A Pig in Provence: Good Food and Simple Pleasures in the South of France

A Pig in Provence: Good Food and Simple Pleasures in the South of France

by Georgeanne Brennan
A Pig in Provence: Good Food and Simple Pleasures in the South of France

A Pig in Provence: Good Food and Simple Pleasures in the South of France

by Georgeanne Brennan

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Overview

A woman and her family give up life in 1970s America for a farmhouse in southern France in this memoir peppered with delicious French recipes.

From the publisher of Under the Tuscan Sun comes another extraordinary memoir of a woman embarking on a new life—this time in the South of France. In 1970, James Beard Award–winning author Georgeanne Brennan set out to realize the dream of a peaceful, rural existence en Provence. She and her husband, with their young daughter in tow, bought a small farmhouse with a little land, and a few goats and pigs and so began a life-affirming journey. Filled with delicious recipes and local color, this evocative and passionate memoir describes her life cooking and living in the Provençal tradition.

Praise for A Pig in Provence



“You can almost smell the lavender as you follow Brennan’s love affair with the province that became her second home and shaped the culinary persona of this cooking teacher and food author. Brennan is a talented storyteller.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Georgeanne Brennan’s captivating memoir reminds me of why I, too, was enchanted by Provence. She beautifully captures the details of living in a place where the culture of the table ties a community together—where everyone knows the butcher and the baker, and everyone depends on the farmers.” —Alice Waters, owner, Chez Panisse

“Fascinating . . . Brennan revels equally in the preparation and consumption of the regional cuisine You can almost hear her lips smacking.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Georgeanne Brennan’s romance with Provence continues to deepen, and the result of her long residence there is an intimacy with local people, food, and folkways. I would love to pull up a chair to her table.” —Frances Mayes, author of Under the Tuscan Sun

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781452119229
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Publication date: 10/12/2021
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 228
File size: 1 MB
Age Range: 13 - 18 Years

About the Author

Georgeanne Brennan is an award-winning author of cooking and gardening books. She lives in Northern California and Provence, where she runs a seasonal cooking school.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1

A Personal History of Goat Cheese

The first goats. Lassie dies. Advice from Mme. Rillier.

Reinette gives birth. Farmstead cheese for sale.

 

“How much are they?” Donald asked as we stood in the heart of a stone barn in the hinterlands of Provence, surrounded by horned animals whose eyes were focused, unblinking, on us. Ethel, our three-year-old daughter, held my hand. The animals pushed against me, nuzzling my thighs and nibbling at the edge of my jacket. In the faint light cast by the single lightbulb suspended from the ceiling, I could see the dark mass of goats stretching toward the recesses of the barn and feel their slow but steady pressure as they pushed closer and closer. My nostrils filled with their pungent odor and the fragrance of the fresh hay on the barn floor, with the faintly damp, earthy aroma of the floor itself, and with the scent of all the animals that had preceded them in the ancient barn. The heat of their bodies intensified the smell, and although it was a cold November day, the barn was warm and cozy. Its earthy aromas were homey and comforting.

 

        “Eh, ma foi. It’s hard to decide. How many do you want? They’re all pregnant. They were with the buck in September and October. They’ll kid in February and March.” The shepherd, a woman, leaned heavily on her cane, making her look older. She was dressed in layers of black, including black cotton stockings, the kind you see in movies set in prewar France, her only color a dark blue parka and a gold cross at her throat. A black wool scarf tied under her chin covered her hair.

 

        We wanted to have enough goats to make a living. Our calculations, based on the University of California and USDA pamphlets we’d brought with us when we moved to Provence a month before, were that a good goat would give a gallon of milk a day and a gallon would make nearly a pound of cheese. French friends had told us that we could make a living with the cheese produced from the milk of twenty to thirty goats.

 

        “Why are you selling them?” I asked.

 

        “Oh, I’m getting too old to keep so many. I have more than thirty.” She looked around, then pointed at a large, sleek goat, russet and white. “I can sell you that one. Look at her. She’s a beauty. Reinette, the little queen, I call her. She’s a good milker, about four years old. Always has twins too.”

 

        She moved across the barn and grabbed the goat by one horn, put her cane under her arm, and pulled back the goat’s lips. “Take a look. See how good her teeth are. She’s still young.”

 

        Reinette was released with a slap on her flank and went over to another goat standing aloof from the others. This one had a shaggy, blackish brown coat and scarred black horns that swept back high over her head.

 

        “This is Lassie. She’s la chef, but getting old like me.”

 

        I expected the woman to cackle, but she didn’t. Instead she sighed and said, “She’s getting challenged by some of the younger goats now, but she’ll be good for a few more years.”

 

        Donald walked over to the goat and stroked her head. She stared at him with her yellow eyes and inky-black pupils.“What others are you selling?”

 

        “Mmm. I could sell you Café au Lait.” She pointed to a large, cream-colored goat with short hair and an arrogant look. “You might have trouble with her. You’ll need to show her who’s boss. She’d like to be la chef, take Lassie’s place.”

 

        As if in response, Café au Lait crossed over to Lassie and gave her a hard butt in the side. Lassie whirled and butted her back, a solid blow to the head that echoed in the barn, bone on bone. Ethel pulled closer to me, holding my hand tightly, but kept her eyes on the battling goats.

 

        Ça suffit! Arrête! Sâles bêtes!” the woman shouted at the goats, menacing them with her cane. Lassie faced down the larger Café au Lait and the barn settled back into quiet.

 

        “Why doesn’t Café au Lait have horns?” I asked.

 

        “Sometimes I cut them off when they’re kids. I did hers. They looked like they were going to grow in crooked.”

 

        She continued her sales pitch. “Café au Lait is only three years old, and last year she had triplets. She’s a good goat.” She showed us four more animals that she was willing to sell and kept up her spirited commentary on their characters and fertility patterns.

 

        Donald and the woman agreed on a price of 350 francs each, and he made arrangements to pick up the beginning of our goat herd in two days. We all shook hands and said goodbye, then wound our way back toward the square where we had parked our car. I made sure Ethel’s knitted cap, a yellow-and-orange-striped one of her choosing, was tied snugly beneath her chin, then pulled up the hood on my jacket and put my gloves back on.

 

        As we walked through the narrow ruelles, the tiny streets of the near-abandoned village, Donald quietly remarked on the ghostly feeling of the crumbling houses with their fallen roofs exposing rotted wooden beams and piles of fallen stones. Wild berry canes pushed through some of the ruins and fig trees had taken possession of others.

 

        It was hard to imagine Esparron-de-Verdon as a thriving village, and impossible not to think of the woman and her goats living there as relics of the past, clinging to a way of life that was long gone. 

 

        Surely what we were doing was something different. After all, we had bought a farmhouse in the country, not in an abandoned village, and we were college graduates. Donald had a degree in animal husbandry from the University of California at Davis, and while we were going to make traditional French cheese, we would bring modern methods to our technique, or so we thought. I was a little scared, though. We didn’t have a lot of money, and we needed to succeed.

 

        First, we had to learn how to make cheese. Our USDA pamphlets, directed at large-scale commercial milk production and cheese making for the United States market, didn’t discuss small-scale production of cheese from raw goat’s milk. So far, no one, including the woman who had just sold us our first goats, had been able to tell me exactly what to do other than add rennet to milk.  

 

        “Mommy, can we have chickens and rabbits too?” Ethel asked as we passed a ramshackle chicken coop made of corrugated tin and chicken wire and utilizing the three remaining walls of one of the sturdier ruins. Her favorite toys were her rubber farm animals, and she was delighted by the idea of having real animals, in addition to our dog, Tune (short for Petunia), who we had brought from California.

 

        “Shh,” I said, “not so loud.” The silence was strong and heavy, and I sensed it was best to leave it unruptured.

 

        I bent down toward her. “Yes, of course we can. We’ll feed the chickens every day and collect their eggs. And build a nice house for them.”

 

        I wasn’t so sure about rabbits. Keeping rabbits meant having to kill them for meat. I knew that on a real farm, the kind we were going to have, you couldn’t just have animals as pets. I wasn’t sure I was ready for that part yet. I had no farm experience, having grown up in a small Southern California beach town where surfing and sunbathing were the primary occupations. Chickens I could easily see—they had been part of my original vision when I imagined life in rural Provence, along with long, slow days of cooking, reading, writing, and sewing, with the occasional visit to Paris and trips to Italy and Spain, countries Donald and I had fallen in love with during our one-year honeymoon when we were students seven years before.

 

 

Copyright © 2007 by Georgeanne Brennan

 

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

 

Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be submitted online at www.harcourt.com/contact or mailed to the following address: Permissions Department, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.

Table of Contents

introduction page vii

Chapter 1 A Personal History of Goat Cheese page 1

Salade au fromage du chèvre avec croûtons frites— page 32

Goat Cheese Salad with Fried Bread

Chapter 2 A Pig in Provence page 35

Porc à l’ancienne avec moutarde et câpres— page 60

Braised Pork Shoulder with Mustard and Capers

Chapter 3 Fungal Obsessions page 63

Poulet au genièvre farci aux champignons sauvages— page 92

Juniper-Rubbed Chicken Stuffed with Wild Mushrooms

Chapter 4 Bouillabaisse for All page 95

Bouillabaisse toulonnaise— page 118

Bouillabaisse, Toulon Style

Chapter 5 Long Summer Meals page 121

Soupe au pistou— page 148

Vegetable Soup with Basil-Garlic Sauce

Chapter 6 The Essence of Garlic and Le Grand Aïoli page 151

Le Grand Aïoli— page 164

An Aïoli Feast

Chapter 7 Sheep and Pieds-et-Paquets page 167

Gigot d’agneau aux herbes de Provence— page 188

Leg of Lamb with Rosemary, Thyme, and Lavender

Chapter 8 Wedding Tarts page 191

Tarte aux tomates— page 205

Tomato Tart

epilogue page 207

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