The Provence Cookbook Reviewed In the New York Times          By Dwight Garner - June 6, 2004 THE PROVENCE COOKBOOK : 175 Recipes and a Select Guide to the Markets, Shops & Restaurants of France's Sunny South (HarperCollins, $29.95), by Patricia Wells. The distin­guished author of five previous French cookbooks, Wells would very likely scream and call in a helicopter water-strike if some­one dumped a slab of jerk-rubbed and habanera-minted any­thing on her plate. She has long been an advocate of simple and seasonal cooking, and she is, if anything, paring her dishes down even more. "Over the years," she writes here, "my food has become simpler and simpler." My wife's father, a retired chef in the Napa Valley, was visiting us when "The Provence Cookbook" arrived. 'He hates recipes, but he sat down with Wells's. book, fell in love with it and then used It to improvise the best meal I've eaten this year: grilled squab, a dreamy cau­liflower gratin in which the cauliflower is pureed so that it's like eating, as Wells puts it, "velvety, pure white pillows," and homemade cheese that you can finish in an afternoon. The only misfire was the recipe my wife and I made, a Beaumes-de-Venise sorbet. Frozen, this lovely dessert wine seemed wan, watery and crunchy. It had become a Sno-Cone with pretensions, and it had lost its will to live.