé wines

Addy Bassin's MacArthur Beverages (on MacArthur Boulevard) is my favorite wine store in DC, at least for European wines. They have a simply outstanding selection of French, German and Italian wines with great Austrian and Spanish. The staff is expert, not just knowledgeable, and get out to visit the vineyards. Their recommendations are very reliable.

They have wine tastings most every Saturday and we get down there every six to eight weeks. Yesterday they had five rosé wines out -- a couple from Provence, a Virginia wine, a Cote du Rhone and a Bordeaux.

We liked both the Provencale wines, found the Virginia wine very drinkable but did not much care for either the Rhone or Bordeaux by comparison.

The one we ended up buying was a 2008 Domaine de Triennes, the second of the two Provencale wines we tasted. It is fruity and dry at the same time, in the wonderful flinty way that many French wines have. It is made from the Cinsault grape, according to the Triennes Web site, and the 2008 cépage won a gold medal.

The vineyard is at Nan-les-pins and was purchased at the end of 1989 by Aubert de Villaine and Jacques Seysses, two Burgundy vintners who were looking for a property in the Var. The former Logis de Nans is located east of Aix-en-Provence on a southern facing slope comprising 46 hectares of limestone terroir. It was renamed Triennes in the honor of the Triennia, bacchanalian feasts that happened every three years during Roman times. The photo above shows the vineyard.

Rosé is made by letting the skins soak in the first press to give it the color. It has historically been ignored by wine snobs as a cheap table wine and it will probably never rise to the refinements of the great varietals and labels. But they are taken more seriously now.

There was a huge fight in the European Union this spring over a proposed edict from Brussels that would allow vintners to mix red and white together and label it rosé instead of going through the longer, and more expensive process of making a true rosé. Many people probably think that's the way rosé is made anyway, but the French led the fight against this new rule. It would be like mixing Coke and Sprite together and selling it as root beer -- just not the same.

Fortunately, the campaign was successful and the rule was abandoned, so that rosé from Europe at least will continue to be made in the traditional way.

We drank a lot of rosé during our recent trip to France, which was in Languedoc just at the border with Provence. There were numerous Cote du Rhone vineyards there and we bought the wine at local organic vintner, Natura. It was a pale rosé (rosé gris), very light and delicate, and perfect for the climate and the food.

The Triennes is somewhat more robust and fruitier. It was our first choice, though the other Provencale wine, Whispering Angel, was a close second. They were similar, but the Triennes seemed more elegant. The Boxwood from Virginia was also quite good, much like the Virginia rosé we had last week at the farm dinner.

The tasting price for the Triennes was $13.99 a bottle, compared to the normal $15.99. That's more than we usually pay for a rosé, but that's why they have tastings.

La vie en rose

We had the great good fortune earlier this month to spend a few days visiting some American friends at their fabulous house in southern France, near Uzes, a market town in Languedoc.

We timed our arrival for a Friday so that we could go to the Uzes market on Saturday, and it was worth the effort. Uzes is a well-preserved medieval city and the market fills the winding streets of the historic center.

I lived in France for 11 years and always loved the markets. I lived near Nation in Paris and generally went to the Saturday morning market in the Cours de Vincennes or the quirkier Marche d'Aligre (which was written up in the recent Gourmet issue on Paris as part of their discovery of the eastern part of the city).

Probably the most spectacular market I visited was the one in Perigeux, in the heart of truffle and foie gras country.

The Uzes market was also terrific, though. There were at least a dozen cheese vendors and we bought several nice goat cheeses. We guessed wrong on a baker who sold us some croissants that were not great. The most exotic stands were those with huge porcelain bowls of olives and tapenade and spices.

My goal at the market was to get a real gigot d'agneau to fix for our hosts. We found a butcher stand where he cut the gigot from the back half of a lamb, trimmed and wrapped it up for us.

I also wanted to find cocos blancs, which I had read about in a cookbook. These are fresh white beans in season in early summer, so they were available in great abundance. So we had our meal with the roast gigot -- you only have to insert slivers of garlic into it and pop it in the oven -- and the beans, which I shelled and cooked only about 10 minutes. We dressed them with oil and gremolata and served them at room temperature with the medium-rare lamb. Delicious.

We continued to live off the fat of the land, so to speak. On Monday, we found a store open to buy echine de porc, the chops cut from the loin rather than the rib, which have much more marbling and are great for grilling. A neighbor in the little village brought by some eggplant and squash from the community garden, so we grilled everything for dinner, getting a nice char on the vegetables and drizzling with balsamic vinegar.

It was part of a wonderful time that started with a welcome dinner from our hosts of grilled salmon paired with a fragrant ratatouille that was great the first night and even better when we had it again with the lamb. We consumed gallons of rose wine from the local vineyard, an organic producer who sold wine in bottles and in boxes. So we had a great time.