This traditional aïoli recipe comes to us from the inn Relais Notre-Dame in Alpes de Haute Provence. The garlicky sauce perfectly illustrates Provence’s culinary touchstones: simple preparations and local ingredients. Throughout Southern France, the silky, mayo-like condiment is served alongside meats, seafood, and raw or roasted vegetables as the centerpiece of a “grand aïoli.”We find it just as delicious paired with crispy frites. 

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In this elegant “French toast,” brioche is soaked in a custard infused with orange blossom water, then cooked until golden and served with caramelized pears and apricots and a simple pear sauce. It makes a lovely dessert as is but can also be amped up with a scoop of Lavender Honey Ice Cream.

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If I get to come back again, I’d like to be a Peyraud.

I’m sure that I’m not alone. It is hard to imagine that anybody will be able to read Richard Olney’s new cookbook without wanting to join the Peyraud family.

In 1940, Lulu and Lucien Peyraud went to live at Domaine Tempier—in the Mediterranean coastal town of Bandol, about 30 miles southeast of Marseille—a property that belonged to her family. At the time, it was a farm with no electricity, no telephone, no running water. They raised seven children and most of their own food there, created what is widely considered to be the finest winery in the region, and still had time to sail boats, travel, and entertain—with an elan that makes Lulu sound like Martha Stewart with a Provençal soul.

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Listen: “When Lulu receives, the table is laid in advance to feast the eyes of arriving guests. In good weather, the faded rose and ochre souvenirs reflected in the façade of the old house form a background to the long table on the terrace: wineglasses sparkle in the dappled light that filters through the leaves of vines and trees and a playful motif—garlands of wildflowers or a still-life of ratatouille vegetables—provides an accent of color … Paule is often in the kitchen, Catherine arrives with sumptuous desserts … François takes charge of open-fire roasts … Jean-Marie chooses and serves the wines.”

Who wouldn’t want to join them? As lovingly chronicled by their neighbor, the author Richard Olney (Simple French Food), life chez Peyraud sounds just about perfect. For nearly a year Olney sat in their kitchen, taking notes as Lulu cooked, breathing in the aroma of wine and garlic, and absorbing the life of the family. He writes with deep affection—and occasional exasperation.

He takes us into the kitchen with him, and we watch him struggle to get the recipes down as he and Lulu argue about ingredients. This narrative form makes for long recipes: The one for bouillabaisse stretches across 13 pages (plus three for the accompanying aioli) as we follow Lulu down to the fishing boats and into the herb garden. We wait as her son François prepares a fruitwood fire for the dish and hold our breath as Lulu pours the soup into an antique copper caldron and adds the fish.

She throws some mussels into the pot. “Maybe [they] are overcooked,” says Lulu, “but it is the flavor that counts—I put them into the pot before adding the fish so they won’t get in my way when I serve….” That makes sense. But then Olney adds, “Shortly after taking these notes I assisted at the preparation of a beautiful bouillabaisse in which the mussels were added after the fish.”

In another wonderful culinary exchange Olney tries, with great difficulty, to get the precise recipe for stuffed baked onions. “My original notes for this stuffing called only for the chopped insides of the onions, garlic, anchovy and seasoning,” he writes. “I figured it needed some body so I asked Lulu to go over it again. She began by saying ‘I always make stuffed onions when I have leftover roast lamb at hand.'” But, protests Olney, the last time she cooked onions she had used anchovies, not meat. “Oh, did I?” replies Lulu. “Well, of course.” Before she has finished, egg and wine suddenly come into the recipe as well.

There is enormous charm in all this. With each recipe you learn a little more about Lulu, her family, and a way of life that is vanishing, even in France.

But this is not one of those beautiful dream books that will live only on your bedside table. Lulu has a lot to teach anybody she invites into her kitchen. Lulu’s method for grating bread crumbs, for instance, is ingenious. “She scatters dried bread crumbs over all fish to be baked and over most vegetable gratins and insists that they must be slightly coarse and irregular in texture. To achieve this texture, she rubs together two broken ends of dried-out baguette over the dish.” So that’s what you do with old baguettes!

Lulu has a unique way of peeling tomatoes, scraping the skin off with a few strokes of the knife. Don’t try this with unripe tomatoes; it won’t work. In fact, Lulu does not hold with out-of-season tomatoes: Even in Provence, she says, canned tomatoes are best in the winter.

That is what is ultimately so appealing about this book. In spite of her garden, her herbs growing by the kitchen, her endless supply of fruitwood, the fishermen down the road, and the setting sun over the vineyards, Lulu’s book is never precious.

What’s more, the recipes work. Almost everything I have cooked from this book has been wonderful. Lulu’s Tapenade, a mixture of olives, anchovies, capers, olive oil, and winter savory, is made in a flash in the food processor—with Lulu’s blessing. You may have a momentary twinge of regret that you aren’t using home-cured anchovies as Lulu does, but it’s a regret that disappears with the first pungent bite.

One night I made Lulu’s Squash and Mussel Soup, a surprising combination that turned out to be one of the most delicious things I’ve ever eaten—and was remarkably simple to cook. I followed it with Pot Roasted Leg of Lamb with Black Olives, one of those company dishes you put into a pot, cook for a few hours, and serve to cries of deep appreciation.

On the other hand, I didn’t even try the recipes with notations like the following: “If possible, use a 6-month-old farm chicken that has had space in which to run and a natural diet of grains, green stuff, worms and kitchen leftovers.” I can’t remember the last time I was aware of the age of my chicken, much less his diet. I stayed away, too, from the recipe that said, “If the rabbit is from your hutch, leave the head attached.”

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Each month, our Cookbook Club digs deep into a cookbook and shares our progress online.

But I thought most of the vegetable recipes would be safe, and they were not. Lulu’s recipes are for vegetables that have pushed their way through the hard earth of Provence, and every dish I tried was dull and watery and left me wishing for a garden. Fruit recipes are likely to be disappointing as well. The recipe for Apricot Tart begins, “Bad apricots are mealy and flat-tasting.” I passed it by; almost every apricot I’ve ever eaten has been mealy and flat-tasting.

But surprisingly few recipes call for hard-to-find ingredients. This is country cooking from a very sensible woman. After a while you find yourself reading through recipes wondering what Lulu would say if she were standing beside you in your kitchen. And so you throw a couple more cloves of garlic into the pan, and take a sip of wine before you add it to the pot. Cooking with Lulu is always a pleasure.

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This ice cream is best when made with true miel de lavande, French lavender honey from Provence, which is produced by bees that feed primarily on lavender blossoms, imparting a creamy texture and distinctive flavor and scent.

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We learned this method from Ben Moise, a longtime game warden and noted al fresco chef. To roast oysters the way they did in the old days:

1. Build a fire of oak and hickory, to get a hot ash. Put a steel plate over the fire and let it get hot.

2. Put the oysters in their shells on top of the steel plate. Cover them with a soaking wet croaker (burlap) bag. As the water drips down off the bag onto the plate it steams the oysters. It is important to keep the bag wet, otherwise it could catch fire.

3. When the oysters are done, shovel them directly onto a table and serve with Seafood Cocktail Sauce, hot pepper sauce, or simply “naked” (without any sauce).

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I knew the beer was going to taste good: A gray-haired monk in black and white robes was offering me a round, fat, gold-rimmed glass of dense, amber liquid with a short but foamy head the color of old ivory. Behind him, copper vats gleamed. The air was filled with a toasty, malty smell. I almost thought I heard angels singing in the background—and indeed, I suppose, I might have been hearing the faint notes of a choir somewhere, since I was on the grounds of the Cistercian Abbey of Chimay in Notre-Dame de Scourmont, Belgium.

Then I brought the glass to my mouth, inhaled its yeasty, faintly herbaceous aroma, and took a sip. I will not say it was the best beer I have ever tasted, for I have tasted many wonderful beers in many styles from many parts of the world. But it was everything I could ask a beer to be—intensely flavorful, round on the palate without seeming heavy in the least, perfectly carbonated (neither too prickly nor too mushy), both refreshing and deeply satisfying. For the moment, anyway, I was—if you’ll pardon the expression—in heaven.

This was in the early 1980s, and the monk who had welcomed me to the brewery and showed me how Chimay is made was Frere Theodore, the abbey brewmaster and part of an ancient Belgian tradition. Beer has been made in what is now Belgium since the Romans taught the brewer’s art to the Gauls, way back before abbeys (or even the Christian faith) were invented. Because Belgium is too cold to grow wine grapes consistently, beer became the alcoholic beverage of choice among the local populace. The Brewers’ Guild was one of Belgium’s most powerful and wealthiest craft unions throughout the Middle Ages and a wide range of beers, many of them unique in style to Belgium and some of them almost more like wine than beer, developed over the centuries. As late as 1900, there were more than 3,000 individual commercial breweries in the country.

Today, alas, a mere handful of them, including Chimay, produce what is known as Trappist beer. (Trappists are a reformed branch of the Cistercian Order, founded in 1664 by the Abbot de Rance at a monastery in Normandy.) Belgium’s abbeys were early and enthusiastic brewers of beer. In the absence of wine, beer was the beverage of hospitality offered to travelers in the days when abbeys functioned as de facto inns. It was also a source of income for the monks, a commodity to be traded for other foodstuffs, and even a means of maintaining good health. Beer is not only nutritious but also sterile—a quality much appreciated in the days when contaminated water could kill—since the water with which it is made is vigorously boiled.

Though Trappist beers are brewed under carefully controlled conditions today—there are now computers in the breweries as well as copper vats—the basic process has remained unchanged for centuries. Malted barley is dried, ground to a flour, and soaked in water, to produce what brewers call the mash. As it soaks, the mash is stirred constantly by powerful motor-driven beaters. Next, it is passed through a filter where the draft, or spent malt, is separated from the wort—the liquid that is, at this point, to beermaking what grape juice is to the making of wine—which flows into the copper vats to be boiled. Hops are added both at the beginning and the end of the boiling stage, both to flavor the beer and to help precipitate out its nitrogenous matter, which would cloud the finished product.

After boiling, the wort is clarified, then cooled to a temperature of 68°F. At this point, yeast is added to induce fermentation—the action by which yeast converts the sugars in the wort into alcohol and carbon dioxide. After fermentation, the beer is cooled and filtered, usually (these days) by centrifuge. However automated some aspects of this whole process are, the brewer-monks watch the beer closely at all stages, and send it through these steps in small batches. It is almost as if they can’t quite bring themselves to put all their faith in technology.

Then comes the real secret of Trappist beers: They are bottled flat, without carbonation, but with a tiny bit of yeast added to each bottle. Then, like champagne, they referment. (Like champagne, too, some Trappist beers are sealed not with bottle caps but with corks and wire fasteners, giving them a particularly serious look.) This second fermentation is said to make the beer more easily digestible; it certainly increases its alcohol content (the proof of Trappist beers ranges from 5 to 10.3—compared, for instance, with a standard American beer proof of about 3.8) and saturates it with carbonation. It is this refermentation that gives Trappist beers their remarkable combination of complexity, richness, and real delicacy.

After refermentation, there is one more important stage in the development of Trappist beer: It should be aged a bit. Some bottlings are held for a time by the abbeys themselves for maturation, but the consumer should be prepared to do a bit of the work, too. Any Trappist beer should be allowed to rest for a week or two after it gets brought home—and if you buy some packaged in Bordeaux-style bottles, complete with corks and wire closures, laying them down alongside your bottles of cabernet and chateauneuf-du-pape for a month or so will only improve them.

I sometimes think of Frere Theodore when I sip a glass of Trappist beer, Chimay or otherwise. I like the fact that he and the other monks who have made these beers over the centuries treat their creation with respect. I like the fact that they maintain a kind of humility in the face of this miracle of managed nature, a monastic modesty that never quite lets them take its success for granted. And sometimes, after midnight in California (where I live and drink), when it is getting close to 10 a.m. in Belgium, I imagine an old monk and master about to taste, for the many-thousandth time, the beer of Chimay—and I wish him many mornings more.

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One night in Los Angeles in the late 1980s, sitting in Michel Richard’s Citrus restaurant, we watched in amazement as beet after beet, then sweet potatoes, then horseradish came spewing out of a slicing device we’d never seen. The vegetables were turned magically into delicate julienne strands, thin as rice noodles. Richard quickly fried them as an enticing garnish. Since that night, we’ve wanted such a slicer, and finally located a simple Japanese home model, the Benriner Turning Slicer, made by the Benriner Company—in a rather questionable shade of green, but otherwise up to the task.

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Many years ago, while working on the very first issue of SAVEUR, we were fortunate enough to come across Jacques Piegay, a beekeeper in the town of Esparron, about five miles southwest of Greoux-les-Bains. Well-known locally for his excellent honey, which he began producing after retiring from being a mountain guide in the Alps, we heard he also enjoyed quite a reputation, too, for his version of daube—the long-cooked Provençal stew found throughout the South of France.

When we asked him for his recipe, he demurred at first, saying that what he did was just what any cookbook would tell you to do. But then he elaborated: “The important thing,” he told us, “is to start with good, fresh game, chamois if you’re lucky, or deer, or wild boar, or hare. Wild duck would work, but it makes a better salmis than daube. Then you need a good, full-bodied wine to marinate it in. It doesn’t matter what kind of wine, so long as it’s strong. There are hundreds of wines in France that would do, but you have a lot of good California wines that would be just fine. Then I like to add the zests of some thin-skinned oranges. Then I add a good bit of cognac. And lots of vegetables. Lots of onions, carrots, and garlic, chives, cloves, thyme. I add everything. That’s all there is to it. The one thing I ask is that, when you’re eating your daube, you think of me.”

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Jim Clendenen and Bob Lindquist have been called a couple of the best winemakers in America. They have also been called, in the catalogue of a wine shop that enthusiastically sells their wares, “the Beavis and Butthead of [the] local wine scene.” It is essential to an appreciation of their wines, and of their place in the world of wine, to understand that there is truth in both assessments. It is precisely the combination of contrasting qualities they betray, in fact—seriousness blended with irreverence, consistency with unpredictability—that makes their doings so rewarding to follow, and their wines so good to drink.

Clendenen and Lindquist make wine in Santa Barbara County, a thick wedge of land—sort of a wavy rectangle with a couple of jags on top—set into the Southern California coastline, beginning about 70 miles northwest of Los Angeles. The county’s lower reaches are largely residential; here are found, for instance, the communities of Summerland (briefly the site of a borrowed “Western White House” in the early days of the Clinton administration) and Montecito (very pretty, very private, very posh), and the city of Santa Barbara itself—an attractive whitewash-and-red-tile town, known for its Cal-Med lifestyle and popular as a weekend vacation destination for Los Angelenos.

On the other side of the Santa Ynez Mountains, about a 45-minute drive beyond the city to the north and east through the San Marcos Pass, a different kind of territory begins. Highway 101, which snakes through the county following approximately the course of the old El Camino Real, or Royal Road, built by the Spanish in the 18th century, transects three consecutive valleys, the Santa Ynez, the Los Alamos, and the Santa Maria. The basic landscape is typical of California’s vast coastal interiors—sloping meadows, broad pastures, and rolling hills (these are lush green in winter and early spring, and otherwise relentless straw-yellow and dusty brown), punctuated by little clumps of grandly spreading live oak trees and tall stands of eucalyptus. Set into this rural landscape are thoroughbred horse farms, commercial flower fields, celebrity estates, and oil fields full of black rocking-horse pumps.

And all over this portion of the county, bordering the farms and estates, patchworked with the oil fields, stretching off over the hills, are vineyards—chardonnay, pinot noir, riesling, cabernet, syrah—producing grapes now recognized as some of the best in California.

The first winemakers in this region were Spanish missionaries who established outposts here in the late-18th century, immediately planting grapevines for the production of sacramental wine. Commercial vineyards followed, and by the late-19th century, there were more than 5,000 acres of grapes in the area. Prohibition all but wiped out local growers, and by the 1950s, grapevines were mere curiosities here. A revival of local viticulture began in 1964 and kicked into high gear in the early ’70s. Today there are about 20,000 acres of vines in the county.

Jim Clendenen and Bob Lindquist—who make wine under several labels between them, but whose principal concerns are Au Bon Climat and Qupe, respectively—certainly weren’t the first to make wine here, or even to make good wine. But in a way they are the definitive local winemakers. Because the region was—Spanish mission vineyards aside—virgin territory for wine until recently. There were no rules, no traditions, no expectations in the marketplace. While their earlier counterparts in Napa and Sonoma were usually European immigrants with enological baggage in hand, the wine pioneers in Santa Barbara County were mostly all-American, and they traveled light.

Nobody told them what grapes they could or couldn’t plant—or, if somebody did tell them, they probably didn’t listen—and nobody told them what or how to market. As another of the region’s young vintners, Bryan Babcock of Babcock Vineyards, puts it, “There’s sort of a maverick attitude throughout Santa Barbara County. There just isn’t any institutional line that people feel they have to follow.”

Clendenen and Lindquist share “maverick” as a middle name. Informally schooled, Francophilic, energetically unpredictable, they might be called post-modern vintners—redefiners of categories, disrespecters of the party line (though always first in line to party). They are winemakers who don’t see why rustic tradition and technical innovation, or even business and fun, should be mutually exclusive. And they turn out extraordinary wines—luscious chardonnays, dark and spicy pinot noirs with more strength of character than most bordeaux, inky-red syrahs that seem to have captured the very soul of grapes, flower-and-honey viognier and viognier blends.

Au Bon Climat (whose name might be loosely translated as “Where the Sun Always Shines”) and Qupe (the local Chumash Indian word for the California poppy, which grows in great abundance hereabouts) are not showplace wineries—not hardly. They’re a matched set of Butler buildings, linked by a common roof, on a near-barren plot surrounded by celery fields on land that belongs to the independently owned Bien Nacido Vineyard (one of the county’s best). Though their businesses are independent, Clendenen and Lindquist share quarters in these buildings so intimately that it is impossible to tell where one winery stops and the other begins. They are meshed like a handshake.

There are David Bowie and R.E.M. posters on the walls in one building, and a basketball net on a pole is set up next to some barrels—and casual conversation is as likely to involve rock music or sports as it does volatile acidity or clonal selection. Neither winery offers tastings, and both would probably shoot tour buses on sight. A typical message on the answering machine at Au Bon Climat might say something like, “Our winery is not open to the public for tours, tasting, or direct sales. We’re not looking for new customers. We’re not in the office every day. Far from it.”

The wineries’ informal atmosphere extends beyond their walls. Clendenen and Lindquist travel frequently, selling their wines in a blur of raucous tastings and long liquid lunches, and keeping an eye on what winemakers in France and Italy are up to. And they welcome colleagues from the whole world of wine to their Santa Maria Valley digs as well. “It’s amazing,” says one California wine merchant who visits the two often. “People come from everywhere to see these guys, and you’ll have French winemakers meeting Italian winemakers for the first time and suddenly discovering, 6,000 miles from home, that they might have something to teach each other.”

Jim Clendenen was born in 1953, in Akron, Ohio—where, he insists, “people are raised up bright as hell.” Ironically, his father worked for the Firestone Tire Company as a chemical engineer—ironically, because one of the pioneers of local winemaking, and the owner of the county’s largest winery, is A. Brooks Firestone, scion of the tire family. The Clendenens moved to California in 1967, and in 1971, Jim enrolled at the University of California, Santa Barbara, with a pre-law major. After taking some time off to kick around Europe—he visited 18 countries and lived for a time in Bordeaux—he returned and graduated. By this time, the wine bug had bit. He dutifully applied to law school, but in the meantime went to work on the bottling line—grunt work—at the Zaca Mesa Winery, another local pioneer in the Santa Ynez Valley.

The next thing he knew, he was learning to make wine under winemaker Ken Brown (later the founder of Byron). After three years, he left to travel, worked two vintages at a winery in Australia, and went to live briefly in Burgundy. In 1982, full of ideas about how wine should be made—”Everything I do I learned in France,” he says—he founded Au Bon Climat in partnership with his friend Adam Tolmach, another veteran of Zaca Mesa, who happened to have a degree in enology from the University of California, Davis. (Clendenen and Tolmach have since parted ways; Tolmach now makes wine in the neighboring Ojai Valley under The Ojai Vineyard label.)

Bob Lindquist was also born in 1953, in, as he says, “Missoura.” His family moved to California in 1964, and he ended up studying social science at the University of California, Irvine, in Orange County, and then dropped out. He got a job with a small local ad agency designing window displays for shops. One of his clients was a wineshop, and Bob worked out a deal to get paid in wine.

His epiphany came in a bottle of 1974 Simi Cabernet. “It blew my mind,” he says—and it made him a confirmed wine-lover. He moved to Hollister in California’s Central Valley in 1975 to live with an uncle, and went to work as the tasting-room manager for the San Martin Winery. When he moved down to Camarillo, between Los Angeles and Santa Barbara, to manage the winery’s tasting room there, he got to know the Santa Barbara region. He moved up to the Santa Ynez Valley to manage a wineshop in Los Olivos, then promptly got fired for taking time off to go to a Kinks concert.

But the owners of the shop also owned the Zaca Mesa Winery, and hired him there as their first paid tour guide. There he met Clendenen, Ken Brown, and Adam Tolmach. “They let me help with the harvest,” he recalls, “and then I helped them make the wine. I’d never realized how easy winemaking was until I did it.”

While Clendenen was attracted to the wine styles of Burgundy, Lindquist fell under the spell of the amazing Rhone wines that Berkeley wine merchant Kermit Lynch had just started to import. “We were all wine geeks,” says Lindquist, “and we knew we had to do something on our own.”

In 1982, the same year that Clendenen and Tolmach started Au Bon Climat in an old dairy barn in Los Alamos, Lindquist rented space for Qupe at Zaca Mesa and several other wineries. Then the owners of the Bien Nacido Vineyard offered to build the two wineries a shared facility. They opened in 1989.

“The thing about Santa Barbara County,” says Clendenen, “is that we have a long, cool growing season with not much rain. You can grow just about anything here and get absolutely top quality. You can even get great syrah and pinot noir from the same vineyard, like we do here at Bien Nacido.” The region’s secret is that here, exceptionally, the coastal mountains run east and west (like the coastline itself) instead of north and south. This allows ocean breezes and fog to flow easily inland from the Pacific, providing a cooling influence beneficial to the grapes. Thus the grapes benefit from what viticulturists call a long hang time: The climate is basically mild, so grapes appear comparatively early, but it’s cool enough that they take a long time to ripen developing more flavor.

In viticultural terms, a growing season of 100 days or so is considered highly desirable; in Santa Barbara County, seasons of 110 days or more are common.

Clendenen and Lindquist take full advantage of the wide range of grapes available in the region, and also buy from other parts of California. At any given time, the winemakers estimate, they have somewhere between 60 and 100 different wines in cask. “Maybe we’ve got too many different wines coming out,” admits Clendenen. “Making what you want to make is easy, but knowing what you ought to intend to make is hard.”

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Just as that wrapped bundle of aromatic herbs called the bouquet garni is a staple of French cooking, so hierbas de olor is essential for flavoring Mexican sauces. Simply wrap black peppercorns, whole allspice berries, Mexican oregano, and canela into a cheesecloth packet, and use whenever you want to impart a deep yet subtle sweetness to your dish.

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(Baudroie en Feuilles de Figuier)
The fig leaves used in this recipe impart a delicate scent and flavor to the fish when wrapped and grilled. If you cannot find anglerfish, try substituting grouper, halibut, or sea bass.

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