Since I write memoirs and historical fiction, and since I have a passion for stories about and by regular people; since I’m the granddaughter of restaurateurs and gardeners, I found all of those interests joined in A Pig in Provence: Good Food and Simple Pleasures in the South of France by cooking instructor Georgeanne Brennan.
The book begins with a chapter on Goat Cheese—making it from scratch. From scratch in each of Brennan’s chapters means beginning with buying and/or breeding the animal—or plant. While I’ve never made goat cheese, I have welcomed a goat into the family. Mine was a nurse goat who took care of my bum lambs. In the tradition of Brennan’s Provence, a friend loaned her to me.
The second chapter came even closer to home for me as it introduces the pig and a butcher who makes house calls. On our farm, when I was a small child, we did our own and I can remember the hog hanging on a single-tree, the smell of singeing hair, and my dad and granddad scraping the hide. I don’t believe the people of Provence render their lard quite the same way as we did, but I remember vats of animal fat boiling on the stove and, in our age of innocence about animal fats, eating cracklings warm.
Further chapters focus on mushrooms and truffles; bouillabaisse, long summer meals, garlic, sheep, and wedding tarts. And here’s what’s wonderful about all of those chapters. Brennan writes something about production of the raw materials and how it fits into the local culture and ends each chapter, not with a simple recipe, but with pages of instruction on how to prepare a featured dish.
This lush chronicle of food, from farm to table, brought me back to my own time growing up on a farm in south-central Nebraska and working that farm as an adult. I could remember practically lying on the floor of the sheep stall trying to get a little colostrum from a ewe that couldn’t seem to make up her mind to live, and hauling wheelbarrow-loads of used bedding from my sheep barn to the garden to mulch my tomatoes and squash.
Do you have any favorite food memoirs you’d like to share? I’d love to read them.