Provence: The Cookbook

Craig (coauthor, The Little Book of Lunch), who descended from generations of farmers in Provence, arranges time-tested Provençal standards by season in this unfussy cookbook. Nothing nouvelle here: recipes include sandwiches of roast chicken and mayonnaise on baguette, green beans tossed in garlic butter, and tapenade made with a mortar and pestle. “Pizzas,” created by arranging tomato sauce and mozzarella on sliced day-old baguettes and baking them, are as out-of-the-box as the proceedings get. The author’s prose is often elegiac: one mini-essay describes the thrifty practice of eating broth followed by a second course of the vegetables used to make it, and a breakdown of the intense work behind a grape harvest strongly sets the mood. Recipes for dishes such as ratatouille and chicken liver pâté are sensible and detailed, as are those for everyday sweets, such as the simple yogurt cake used to teach millions of French children to bake. This languidly paced book culminates in menus for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, along with an overview of the ritual of arranging a display of 13 sweets (representing the 12 apostles and Jesus) including nougat, a sweet, orange blossom–flavored bread, and quince cheese. This is a pleasant, albeit familiar, paean to tradition. (Nov.)