A Year in Provence (Vintage Departures)

I said to Massot that I thought it was a shame the sangliers were hunted quite so relentlessly by so many hunters. “But they taste delicious,” he said. “Specially the young ones, the marcassins. And besides, it’s natural. The English are too sentimental about animals, except those men who chase foxes, and they are mad.”

We arrived at the olive oil mill in Maussane two months early. The new crop of olives wouldn’t be gathered until January, and that was the time to buy oil at its most fresh. Luckily, said the manager of the mill, last year’s crop had been plentiful and there was still some oil left. If we would like to have a look around, he would pack a dozen lite

The official name of the establishment—Coopérative Oléicole de la Vallée des Baux—was almost too long to fit on the front of the modest building that was tucked away at the side of a small road. Inside, every surface seemed to have been rubbed with a fine coating of oil; floors and walls were slick to the touch, the stairs that led up to the sortin

essential part of a day out is lunch, and before going anywhere new we always studied the Gault-Millau guide as well as the map. We discovered that Maussane was perilously close to the Baumanière at Les Baux, where the bills are as memorable as the cooking, but we were saved from temptation by Madame Soliva. “Go to Le Paradou,” she told us, “and ha

MADAME SOLIVA, the eighty-year-old chef whose nom de cuisine was Tante Yvonne, had first told us about an olive oil that she said was the finest in Provence. She had better credentials than anyone we knew. Apart from being a magnificent cook, she was olive oil’s answer to a Master of Wine. She had tried them all, from Alziari in Nice to the United

In Cavaillon, there are seventeen bakers listed in the Pages Jaunes, but we had been told that one establishment was ahead of all the rest in terms of choice and excellence, a veritable palais de pain. At Chez Auzet, so they said, the baking and eating of breads and pastries had been elevated to the status of a minor religion.

every village celebrated August in one way or another—with a boules tournament or a donkey race or a barbecue or a fair, with colored lights strung in the plane trees and dance floors made from wooden planks laid across scaffolding, with gypsies and accordion players and souvenir sellers and rock groups from as far away as Avignon.

We decided to go to a simple restaurant in Goult, a small village with an invisible population and no tourist attractions of any kind. It would be like eating at home, but cleaner.

The sun was a great tranquilizer, and time passed in a haze of well-being; long, slow, almost torpid days when it was so enjoyable to be alive that nothing else mattered. We had been told that the weather often continued like this until the end of October. We had also been told that July and August were the two months when sensible residents left P