Why Americans Crave Southern French Cooking Now

THE THING IS, all the clichés you’ve heard about the south of France are true.” So begins “Le Sud” (April 23, Chronicle), the new cookbook from Rebekah Peppler, an American based in Paris. She goes on to rhapsodize about the region’s light, its open-air markets, its olive trees, lavender and sunflowers. Then, casually: “And the food? It’s not overrated.”

Peppler is certainly not the first expat to fall for southern French cooking—and not the only one publishing a cookbook on the region this spring, either. As much as the south of France is a real place, it’s also a story we tell ourselves, over and over again, about what it means to eat and to live well. But why are we so hungry for the food of the south of France right now?

If anyone can answer that question, it’s chef Alice Waters of Chez Panisse, the farm-to-table restaurant she founded in Berkeley, Calif., in 1971, that forever changed the way Americans eat. “The reason southern French cooking appeals to us so much today is that it offers delicious solutions to our most urgent food challenges,” she said. “We need to make our diets healthy by eating more fruit and vegetables and less meat, and we need to respond to climate change with farming methods that protect and renew the earth…which is what they’ve been doing in the south of France for centuries.”

Ruth Reichl has followed the flow of ideas from the south of France to U.S. kitchens for decades—from her own time cooking in California restaurants in the 1970s to her stint as editor in chief of Gourmet (1999-2009). “I think a new generation is loving southern French food today because it includes so many dishes that are vegan and vegetarian,” she said. “This kitchen also hits a sweet spot, because we’re bored with the expense, formality and pretension of haute cuisine.”

The Transplant’s Perspective

With summer approaching, the beautiful new cookbook “Nicoise” by Rosa Jackson (April 9, W.W. Norton) arrives to help Americans fall head over heels for the food of France’s sun-basted Côte d’Azur all over again. Or maybe for the first time.

Fascinated with the food of France, Jackson left her native Canada for Paris and then Nice, where’s she’s lived and worked as a teacher, author and cooking-school owner since 2004. She is a graceful, witty writer, and her book is deeply lived and knowing. The glimpses of her life in “Nicoise” will surely encourage others to follow in her footsteps.

Until you, too, can move to Le Vieux Nice, Jackson offers recipes gifted by the grandmothers and other cooks in her neighborhood, grouped according to the seasons. Garnished with a radiating pattern of edible blossoms, her tian de courgettes et de chèvre—a sort of crustless quiche of zucchini, eggs and goat cheese—looks like the sun itself. Throughout, Jackson salutes her mentors, from her neighbor Marie to Franck Cerutti, who ran the kitchens at the Michelin three-star Louis XV in Monte Carlo for chef Alain Ducasse for many years.

A Cuisine to Take Seriously

Ducasse began his own discovery of Provençal cooking with chef Roger Vergé at Le Moulin de Mougins in 1977 and won his first Michelin stars as head chef at La Terrasse in Juan-les-Pins, putting Provençal cooking on an equal footing with the butter-rich dishes of Bordeaux or Burgundy. “Before I started, the French thought of southern French food as vacation food—gigot d’agneau, salade Nicoise, pan bagnat, etc., but not serious cooking,” he said. Today, visitors to the south of France find an embarrassment of excellent restaurants.

“The countries around the Mediterranean are an ancient larder of primal tastes and flavors with one product that defines it: olive oil,” Ducasse said. “This cooking is not a fad or a fashion. It endures because of recipes that evolved to show off the richness of the fish, vegetables and fruit that grow here.”

Waters and Reichl credit the writer Richard Olney with bringing Provençal food to the attention of American chefs in the 1970s. “[Olney’s] ‘The French Menu Cookbook’ and ‘Lulu’s Provençal Table’ were a huge inspiration,” Waters said. “I also loved Elizabeth David’s ‘French Country Cooking,’ because she made me feel I could do it.” (Find more essential reading below.)

A Fresh Take

Now it’s another generation’s turn. In “Le Sud,” one senses the wonderment of a child of the New World as she discovers the lushness and sensuality of a much older one. Peppler, a graduate of the French Culinary Institute, grew up in Wisconsin and lived between New York and Los Angeles before moving to Paris 10 years ago. After penning books on French cocktails (“Aperitif”) and her personal take on French cooking (“À Table”), in her latest she shares her new crush on the south of France.

Looking at the gorgeous photographs, you can’t help but wish you’d been invited to that picnic or long lunch in the shade of silvery olive trees. Peppler emphasizes the ease that comes from cooking with really good seasonal produce. Her recipes are lucid; her writing, relaxed and engaging.

This is a book to read, not just to cook from, and we learn as much about Peppler as we do about the place. “I wanted to write from a queer woman’s perspective, which is often missing, especially within the cookbook world,” she said in an interview with the newspaper France-Amerique. “I wasn’t interested in just writing a cookbook. I was interested in writing, first and foremost, and the recipes are part of it.”

In the end, everyone creates their own south of France, whether you spend a year in Provence or only a week. Even if you stay home, Jackson and Peppler will have you savoring the region’s sensual, sun-ripened cooking as long as the weather and the produce where you are let you live the dream.

The Essential South of France Bookshelf

A literary, culinary timeline of a region and its recipes

I was nine when I learned that a great cookbook can make you fall in love with a place you’ve never been and also be as intimate and interesting a read as a good novel. My aunt who was an editor at a New York publishing company gave me a book a colleague had edited, “French Provincial Cooking” by Elizabeth David. It was an unusual present for a boy of my age living in the Connecticut suburbs, but a kind one, too.

The elegant David had taught post-war Britain to love the cooking of France and the Mediterranean countries. She taught me the magic of cookbooks: They help you taste the food of a place before you even go there. David was proper but puckish, and a fountain of memorable quotes, including two of my kitchen favorites. “Cooking is an art, but you don’t have to be an artist to cook,” she wrote. And also: “The life-enhancing power of good food cannot be overstated.”

The books below, listed in order of their publication dates, offer a potted history of southern French cooking over the last century and a quarter as well as the various acolytes drawn irresistibly to it. Each one evokes its own equally vivid and wholly singular sense of this endlessly intriguing region.

—Alexander Lobrano