A homey Provencal haven lets students experience the region through its food.
By JANET K. KEELER
Published August 10, 2003
The lavender fields of Provence begin to bloom in June. The signature flower of the region is used in perfumes and cooking, but resist the urge to traipse through the fields: They are buzzing with bees.
[Times photos: Janet Keeler]
Afternoon aperitifs at Le Jardin du Couvent are de rigeur for students at cookbook author Georgeanne Brennan’s cooking school. Students prepare daily meals using local ingredients such as rabbit, goat cheese and peaches, then relax with a drink.
Canoers, with their dog at the helm, slip through the lower section of the Gorges du Verdon which is fed from Lac de Ste. Croix in France's mountainous Alpes de Haute-Provence region.
The morning sun splashes into the sitting room of the restored 17th century convent where cooking classes are held.
AUPS, France - The baby bat, no bigger than an apricot, was clinging to the wall of Le Jardin du Couvent after a nasty fall from a nest in the roof tiles high above.
Leaving the nocturnal critter exposed to the searing sun was more than Georgeanne Brennan, our guide and cooking teacher, could bear. She feared he would die there. Maybe he would die anyway after being separated from his mother like that, but action was clearly called for.
"We've got to rescue him," Brennan said to no one in particular. Someone hollered for a stick and a jar, and off we went to save the day.
Within minutes, the protesting bat - didn't he know we were helping? - was pried off the wall and released in the damp shade of a fig tree. Luckily, no cats witnessed the derring-do.
At dinner that night, under the sprawling branches of a sycamore just feet from the release point, we dined on handmade gnocchi with rosemary, gorgonzola and walnut cream sauce, and on duck breast glazed with lavender honey. A chirping bat swooped low over the table and we convinced each other it could be the mother, called to baby by that amazing sonar.
The possibility of mother-and-child reunion tickled the diners, though not nearly as much as the spread of food before us. We'd prepared it with our very own hands, seven Americans in Provence on a weeklong cooking adventure.
Brennan, author of more than a dozen cookbooks, including Savoring France for Williams-Sonoma and the award-winning Food and Flavors of Haute Provence (Chronicle Books, 1997), was like our mother for the week:
She directed us to cutting boards and mixing bowls in the kitchen of a restored 17th century convent and made sure we knew how to use the antique key to the front door. And for the French-challenged among us, she translated.
The bat rescue was the type of unscripted experience I had hoped to have when I selected Brennan's Haute-Provence cooking school as my first hands-on foray into French cuisine. As a food writer, it was a travesty that I had not sampled this world-class cuisine at the source. Time for a long road trip.
Summer camp for adults
"You have to go to France at least once a year to wake up your taste buds," cookbook author Linda Gassenheimer of South Florida once told me.
My taste buds needed shaking for sure, but I didn't want to be kept in line by a stern chef in a tall toque. And I refuse to wear one myself, being so susceptible to hat hair.
I hoped to cook in a homey kitchen where the schedule was flexible enough to let the students pop down to an outdoor cafe for a beer or maybe to the village creperie for a sugary treat doused with Grand Marnier and set aflame. Brennan's program appeared to be the one to provide freedom with learning. Indeed, we had both crepes and classes.
Brennan, who divides her time between homes in Northern California and Provence, is one of many culinary professionals who operate cooking schools around the world. In Mexico, France and Italy, even Turkey and Thailand, amateur foodies gather around kitchen counters to learn how the locals cook.
Courses can be pricey - it's not unusual to pay $3,000 for one week - but, in the case of Brennan's program, the schooling also may include food, lodging and transportation.
The appetite for recreational cooking schools is big, fueled by the desire to try new foods, replicate unusual restaurant and TV cooking show dishes, and take a different kind of vacation, says Dorlene Kaplan, editor of ShawGuides' The Guide to Cooking Schools.
That annual catalog of both professional and amateur programs around the world includes 1,140 listings in its 2003 edition. There were 333 in 1989 when the guidebook got its start.
Even the most esteemed cooking schools, such as the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., and Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, now offer classes for amateurs.
Brennan says that gloomy economic news, travel jitters and the weakness of the dollar compared with the euro haven't affected her attendance, but Kaplan reports these factors are hurting other schools. Nevertheless, the cyclical nature of tourism ensures that the pendulum will swing back and the schools that survive tough times will be there to feed the interest.
It is not just food and cooking that lure many Americans to culinary schools in exotic locales. Certainly there are fabulous dishes to remember - at Brennan's school, that included a luscious tomato and Roquefort tart and an earthy rabbit terrine, nicknamed Monsieur Pierre Lapin (Mr. Peter Rabbit). But the real draw of adult cook-away camps is learning about a place through its food.
It's also a kick to hang out with people intensely interested in food. Among the seven students who signed on for Brennan's late June class, there were easily as many opinions about the economy, French-American tensions, wine, shopping and paper or plastic.
But we were of one mind when it came to cooking and trying new foods.
How else to explain that several of us ordered pieds et paquets at a restaurant near the Gorges du Verdon, the lovely ribbon of water that cuts through the "Grand Canyon of France." When would we ever have another chance to eat pig's feet and little packets of sheep intestine stuffed with other kinds of innards, all floating in a tomato broth?
We American visitors would not be labeled food imperialists; we would eat like locals. Well, at least once, anyway.
"Interesting" olives and cheese
For our tastes, Brennan was the perfect teacher and guide. Her kitchen was low-key, her instructions straightforward but never preachy. We had no lectures about hand-washing and double-dipping; we were adults, after all, and she treated us as such.
Brennan, 60, has been a part-time resident of Provence and a full-time student of its cuisine for 30 years. This medieval village of about 1,500 where she founded her school four years ago is in the Department of the Var, just a few miles south of the Alpes de Haute-Provence, the northern, mountainous region of Provence. Provence is famed for its earthy Mediterranean cuisine and fields of lavender.
Aups, pronounced UHPS, is not exactly a hot tourist destination like its swankier Provencal cousins Aix-en-Provence, Avignon and Arles, but it does warrant attention for its winter truffle market. A monument in the town square commemorates the town's failed resistance to Napoleon's coup of 1851.
Though small, Aups is hardly sleepy, and real estate prices are soaring, thanks to retirees from Paris and London snapping up country retreats. The village center boasts several cafes with outdoor seating, boulangeries (bakeries), charcuteries (butcher shops), a few souvenir places and a small convenience store where wine could be had for mere euros.
Tiny lanes wind away from the business district and the ancient buildings kiss the roadway, with no front yard to speak of. In fact, most of the time, the street is the sidewalk.
There's not much in the way of American-style curb appeal to the homes of Aups. The flat buildings with cracks and small windows look more like the back of an apartment building rather than the front. What isn't apparent to the eye is that the homes open onto expansive gardens on the other side.
We found Aups a fitting base camp from which to learn about and sample the cheeses, olives and produce of the region. From Aups, we went north and west, to the artsy village of Forcalquier and the kitschy Moustiers, which entertains French tourists after they've lazed for a day on the enormous Lac de Ste. Croix. The lake's azure water rivals anything you'd see in the Florida Keys.
To immerse her charges in village life, Brennan sent us to the Aups outdoor market on our first day, each with a shopping list and a straw basket slung smartly over our arms. My list:
"150 grams interesting olives, one bunch blette (chard), 500 grams cherries, four heads fennel, five tomatoes, interesting cheese, 1/2 loaf olive bread."
Initially, I was inclined to stick with Mary from Berkeley, Calif., whose French was magnifique, but I decided I should march into the market with a big smile and bonjours for all. How hard could it be?
I stared at bowls and bowls of olives, finally settling on a mix of oil-cured blacks and greens, flavored by small red chili peppers and preserved lemon pieces. They were marked "Antillaise" which I learned means in the Antilles-style, or hot. Interesting, yes, but they were still in the fridge when our group left a week later.
I scored better with the cheese, a raw sheep's milk variety that we nibbled with our evening aperitifs. How civilized.
Lest I sound like Miss Independent, Glyneth from Napa put some of my bounty in her basket because I was listing as I walked. Perhaps I was whining a tad, too. Those fennel heads weighed a lot and besides, I got five instead of four because because my quatre sounded like cinq to the vegetable man.
School daze
Our days had a comforting rhythm to them. We stirred early, some of us because the gardener across the way was shaping cypress trees with an electric trimmer at 6 a.m.
For much of late spring and early summer, southern France sweltered in a heat wave and with no air conditioning at Le Couvent, our windows were tossed wide. Breezes slipped through, but so did the street sounds. Who were all those folks on motorcycles roaring through town long after midnight?
I was assigned a room on the third floor, sharing a bathroom with sisters Lynn from Los Gatos, Calif., and Faye from Philadelphia. It felt like a friendly pajama party with "good nights" tossed into the hall, following the recap of how the day went along with kudos for the incredible food we had prepared.
The only man in the group, Wayne from Benicia, Calif., roomed with Mary. They were longtime friends who met in the Peace Corps in Liberia, about 25 years ago.
Judy from Santa Rosa, Calif., was our style guru and knowing hand. It was her second time at Le Couvent and she made sure we stopped at Starfish and Coffee, a trendy boutique in Forcalquier. She bought a quirky, handmade scarf there that we agreed only she could carry off.
(Brennan's school always includes Northern Californian students because she teaches cooking classes there and writes occasionally for the San Francisco Chronicle.)
After a leisurely continental breakfast, during which someone gushed daily over the chewy-pillowy baguettes only minutes from the boulangerie oven, we loaded into two cars for a morning outing.
One day we visited Luc Chaffard, a farmer and goat cheesemaker, after which we hunted wild herbs in the hills above the farm. Another day the group hoofed it to the beekeeper on the other side of the village and learned about honeymaking.
We sipped wine at several wineries and attended an olive oil tasting. One evening there was an art show in a nearby town.
Brennan and her assistant zipped us over hill and dale, on winding roads sometimes so narrow we had to take a deep breath to pass uncoming cars. The terrain, other than the skinny roads, and the climate is reminiscent of the Sonoma and Napa valleys of California. Lushly bulging mountains, vineyards and olive groves in both places are fed by warm Mediterranean days and cool nights. A trip to the Salernes farmers' market, south of Aups, had us gawking at bundles of sunflowers and lavender, and rows and rows of sausages studded with olives, nuts and figs. A panoply of Indian spices was tended by a young man who looked like he might have run into trouble in the movie Midnight Express.
On the day we visited Moustiers, we traded our aprons for a long, leisurely lunch at Le Bastide, the country restaurant of famed chef Alain Ducasse. Ducasse is best known in the United States for the New York City restaurant that bears his name; there, lunch for two might cost $500.
The bill for our five-course Le Bastide lunch, which ended with a basil-citrus tart and delicate cookies, was more than $1,200. The lunch was included in the course fee, but dining on the deck overlooking the verdant valley and helicopter pad for the rich and famous was priceless.
On all of the other afternoons, we cooked, mostly dinner which we later ate. Recipes were divided among us and we dived in, bumping into each other on the first tentative day and becoming more and more like family as the week wore on.
"Has anyone seen the measuring cup?"
"Are you done with that knife?"
"Somebody taste this."
"Being a little heavy-handed with the cognac there, Janet."
(I figured if Monsieur Lapin had to die for our terrine, he might as well go happily.)
We ate all our meals outside, under that sycamore, drinking plenty of local wine and talking about now and then.
The sun set nightly about 9:30 and we were eating dessert long after dark. The wine and conviviality of the group led to stories of European shopping excursions, friendly Norwegian encounters, Scottish golfing sojourns and harrowing Peace Corps tales that made us tip our hats to young folks with the guts to serve others.
On the evening of the bat encounter, I was able to trot out my story of the weirdest food I ever ate. It was in India and the poor creature on the menu was . . . bat. It was gamey and weird, and not something I would want to repeat.
