Ingredients

All serious cooks consider their trip to the market the most delicate and decisive part of their culinary preparation. In Niçois and Provençal cooking, the success of a meal depends on the quality of its basic ingredients. In Provence, the shops and open-air markets are places of wonder. All the sinuous narrow streets in Provençal towns lead to the marketplace, which has a fountain in the center, a few benches, and some big plane trees all around it. In the afternoon children run about and adults play pétanque or sip pastis, but in the morning the whole square is the setting for the market. There are pyramids of fruit and vegetables, bunches of flowers standing in wide pails, dozens of goat’s cheese, piles of breads, bannettes, boules, fougasses. Here the peasants have brought the small fruits of their labors: a few pounds of green vegetables picked a few hours ago, a basket of figs, a bowl of fresh eggs, a bundle of wild asparagus that were gathered between the olive trees, a couple of rabbits and ducks killed the night before, some cured olives, baskets of snails—some gathered in the fields and fed on rosemary and fennel, some gathered on the salty grass of Camargue.