Memories of food and France

With neither apology nor blush, Georgeanne Brennan pulls from her refrigerator a package of Pillsbury pie crusts.

Visitors in her sunny kitchen must look startled, for she is quick to explain that such a shortcut is as French as Champagne.

"If I were in Provence, this is exactly what I'd be doing," Brennan says. "It makes perfect sense, because the French can buy such good things. And I'm not a baker."

She peels open the package, presses the dough gently into a pie plate, and layers it with a thin brushing of Dijon mustard, thick slices of Golden Jubilee tomatoes from her garden, a generous showering of locally produced olive oil, a sprinkling of sea salt, and leaves of thyme snipped from a planter on the front porch.

Brennan knows the food ways of Provence. Since 1970, she's been dividing her time between Aups, a small village in the heavily wooded Upper Var between Cannes and Aix en Provence, and her 10-acre spread on the Solano County side of Putah Creek, just outside Winters in Yolo County.

Her French home and neighbors, and the cooking she learned from them, including the tomato tart she's about to slide into the oven, form the focus of her latest book, "A Pig in Provence" (Chronicle Books, $24.95, 223 pages).

Brennan has written so many cookbooks that she's lost track of the total, but puts it at around 35, making her one of the nation's more prolific food writers. Somewhere around her Winters farmhouse is her first handwritten cookbook, "My Receipts," which includes "banana snow" (smashed bananas with cream) and "orange fluff" (orange juice with whipped egg whites), which she wrote when she was in theecond grade.

"A Pig in Provence" departs from her usual approach, which is to write practical manuals with a specific theme: Christmas sweets, root vegetables, vegetarianism, salads, soups and the like.

Instead, it's a graceful memoir of her awakening to the role the dinner table plays in bringing people together and fostering their understanding of community, cookery and farming.

"This was an opportunity to write about the connections between people and food. It's about that place at the table where memory connects with food," Brennan says. "When you have a dish, it brings back the time, the place, the people, and how you felt about it. It was wonderful for me to do that in this book."

"A Pig in Provence" isn't a cookbook, though a recipe concludes each chapter, and each chapter is a story that tells how Brennan mastered another of Provence's enduring food customs – the raising of pigs for the annual "jour du cochon," the long celebratory day when the family pig is slaughtered and transformed into pâtés, bacon and ham; the hunting, gathering, cleaning and grilling of mushrooms; the complicated and intense assembling of bouillabaisse, the classic seafood stew most closely identified with nearby Marseille; the crafting of tomato tarts for a village wedding; the making of goat cheese.

In its intimate tone and archaic design, "A Pig in Provence" is a throwback to a publishing era that's virtually gone. For one, the headnotes at the start of each chapter, in their suggestions of drama to come, read as if they could be from a Dickens novel. And contrary to the modern practice of publishing recipes by listing ingredients and following them with blunt directions, the book's recipes are casual narratives, which could only be more personal if they'd been handwritten.

"They're written in prose, the way you would describe a dish to someone if you were in the kitchen together," Brennan says.

This style, she adds, reflects the Provence she first came to know.

"Those years were extraordinary," Brennan says. "Even though it was 1970 and 1975 and 1980 here, it was still the 1940s there. People still used wells or a cistern. There was no city water until maybe 1978. Everybody had a garden, everybody kept a pig. It wasn't just another place, it very much was another time."

It sure wasn't Laguna Beach, where she grew up, and where not many residents, if any, had a well or a cistern. Her father was a surfer and a potter, her mother the homemaker who first suggested that the dinner table is far different from all other household furnishings.

About the writer:

• Reach The Bee's Mike Dunne at (916) 321-1143 or mdunne@sacbee.com.