All Balls and Memories of the Côte d’Azur
Posted: 6th July 2017
Rumours have reached this ivory tower that my friend Jonathan Meades is cross with me and that he has denounced me in some sort of Spectator podcast. It is bad enough living in semi-enforced pseudo-retirement without being hauled over the coals for something I cannot cure. I have been told that he is angry because I suggested he could obtain sheep’s testicles from Harry the butcher in Kentish Town (or indeed porky ones from Paul the butcher in York Way). This was in response to an e-mail from Jonathan some time ago, on the basis of which he cited both butchers as a source for these delicacies in his new cookery book, The Plagiarist in the Kitchen. Now, Jonathan is as aware as I am that male animals have but two, and for that reason alone such things are rare. Should he wish to buy some in the future he needs to ring up in advance (Harry 020 7485 0346 or Paul 020 7607 3208) preferably on a Thursday before the butchers go to market to stock up on suitable treats for the weekend.
Actually Meades’ manual is very much my kind of cookery book. I rarely if ever follow recipes slavishly and look to books for inspiration. Meades’s approach is unsurprisingly Meadesian and I look forward to plagiarising the plagiarist. Another cookery book I have obtained recently is Ugly Food by Richard Horsey and Tim Wharton, which focuses on octopus (I am sure they are not ugly to other octopuses), offal, rabbits and squirrels (which are actually rather cute) and vegetables deemed ugly such as salsify and Jerusalem artichokes (the effects of the latter are distinctly anti-social if not plain ugly). Just to prove the point I made above: there are no recipes for testicles, presumably because they are a joy to have and behold. I did actually make an arroz do polvo (octopus) from the recipe in the book and was more than pleased with the results.
An arroz is a Portuguese rice dish that has more in common with a paella than a risotto, combining meat (duck) or fish with rice (long grain) and stock. As it turns out, one of the few tastings I attended this month was of the wines of the Alentejo, which has been my favourite Portuguese region for some time. In recent years the number of producers using amphorae (talhas) to age the wine has increased considerably. The result is a wine that expresses the taste the grape varieties used rather than flavourings like oak. Most wines, however, are run into casks. The tasting took place at the Taberna do Mercado restaurant in Spittalfields and the highlights were the Monte do Pintor 2015 (branco – no importer), Herdade São Miguel’s Art. Terra Amphora 2016 (Raymond Reynolds), Herdade da Maroteira’s Dez Tostões 2015 (no importer), Herdade do Sobriso Cellar Selection 2014 (Nick Oakley – this is a lovely wine), Ribafreixo Gáudio Classico 2013 (Laithwaites), Cortes do Cima 2013 (Oddbins), Cartuxa 2013 (Atlantico UK – how well I remember drinking a bottle of an earlier vintage of this in an otherwise dull Lisbon restaurant with my then two-year old daughter stretched out across two chairs fast asleep), Herdade da Mingorra Reserva 2013 (no importer) and Herdade Paço do Conde 2014 (no importer).
I had some good, hoppy bottled beers from Magic Spells, the best of which, I thought, was the IPA. Then there were the parties: the TLS at Gray’s Inn and History Today in the battle-scarred church of Saint Ethelburga in Bishopsgate. I was not invited to the Spectator‘s. The big treat came at the end of the month when a friend asked me to stay with him in his house in Antibes. As I climbed into an air-conditioned bus at Nice Airport I recalled the many times I had patrolled this rich-man’s playground before, and how on many occasions I had reviewed fabulous restaurants way beyond my own means: at old Roger Vergé’s Moulin in Mougins (for years I used to receive a huge Christmas card from him), or Alain Ducasse’s hideaway in Moustiers; then there was Les Roches in Le Lavandou; and a Chinese-owned Relais et Châteaux place in Saint Maxime the name of which I have now forgotten. There was the time the Ritz sent me to Monaco to review a sister-establishment and gave me a wad of banknotes to pay for the helicopter from airport; or the weekend in Eze, where you could hardly venture out during the day for the number of grokels that filled the streets. I stayed by the pool and read Nietzsche, who wrote parts of Also sprach Zarathustra in Eze and walked the perilous path down to the water, a ramble still called ‘le chemin de Nietzsche’.
Sometimes the pretext was wine. There was the week I spent tasting Bandol based at the Hostellerie Bérard in La Cadière d’Azur (come to think of it I used to receive a card from them too) further down the coast towards Marseille culminating in an al fresco birthday lunch with the delightful Henri de Saint Victoire at Château de Pibarnon; or on another occasion when I stayed in Les Arcs and knocked up a piece on the Grands Crus de Provence. I once spent a holiday in a ‘maison noble’ nearby where you swam in the ice-cold water of a great cast-iron tank that collected from the mountains and fed the household pipes. If you looked down there was a shoal of trout living at the bottom. I made a journey to the Iles de Lérins with my ex-friend Caliban whose bathers split open the moment he strode into the water in full view of a tourist boat lying some fifty metres out – more balls. When we had recovered I bought holy honey from the ancient monastery on the island. Another time I spent a fraught few days in Saint Tropez with a girl in a house next to Brigitte Bardot who had been forced to open her stretch of beach to hoi polloi when Mitterand declared the coast the property of the people.
I used to spend most holidays from the mid-seventies to the early eighties in a little village called Claviers in the back country, and occasionally, when it wasn’t too hot, we’d be driven to Saint Tropez, or slummy Fréjus for a swim in the ocean. On one occasion we went to Antibes, where I discovered a Roman carving of three interlocking penises which formed the prototype for the crest of the Piers Gaveston Society; I merely swapped couchant for rampant. We later enjoyed a picnic on the beach in Nice. Much later I came to Bormes les Mimosa with my children and we took the bus to bathe at Le Lavandou – a fraught experience with a boy of three or four, as we had to walk huge distances to find food, water and wine every day, living as we were in a dormitory villa a couple of miles from the village.
This last time was far, far smoother. On the first night I discovered the hardly spoiled village of Biot, and dined at Les Arcades, a simple Provencal restaurant on stuffed courgette flowers and ox cheek daube.
Later we discovered the fifteenth century church and witnessed a wedding in the town hall that looked like an episode from an old film with the bride tossing the bouquet out from a first floor window. Saint Paul de Vence was sleek and manicured by comparison, and full of twee little galleries; but in a cafe I was reminded how good a proper salade niçoise could be in the heat. We ate at the Royal Beach in Antibes and explored the coast in a speed boat, pootling along among the flotillas of floating gin palaces belonging to oligarchs and Chinese millionaires, to park between the islands of Sainte Marguérite and Saint Honoré. From the shore twinkled the occasional old villa or palace hotel, like the Belles Rives in Juan-les-Pins, outnumbered ten-to-one by the gimcrack contemporary residences and the seraglios of Saudi princes. It was a long, long way from Kentish Town.
