“I write about the places I like, the ones I want to return to and the dishes that inspire me and tell a story”

Provence has always been my land of adventures. Born in Valencia, I grew up in Marseille and I feel Mediterranean by adoption. The novelist and historian Joël Schmidt said that “Marseille is not a French city, but the capital of a continent called the Mediterranean.” It is a site, a history, the link with Antiquity, Greece, the Maghreb. Passionate about archaeology, I worked for a time at the Glanum excavations in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, which led me to pursue the profession of architect.

And it was architecture that opened the door to culinary journalism for me, since, knowing my love for good food, they entrusted me with the gastronomic review of a gloomy magazine that was widely read in the sector, The Public Works and Building Monitor. For fifteen years, I delivered an article a week to recommend good places – where you could eat well and a lot – to contractors, surveyors, notaries, architects…

I approached the journalistic world and certain editors of the World – to the supplement “Le Monde sans visa”, in particular. It occurred to me to cook for them in my apartment on rue de Varenne in Paris, so they could try dishes like calf’s head with turtle sauce, a complex brown sauce without turtle. In 1989, I was asked to write a column with Robert Courtine, who was the food writer for World under the pseudonym La Reynière, succeeding him in 1993.

I wrote the column for almost twenty years, alternating with Jean-Pierre Quélin, between 1995 and 2000. I wrote about products, chefs, winegrowers and restaurants. I do not intend to impose my tastes, but I tell and share, respecting each person’s taste, thanks to a pseudoaphorism inspired by Spinoza: “We don’t like things because they are good, they are good because we like them. » I write about the places I like, the ones I want to return to and the dishes that inspire me and tell a story.

It was still in Provence that I discovered aigo-sau for the first time. I cannot exactly date my encounter with this Italian-Provençal recipe, but I know that it was in the legendary Lou Marquès restaurant, in Arles, in the company of the poet Pierre Emmanuel, an immense character, writer of the Resistance, who had introduced I was given a job as an architect. He died two or three years later, in 1984. Suffice it to say that it was a day that should be marked with a white stone.

Aigo-sau is a kind of simplified bouillabaisse. Its name means “salt water” in Provençal. This clearly shows the purity of the dish: some fish, cooked quickly in water over high heat, herbs, three or four potatoes for starch, a good orange zest. I happily prepare this recipe, which can be found at The Provençal cook, Cult collection of southern recipes by Jean-Baptiste Reboul, and which is decidedly simpler and more digestible than calf’s head!