Joanna Biggar's Blog

When you move to a new place, of course it is a beginning. But when you move to a new place while at the same time moving into the end of the natural year, there is a sense of beginning at the end. So, arriving in Aix-en-Provence as my husband and I did, in October, we expected to be greeted with a feeling of fall.

We were wrong. This year, of all years, summer lingered into the early territory of winter. It wasn’t just the glorious strands of light filtering through the avenues of plane trees, nor the light clinging with blinding white vigor on the  rocky heights of Mt. Ste. Victoire, nor the light of the clean blue sky playing over a blue  sea—the famous Provencal  painterly light.

It was the sense of summer the light carried. People sitting long and leisurely in shirt sleeves and light-weight skirts in cafes; kids running free and playful in that holiday mood; crowds pushing into the streets in the mornings on market days and into the dark after dining in restaurants, or leaving the theater;

even throngs in bathing suits and towels dusting themselves off as the sun set over the beach and the boats in the harbor and the wine sippers in bars beneath the dramatic cliffs of Cassis.

Surely, I thought, this can’t last. For even as summer seemed a permanent guest on the terraces with geranium-filled pots outside our new home for the year, inside told another, cooler story. We soon learned what the people of Provençe all know: that stone houses with tile floors are meant to keep the cold inside, even while walls and stones and pavements harvest the light.

I looked for the shafts of light falling straight as church steeples into open spaces, public squares, and the glow of orange, pink, yellow and rose tones—the colors of Provence—on buildings as the last light of day hit them. It seemed I should do something to save the summer light, too, to put something up before the storms and rains, and the Mistral came in earnest.

Then I went to the market and saw the mounds of multi-colored vegetables: baskets of peppers and zucchini; mounds of tomatoes, onions and garlic; stacks of purple-skinned eggplants. Then I knew: I could cook summer light where it was stored, in these vegetables.

Our friend Maurice was coming to dinner, and I decided to make my best ratatouille and a favorite Provençal dish. As the scents of the vegetables, olive oil and herbs simmering in the heavy pot invaded the kitchen, Maurice wandered over.

He looked over my shoulder and finally said in French, “You know, that looks something like ratatouille.”

I turned to look him in the eye. “But it is ratatouille,” I said.

“Ah,” he answered. “But it is a dish made in summer, with summer vegetables.”

I did not tell him I committed another heresy and put some away, for winter, in the freezer.