…St Tropez also has traffic jams. Lots of big ones, or rather one gigantic big one which just fills the town from end to end.
I’m just back home now in Avignon after a long Ascension weekend there cooking for a private French family in their villa overlooking the town; mum, dad and a handful of kids, two other members of staff and a few visitors popping in here and there. Including the lady who’s now nanny to the children of Picasso’s grandson’s children. Which was kinda cool.
They wanted, and obviously I cooked, simple Provencal food: an escabeche of supions (baby cuttlefish. Very baby, in fact, little finger sized and a real pain to clean a kilo of them), roast poulets de Bresse (served with mache and home-made crisps), grilled sardines, Jean-Remi’s famous ‘Trilogies’ of tomates confites, goat cheese and aubergine caviar. I’ve been working on my own version of this and am quite please with my Millefeuilles Provencaux. A steel ring with a layer of goat cheese, then some dried tomato paste, then thinly-sliced, olive oil-fried aubergines and courgettes built up in layers, topped with some roast red peppers and a drizzle of pesto round the outside. His is easer to serve in a restaurant environment – mine takes a while to do and it’s not that easy to keep overnight. But it looks pretty and it’s all mine.
Shopping twice a day; prices in St Tropez are simply horrendous; rougets I’ve refused to buy in Avignon on the grounds that they cost EUR19 a kilo come for EUR32 a kilo here; parma ham at EUR90 a kilo; cups of espresso for EUR2.50. It goes on.
And being the long Ascension weekend the world and its dog came to town, all by car. An hour to shop, an hour to drive back the three kilometres to the villa.
I came home by bus and train which took seven hours, partly because the bus driver was busy chatting on her batphone and we left five minutes late, arriving 30 seconds after the train had pulled out of the St Raphael station (there’s no train station in St Tropez).
Many of the summer jobs I’m looking at are in St Tropez, but it’s a nightmare to get to; Delphine and I spent enough time apart this winter, and we’re not keen to do it all over again this summer.
Still.