A Time for Pagnol

There’s a time of year–that first little itch of spring, the first morning that you can walk out your front door without shivering, the first afternoon where you can shrug your jacket off your shoulders, even if it’s only for a moment–that makes me want to hunker down on a park bench somewhere with a copy of a Marcel Pagnol novel. La gloire de mon père, Le château de ma mère, heck, even the play La femme du boulanger is good enough… there’s a time of year for Pagnol, and when it rolls around, I don’t want to read anything else.

Marcel Pagnol, for those who don’t know him, was a writer from the French southwest who wrote novels and plays about his native land with the words of his native region, something that hadn’t really been done before. Today, French novels in street slang abound, but Pagnol was the first to take the spoken language and turn it into a written one, and reading his novels, dated as they might be, send me back to–you guessed it–Paziols.

What can I say? That little town stole my heart, and no matter how frequently I think about trying something new, about going on a new adventure with the month of July, every year, I find myself drawn back to the South, and every year at around this time, I remember why.

Pagnol’s garrigue is filled with discovery: people to meet, plants and animals to discover and, of course, the aforementioned lilting occitan, the language that makes me smile every time pain is pronounced peing.

I get lost in the pages, closing my eyes and imagining a world that doesn’t exist in entirety, an amalgamation of the movies based on Pagnol’s novels, of Paziols itself, of the countless short stories and poems I’ve started and never finished, trying and failing to evoke what I love so much about the South.

I miss the tidy rows of vines, the lazy tractors moving through the fields. I miss the light–there’s nothing like southern light at noon. I miss the neighborliness of it all. I miss discovering little turns and bends in the tiny town that I always think I know by heart until I realize I don’t. I’m eager to be proven wrong again.

Until this summer, though, I’ll have to content myself with Paris… not that it’s a bad place to be. On the contrary, springtime in Paris is all about love, sun on the Seine, getting lost on purpose… and markets. Paris markets are the highlight of my spring, now, and it was with a spring in my step that I set off to our local market last week for these tiny potatoes.

Aren’t they gorgeous?

Salade nicoise is in no way from Pagnol’s south. Rather, it’s a dish from the eastern side of the Mediterranean, from the city just a few kilometers away from the other southern French town that captured my heart: Cannes. I’m not going to the film festival this year, nor am I spending hours lazing on the beach with Emese. But I can make salade nicoise if I want to, hunker down with La gloire de mon père in front of the window and allow the sunlight streaming in remind me of the days in the South that are only a matter of months away.

Jean’s Salade Nicoise

1 head soft lettuce
500 g. (1 pound) cooked new potatoes, cooled
4 hard-boiled eggs
4 tomatoes
1/2 red onion
500 g. (1 pound) string beans, blanched and cooled
~20 olives (nicoise if you have them)
2 cans tuna packed in olive oil

1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil
1/4 cup white wine vinegar
1 egg yolk
1 tsp. Dijon mustard
salt and pepper to taste

Wash and dry the lettuce and arrange the leaves on a large platter. Salt lightly.

Slice the potatoes and eggs into coins and the tomatoes into wedges. Thinly slice the red onion. Arrange these ingredients and the string beans over the lettuce.

Drain the olives and tuna and arrange over the lettuce.

Combine the dressing ingredients in a blender and blend until combined. Pour over the salad; you may have extra dressing. It can be covered and kept in the fridge for three days.