The case for ingredients
Best-selling cookbook writer Patricia Wells was born and bred in Wisconsin but for more than 20 years has made do instead with dividing her time between Paris -- where she serves as restaurant critic for the International Herald Tribune -- and her farmhouse in Chanteduc, where she runs a cooking school. And it is the simple country cooking of the region around her rural retreat in northern Provence that serves as the focus of her latest work, The Provence Cookbook (HarperCollins, 338 pages, $49.95).

Hardly underexplored territory, this regional cuisine. But flip though the book and you will find that Wells does manage a fresh take, serving up personal recipes from favourite suppliers and local bistros, peppering the lists of ingredients with a splash of local lore, and here and there adding in short personal anecdotes and entertaining factoids, of which the most surprising I have yet to come across was that the Mediterranean tuna can swim at speeds up to 100 km/h.

"I found that fascinating," I said as we sat together to talk about the new book and the state of French cookery in a private room over the downtown Toronto restaurant Pangaea, where Wells did her Canadian book signing last week. "But I had to wonder why."

"What do you mean?"
Well, it's a sunny day on the Mediterranean. No one else is in a rush. The sardine just ahead is puttering along at 10 clicks or so -- why bear down on it at 100? What's the hurry?

"That's a good question," she acknowledged. "I shall have to ask him." He must be M. Edmond Lafont, who drives a truck full of fresh fish to Wells' neighbouring market at Vaison-la-Romaine every Saturday and provides the recipe here for a daube of tuna with green olives and red wine, along with another for a simple mussel soup. All the recipes in the book that are not her own seem to come from suppliers like this, or from neighbours, or nearby restaurants. And none of them -- from Le Mimosa's rabbit stuffed with pistachios and sage to guinea hen braised with capers and olives -- seems to pack many more ingredients than what you find in the title. Any decent home cook should be able to turn out a fair edition of what appears in this book.

"My food has become much simpler," Wells concedes. "What I like is more and more ingredient-driven rather than recipe-driven."

Since so many cooks and chefs I respect have expressed the same sentiment of late, I feel compelled to ask why.
"Well, it's natural, because we have better ingredients now," Wells replies. "We didn't have what we have now to cook with 20 years ago."

And she talks for a while about how impressed she has been with the food markets she has stopped in on this book tour through the United States. For there is no question that the disparity between French produce and what we have in North America is shrinking fast. That said, the French still have a lot to teach us about cooking and eating at a happier, more leisurely pace.

You get a sense of it in this book. For example, there is a recipe here for a decidedly simple but appealing dish called fricassee of chicken with garlic and sweet garlic confit, which calls for some 60-odd cloves all told. "While some cooks find it a chore to peel this quantity of garlic, I look upon it as a relaxing, calming task to be enjoyed with a glass of chilled rose," Wells writes.

If this is the style of cooking she teaches, it seems too that it is the sort of dining she prefers while pursuing her other gig, as restaurant critic at the International Herald Tribune. She states a dislike for dining at the sorts of establishments to which top chefs lend their names but not their toques -- like, say, Alain Ducasse in the Plaza Athenee. And likes the trend to casual dining taken by his predecessor there, Joel Robuchon, who last year opened a no-reservation, bar-dining-only restaurant in the Hotel Pont Royal called l'Atelier de Joel Robuchon, which offers value of a kind from a three-star Michelin chef at a time when -- from here, anyway -- it seems Spaniards like the redoubtable Ferran Adria are getting all the attention.

"[Adria] has tremendous respect," Wells says of the legendarily inventive maestro of El Bulli, who has given us such bizarre new culinary terms as "foam," "air" and "liquid" ravioli. "But it's [America] that is obsessed with whether it is Italy or France or Spain that's on top. The French aren't interested in keeping baseball scores -- they just do what they do."

As her indispensable Food Lover's Guide to Paris attests, what they do better than anyone is the unpretentious corner restaurant, which she insists -- despite the soaring euro -- still provides better value than its equivalent in, say, New York or San Francisco.

"I've always questioned how many top restaurants we really need," she says. "The ones I always worry about are the little guys. Too many young chefs are being ignored. You don't need me or the Guide Michelin to send you to Alain Ducasse ..."

But you should use her Guide to Paris to find just about any other place of quality. Or, come to think of it, her Web listings accessible via the site for the International Herald Tribune. And having made good use of each, as we parted ways at the end of the afternoon I thought I might help out with a tip for local parts, and so mentioned that the first soft-shell crabs had arrived in town from the coast of Florida that morning.

"Oh, I miss soft-shells. We don't have them in France," she said, sadly it seemed. But then, brightening, she added, "But we have langoustines!" and was gone.

May 19, 2004