Meet Anne de Ravel, the former editor of The New York Times Entertainment section, cookbook author, and once producer of The Food Network program “Dining Around.”
Three years ago, Anne slipped away from her very fabulous career in New York to return to her family home in Languedoc-Roussillon, the province of France nestled on the Mediterranean coast between the Spanish border, the Pyrenees and Provence.
“Soustres,” Anne’s home, is a tumbling expanse of shuttered, gated, stuccoed and tiled grandeur her family has loved for at least four generations. There are wings to buildings and stairways to upper floors and doors to secret rooms as extensive as the maze of hedges in her front park. The simplest plot to understand on this magestic, very French acreage is the potager on the edge of the park, where Anne shares growing space with her aunt.
Right now artichokes and cardoons grow in sporadic fluffs near the readied but empty beds. Beside the pool, a vibrant rosemary is in bloom. In the house Anne had put fresh branches of soft yellow mimosa in vases. The wild almonds, she told us, were almost ready to bloom, and we found trees with last seasons almonds still stuck like ghosts of ancient fruit to the twisted branches. The wild asparagus, teensy stems sprouting throughout the grounds and hedges, are just beginning.
After a long journey (flight to Paris via Iceland, and a train straight south for five luxurious hours of reading, napping and chatting), my friend Leslie and I arrived at dark in the town of Beziers, where Anne and her petite Peugeot were waiting for us.
With a sliver of a moon hanging low over the countryside, we drove to Montady, Anne’s nearby village.
Before I tell you about dinner that night, here’s a gem of Montady history: In 1247, after too many years of the Montady citizens dying of malaria, the city decided to address the enormous swamp at its feet. The citizens dug by hand a radii of ditches that met in the center to drain the water. The result is a geographical work of art worthy of Christo, and an engineering triumph 800 years old.
Later King Louis XIV, in the 17th century, decided that the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean were too far apart; a short cut by water, connecting the two oceans across France, would be built. The Canal du Midi begins in Sete, on the Mediterranean, passes through Beziers, Carcassone, Toulouse, and runs all the way to Bordeaux. Or, rather it wanders, a gracefully winding canal, flanked evenly by Plane trees. Meandering through the vineyards and olive groves of Montady, it seemed today in no great hurry to get to the Atlantic Ocean.
Back to dinner. Under the stone arches of Anne’s dining room, with Anne’s father, Francois graciously opening the wine, we began with a walnut aperitif made by a cousin, while Anne finished preparing soup de boulliabaisse: cod, monkfish, mullet and tiny mussels from Brittany floating in a rich, complex broth made with fish heads and small “green” crabs blended in a sort of emulsion blender. Salade, bread, and, certainment, le fromage. The small rounds of fresh chevre were my favorite. I swear they are cuter, better wrinkled, and taste more of goat and grass than their American brethren. We think here that perhaps it’s because these cheeses are made with raw milk, but this demands more research.
- which I’m too tired now to do, so I’m going to end this blog with chevre loose ends. I’m heading up the stone stairs to bed now, hoping to not get lost because it’s a long way to my bed room, so long a journey, up worn stone steps and around corners -
- that each time I make it I have plenty of time to imagine what it must have been like in this home four hundred years ago – the quiet, the cold stone walls, the darkness. But, my guess is that a woman going to bed in this home four hundred years ago could have just dined on the exact same bouilliabaisse, salade, bread and chevre.
In warmer weather, Anne runs a cooking school, Saveur Langeudoc. She takes students to the local markets, and then returns to Soustres to cook together dishes from this rich – even ancient - culture. (Today Leslie and I hiked up to a Gallic village whose best years, they tell us, were 400 – 200 B.C.) For more information on Anne de Ravel and Saveur Langeudoc, go to: http://www.saveurlanguedoc.com/
ma chambre.
