 This nostalgia came out of a friend’s collection. I fall into the first double spread on page two and three — the chartreuse tablecloth, Faience crockery, imagining the weight of the silver in hand, the jar of macerating cherries on the lunch sideboard alongside two tourtes and a platter of steak with bone marrow, a glazed terra cotta urn topped with a basket of oranges, paint puddles of yellow and white light through the June Plane tree. Dining in a lovingly restored Provençal windmill. An OG of Entertaining books and a snapshot of 1980’s French Riviera. If I see it in your collection I like you more. Roger Vergé looks like he had fun. The son of a blacksmith, he was raised in a culture of craft. The words Le Moulin de Mougins taste like chilled rosé. So many other French chefs from that region and time leap to mind. I staged with one. I can see Richard Olney and Lulu Peyraud in it. The book’s production is Flammarion, and the design team is five people deep besides Vergé. It reads like they enjoyed working together. I could write at length about the people and the art in it. Learning the book was picked up in America by Stewart, Tabori, and Chang made me smile. Immediately I thought of Martha Stewart’s Entertaining. The two books are iconic-symbiotic — Stewart published in 1982 and Vergé in 1986. Both are lush with the spirit of the times. I imagine Martha looking like a star on the patio at Le Moulin de Mougins. *** I walked on the shoulder of a hilly winding road up to his restaurant. I could not afford to eat. It was my first trip to France. This is part of how I spent my one day off during the Festival de Cannes. I don’t know why I wasn’t on a local bus that day, maybe I was thinking exercise. I’m sure there’s an easier route than the one I took. I don’t recall having a water bottle. I bought Le Moulin de Mougins Calisson in the gift shop and I’m still glad I did that. I was an early international stagiaire and had enough for a six-week stay. I was cared for, but I wasn’t eating at a hit parade of 3-star restaurants. I did the same thing with Louis Outhier, walked east on the Promenade de la Croisette, the Mediterranean rolling in to my left, a good long way toward L’Oasis. I have made other pilgrimages on subsequent visits. Eating is ideal, but sometimes you can’t do it for an arm’s-length number of reasons. Then, I was on a pan bagnat budget. Everything was still ridiculously delicious. I made those journeys because I wanted to be near the chefs and restaurants I’d read about. As a young woman, I came into restaurant kitchens full of hope and dreams. André, Mark and I talked for hours about chefs we admired and meals we wanted to eat. One of the many gifts of the early years. *** Jeni Glasgow has joie de vivre and a thoroughly unique and seductive way with food and hospitality. She chefs at a writers’ retreat in the Luberon at La Gonette. It’s on my bucket list. I can hear my friends say, ‘Inshallah,’ in unison. *** New music week. 20252025Comments are closed.
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