Dreaming of warm places with spicy food

Spices in the Machane Yehuda Market, Jerusalem, 2006.

Cold, cold winter here: frequent snow storms, grey skies with rare glimpses of blue. Thursday's temperatures exceptionally went into the fifties, but Friday will be back well below freezing with a low of 9º F.

I'm dreaming of warmer places and of the spices from exotic cuisines in faraway places. At right is a random selection of images of spicy food that I've enjoyed on past journeys.

And here are my dreams of places I've been and new ones where I want to go:

Herbs in the Machane Yehuda Market

I dream of the lands surrounding the Mediterranean.  Friday in Rabat, Morocco, it's forecast to be 64º -- I dream of eating a special Moroccan tagine with the hot red sauce called harissa. I've never been there, but I can dream!

In Jerusalem, Friday's temperature is 60º and if I were there, I could eat falafel with the Yemenite sauce called zhoug made from cilantro, parsley, cumin, coriander, hot hot pepper, and olive oil. I love to think of Israeli markets full of amazing spices and herbs as well as many exotic foods all ready to eat.

Provence: spices in the market at Arles, 2016.

In Nice, France, it is forecast to be 60º. I dream of fish stew with the sauce called rouille made of olive oil with breadcrumbs, garlic, saffron and cayenne pepper. I remember Provencal open-air markets full aromatic spices.

Closer to home, I dream of New Orleans where it's 70º. Imagine a plate of newly-opened oysters with lemon juice, horseradish, and a handy bottle of Tabasco sauce  -- on Avery Island near NOLA, the McIlhenny family has made Tabasco Sauce since 1868.

I dream of San Diego where high temperatures this week will be 68º and I could go to a nice taco stand and enjoy a burrito with some hot salsa in sight of the beautiful Pacific Ocean.

San Diego, California: Roberto's Burritos in 2009.

Near LA (Friday expected high 71º) they make sriracha which started as an ethnic Asian condiment and is now everywhere. And I could also enjoy the beach.

The vast Pacific offers many exotic islands to dream about. I'd love to travel to Fiji, Easter Island, New Zealand, New Guinea and more. I also love Hawaii where temperatures are in the seventies, as they are almost all winter. I dream of several favorite restaurants in and near Kona like Island Lava Java where I often have ordered fish tacos or Salade Niçoise -- Hawaii is home to Pacific Rim cuisine which includes almost every warm-weather cuisine in the world!

Saint Lucia in the Caribbean: a spicy lunch some years ago.

The Caribbean includes Cuba where the temperature is in the eighties and though I've never been there, I'd like to try the famous spicy black beans and more, as well as see the fascinating island with its famous old cars.

On a trip to Saint Lucia we tried the local curry chicken roti, a dish influenced by East Indian people who came to various British colonies in the Caribbean. At the resort where we stayed, we also enjoyed lots of interesting fish dishes. It's 83º there and that would feel good. So would snorkeling!

Florida Keys: The Fish House, 2017. Their "Matacumbe" preparation
with tomatoes and onions is very delicious!

In Key Largo, Florida it's 81º and I dream of the spicy fish at the Fish House there: not to mention key lime pie! Also driving the beautiful long road across many causeways, eventually arriving in Key West.

I dream of many other exotic locations, where the food is spicy and the weather is pleasantly hot. It's 103º in Buenos Aires and 90º in Rio -- maybe too hot, though I'd love to see them! It's only 81º in San Salvador de Bahia, Brazil, where I'd love to taste the foods made famous in the books of Jorge Amado -- especially the spicy dish called Feijoada. Enough dreaming!

Finally: this is loco moco, a Hawaiian special plate lunch including hamburger, rice, gravy, and a fried egg.
It's total fusion food including flavors from several of the immigrant groups that make up the Hawaiian melting pot.

Van Gogh

I've been thinking about Vincent Van Gogh and his very sad life, which is mysterious to me. In the last couple of years I have been to two places associated with him. I visited the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam, which attempts to offer insight into his experience, and which presents him as a person possessing talent, determination, and discipline. The message I took from the museum is that Van Gogh was deeply troubled, but overcame his mental and personal problems in order to develop his craft and create a large body of works of great genius. Despite his failure to sell his work or receive conventional recognition, he had a number of friends in the art world, such as Gaugin, who did seem to admire his talent somehow.

Last spring, in Arles, France, I visited a few places where Van Gogh painted, notably the asylum where he was sometimes confined. I've written about it before, but I find myself returning to thoughts of Van Gogh and his tragic end.

Van Gogh's sketch of the garden of the asylum at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. From the museum website.

Photo from the window of the room where Van Gogh stayed
at the asylum, looking down into the garden. From our visit there.

The garden of the asylum.

Van Gogh's painting of the trees near the asylum. From the Museum website.

Trees near the asylum.

Playing: A Game of Pétanque

Here we are: back home in Ann Arbor, and I'm reading other people's blogs. At the blog titled "Where's my backpack," Ailsa Prideaux-Mooney has challenged her readers to create posts on the theme "PLAYING." To me, this is a great idea, as in fact, I rarely get photos of activities that would be considered "play." 

Birdwatching? I do it all the time for fun, but it's not really play. Eating and cooking? Some of the motives are similar -- but it's not really play. In my two recent trips, very few of my photos concern any conventional images of "play." I didn't, for example, take photos of musicians playing, the subject of several of the other blogs on the subject. Though I attended an opera performance, the musicians playing in fact seemed very very serious.

As I thought about play, I remembered watching a game of Pétanque in the small town of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer in France last April --

... and also remembered a few similar photos from the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris a week later:

From the "Discover France" website, an explanation of this game and its popularity in France:

"The game of boules, otherwise known as pétanque, is perhaps the sport that is closest to French hearts. Similar to British lawn bowling or Italian bocce, the French version is traditionally played with metallic balls on a dirt surface beneath plane trees, with a glass of pastis at hand. The local boulodrome is a social focal point in southern France. 

"The object of the game is to throw your balls — usually with somewhat of an arched back-spin — so that they land closer to the small object ball (cochonnet) than those of your opponent, or strike and drive the object ball toward your other balls and away from your opponent's."

I've seen the game played elsewhere, including in the park a few blocks from my home, but these photos seem the most playful for the blogger theme.

At Home Salade Niçoise

Salade Niçoise is a French classic. Julia Child wrote my favorite recipe for it. I've ordered it in restaurants and bistros in Paris and in its place of origin, Provence. During our recent trip, I ate Salade Niçoise at a tiny restaurant in the midst of the Camargue in the Rhone Delta, with its salt marshes and vast open spaces. It's where we saw flamingos, many other wild birds, black bulls, white horses, and rice paddies.

The Salade Niçoise there included all the classic components: potatoes, green beans,
tuna, anchovies, boiled egg quarters, olives, tomatoes, and in addition a decorative
piece of toast and radish flower. The real classic uses canned tuna!

And now for the version I made for dinner tonight:

I used the same basic ingredients, arranged on glass plates atop lettuce leaves.
This was the first time I've used the placemats that I bought in Arles at a beautiful shop
with a large selection of very good quality Provencal textiles. 

"Provence, 1970"

M.F.K. Fisher is one of the most respected food authors in American history. In 1970, accompanied by her sister Norah, she revisited a number of her favorite places in France, subjects of her very successful books.

In Provence, she visited several of her friends: Julia and Paul Child, Child's coauthor Simone Beck and her husband; Child's editor Judith Jones and her husband; James Beard; and Richard Olney, another cookbook author. Visiting the Provencal homes of Julia and Paul Child and some of the others, M.F. (as she's called in the book) cooked and shared meals which continued into long evenings of conversation.

Provence, 1970 tells the history of a special moment in history through cookbooks and food authors, which is in itself an interesting thing to do. Author Luke Barr makes the claim that these key food and cookbook authors invented a new American attitude towards cuisine and cookbooks during these encounters. I'm not really convinced by his claim, which he restates often and in many ways, but never persuasively shows that the changes in American cuisine and cookbooks was in any way caused by the events he described.

I did find a lot of things to enjoy in reading the book. I especially loved that quite a bit of M.F.'s tourism described in the book took place in the exact places I visited last month. The numerous descriptions of menus, dishes, and their preparations (quoted or paraphrased from M.F. I assume) are so vivid you feel as if you are at the table with a morsel in your mouth. And my favorite section was essentially a diversion from his main point -- a chapter on memories of the first meal each of the main characters in the book had in France.

Some related books from my collection.

A unique and valuable source fed this narrative: M.F.'s own diary of her 1970-1971 trip. Barr is M.F.'s great-nephew (his grandmother Norah was the travel companion for the first part of M.F.'s trip), and a few years ago, preparing to write this book, he found the diary in a private family archive belonging to one of M.F.'s daughters. Barr's presentation of M.F.'s thoughts from the diary is augmented by material from other sources, such as Julia Child's memoir My Life in France, and Judith Jones's autobiography The Tenth Muse (both of which I've read).

My copies of some of the key cookbooks that Barr mentions.

Did American cookbooks and interest in cooking change because these authors made it change? Barr's point that excessive reverence for French cuisine was diminishing at that point, thanks in a large part to a new attitude on the part of the immensely influential and popular Julia Child. In the winter of 1970, Child and Beck had the second volume of Mastering the Art of French Cooking in press, having just worked through a massive and painful editing process with Judith Jones.

Child, though, was changing: her "aversion to snobbery was deeply ingrained, reflected in her whole persona, her slightly comic, encouraging patter on television, her no-nonsense practicality, her warmth.... Child was ready to turn the page on the retrograde attitudes and old-fashioned ideas. American food was changing and she was ready to embrace that change." (Provence, 1970, p. 133)

James Beard, who had been amazingly influential and popular himself to that point (witness: he's one of the chefs with his own postage stamp), was just about to complete a book on American cooking. Though he was in France for a stay at a weight-loss and health improvement spa, he took time off to visit with the group, and appears to have agreed with them in assessing trends in American culinary affairs.

Richard Olney, who is now only known to the most diligent of cookbook fanatics, had just published a book on classical French cooking. Barr says that though a good cookbook author, Olney was out of step with the trend -- of all these authors he's the only one completely unrepresented in my own library, which suggests how he didn't quite make it into the canon. From Olney's New York Times obituary: "Mr. Olney's most important disciple was Alice Waters, who keeps a jacketless, food-stained copy of 'Simple French Food' in the kitchen of her celebrated restaurant, Chez Panisse, in Berkeley, Calif. " (NYT, August 4, 1999)

Barr's accounts of these important authors' conversations and their inner thoughts (based on the sources I've mentioned, especially the diary) is insightful, especially with respect to their varied views on taste, style, and authenticity. His establishment of their importance in American food writing and cookbook writing is believable and useful. His description of American popular culture concerning French cuisine and modern cooking is reasonably accurate, I thought. He does present a lot of evidence that the change in these authors' views reflected an overall change in American culture coming from many sources. And though the writing in Provence, 1970 is sometimes maddeningly repetitive, it's still pretty readable.

But every one of these authors was already prepared to change before their shared time in Provence, he shows, in a way contradicting his own claim. Julia Child had clearly decided before this meeting that she would no longer co-author books with Beck. She knew that her later books would be less reverent about French food -- her next one, From Julia Child's Kitchen was indeed more relaxed, and her TV show began to include more non-French recipes. Barr himself documents that she was already planning these changes. Judith Jones, before the Provence dinners, had been trying to convince Beck to write a book of her own, though the final agreement seems to have occurred during their stay. Beard had never been that reverent anyway. And Olney was, as I said, out of step.

In sum, Provence, 1970 is a rather flawed book. However, I enjoyed it quite a bit even though I don't at all believe its central thesis is proved by the material in the book.

My favorite food memoir.

Provence, 1970 is the next selection for my culinary reading group, and I'm also looking forward to what the other group participants will have to say about it. I wrote more about M.F.K. Fisher HERE.

Asparagus Season

Asparagus is in season. We saw it in the market in Arles, and I'm sure we'll see it in the Paris market too, if we get there. I have eaten it several times; the three photos show the most beautiful arrangements on the plate. I imagine I'll eat more.

Sunday Lunch near the Pont du Gard

We hoped to find birds at the famous Pont du Gard, but a bitter wind
was discouraging to both us and the birds. 

The Pont du Gard is a Roman aqueduct supported by a bridge over the river Gard; it's one of the most impressive
surviving Roman structures. Built around 2000 years ago, it carried water 21 miles from the nearby hills to the Roman city of Nimes. We climbed up a long stairway to see the panoramic view from above, and take a close look at the aqueduct.

Cold and hungry, we found a restaurant called La Provence in the tiny town
of Saint Bonnet du Gard. We approached the terrace through a
series of narrow walkways. The wisteria and irises growing there were
beautiful, but we wanted to eat inside where it was warm.

A vase of iris were on the table when we sat down at around noon.
After around a quarter of an hour, all the other tables were filled
with French people enjoying a leisurely multi-course lunch:
a wonderful French tradition that I was very happy to enjoy also.

We began with a vegetable soup, served from tureens.
Then my set menu began with this duck fois gras terrine, a bit of
sweet onion jam, and two raspberries. 

Len had the smoked salmon with "petites legumes." 

My main course was confit of duck with a sauce of cepe mushrooms.
Several dishes of vegetables and rice were served family-style.

A platter of Provencal tomatoes ready to share.

My incredible plate of cheese. I don't know what these are,
but their flavors are complex and delicious.

Dessert.

Scenery from the tiny town where we ate.

Arles: Saint Trophime Cloister

Between birding trips in the past week, we've visited several cloisters, churches, chapels, and other buildings around Arles, where we've seen some magnificent stone carvings. We spent quite a bit of time in the cloister of St. Trophime, attached to the former cathedral in Arles. The romanesque capitals and other carvings in this cloister are regarded as among the most beautiful stonework of that era, and the architecture is beautiful. A few images:

Our group viewing the cloister.

This capital is especially famous: it shows the three kings sleeping at an inn on their way to Bethlehem.

The church tower seen from the cloister.

I'm especially fond of romanesque art, and very impressed by several places we've visited this trip.