A Jean Giono's favorite
Food and literature
Like
cinema, and much more than cinema, this very young art, literature has very frequently
included and borrowed scenes, references, and recipes from the culinary word.
Without mentioning the ancient Greek or Latin text, authors like the French
François Rabelais, in the 16th century, whose heroes, Gargantua and Pantagruel,
even left their name to qualify an abundance of food, and by extension an
abundance of everything, or more recently, the Catalan Manuel Montalbán whose
novels feature a gastronome-detective, and of course, the American writer and
essayist Jim Harrison who is probably more familiar to those reading this blog. When I
organized a festival in 2004 focused on the gourmet media, I wanted one of
those -not Rabelais, of course!- to be the president of my jury. Alas, Montalbán
died just before and Jim Harrison's health was declining...
Fox in the stew
Today, I
want to talk about Jean Giono, one of the French major novelists of the 20th
century. I am not sure whether he is really known in the US, but you might have heard about one of his masterpieces,
the horseman on the roof, as an eponymous movie with Olivier Martinez (Unfaithful)
and Juliette Binoche (The English Patient) was based on this beautiful novel.
The action takes place around 1830 in Provence, or exactly Haute-Provence, the
hinterland in the North of Marseille, in the beautiful and picturesque little
city of Manosque, during a cholera epidemy… Which doesn’t prevent Giono to give
us his recipe of polenta with white wine: The polenta au vin blanc, very sweet
and as liquid as a soup, was appetizing to swallow. Afterwards, it lays on the
stomach like red lead… [my old hussars] eat polenta with white wine when
they’re in a tight spot. In another novel, he described a recipe of a daube
(stew): From 1st of January to New
Year's Eve, a huge cauldron was on an open fire…; Without ever unhanging or
emptying it, we poured, day after day, beef, hare, wild boar, wild rabbits, red
wine, virgin oil, bacon, thyme bouquets, laurel, nutmeg. And Giono comments: “and
sometimes, we added fox, but moderately and only for the fumet." Well, this
foodie had also a certain sense of humor… If you have the possibility, read the
houseman on the roof, and if you are to visit the South of France, Manosque is
a must go… even if only to savor some cherries on a bench on the city’s central
square on a late spring early afternoon (personal memories).
Thon en chartreuse
Jean Giono was
not a cook himself, but he was undoubtedly a gourmand and a gourmet, probably
more gourmand than gourmet, as the list of his favorite dishes compiled in a
book by his youngest daughter may suggest it. Among those favorites, there is
the thon en chartreuse (tuna fish in chartreuse). Why chartreuse? Because this
was a dish initially cooked by the chartreux monks, the same who gave their
name to a mountain liquor. And why tuna fish? Giono’s daughter said that because
this was, at that time, the only fish that was leftover and able to be driven
the 60-mile mountainous road separating Manosque from Marseilles fishing harbor.
Ingredients
Except the
tuna fish and, possibly, a few “compulsory” vegetables (onion, lemon, tomato),
it is the typical dish where you put whatever you have in your garden or whatever you
found in the market. For 4 servings, I used:
1 big red
onion, thinly chopped
4 big
carrots, cut in slices
A large bunch
of sorrel leaves that survived under the snow (or spinach in the recipe that
inspired me)
1 fennel, thinly
sliced, with feather greens used for the marinade and the decoration
2 big
tomatoes, peeled and sliced
2 organic
lemons, carefully washed and sliced
2 thick
slices of tuna fish (covering the whole surface of my pot), previously
marinated in olive oil with fennel greens fennel seeds, salt, piment
1/2 bottle
of Provence wine, rosé (in my case) or white
Olive oil,
fennel seeds, salt, piment d’Espelette
Instructions
It cannot
be as simple as that.
First
slightly color 50% of the chopped onions in the olive oil;
Then, place
by successive layers 50% of the ingredients above, from the carrots to the
lemons and in the order of the list, adding a pinch of salt and piment between
each layer;
Place the
tuna fish, with its marinade;
And repeat
the operation with the remaining 50% of each ingredient, in the reverse order
this time, from the lemon to the onion.
Pour a
generous dose of olive and cover with the wine;
Then, like
for a bouillabaisse, put to boiling, then let simmer, lid on, for at least 2
hours. You can eat it then, but like many stews, it will be even better if it
rests overnight for instance, allowing the tuna fish to absorb all those
flavors and literally to “candy” in the wine, the olive oil and the vegetable
juice. After it rests, cook it another hour, with the lid off (those flavors as
soon as you remove the lid!!!) towards the end.
I served it
with croutons sautéed in olive oil with crush garlic, and of course, with a rosé
de Provence…
Even though this was Winter in Ohio, we heard the cicadas!
Thank you :)
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