Lulu's Provencal Table: The Exuberant Food and Wine from the Domaine Tempier Vineyard (Hardcover)

~ (Author), John Thorne (Introduction)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Lulu Peyraud taught me how to make bouillabaisse in her Bandol kitchen and Richard Olney has been an inspiration for years. The aromas of Lulu'¬?s food and wine actually seem to waft from the pages." -Paula Wolfert"LULU'¬?S PROVENCAL TABLE is a gastronomic love poem to France'¬?s most exhilarating region. Here, Richard Olney profiles both a lifestyle and a culinary tradition, a real life that deserves to be shared with the world. His personal voice, as well as Lulu'¬?s masterful art of cooking with love, both come through loud and clear. In short, a gold mine of authentic Proven?ßal cooking." -Patricia Wells

Product Description

Of all of the culinary treasures that Richard Olney brought home from France for his American audience, the spritely and commanding Lulu Peyraud is perhaps the most noteworthy. A second-generation proprietor of Provence’s noted vineyard Domaine Tempier, and producer of some of the region’s best wines and meals, Lulu has for over 50 years been Provence’s best-kept secret. Mother of seven, Lulu still owns and operates Domaine Tempier with her family, serving up wit and warmth with remarkable food year-round at the vineyard. Hosting a parade of American tastemakers like Alice Waters, Paul Bertolli, Gerald Asher, Paula Wolfert, and Kermit Lynch through the years, Lulu has willingly shared her sweeping culinary knowledge, wisdom, and resourcefulness with anyone who stopped by. In LULU’S PROVENÇAL TABLE, Olney, who shared an unguarded friendship with Lulu, relays the everyday banter, lessons, and over 150 core recipes that have emerged from her kitchen. Peppered with over 75 photographs, Olney’s tribute aptly celebrates the spirit and gifts of this culinary legend.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 392 pages
• Publisher: Ten Speed Press; illustrated edition edition (March 1, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1580084001
• ISBN-13: 978-1580084000
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.2 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #194,573 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A classic of the first Water! Buy it!!!, August 23, 2005

By	B. Marold "Bruce W. Marold" (Bethlehem, PA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

`Lulu's Provencal Table' by renowned culinary writer and editor, Richard Olney is one of the best works in the very select genre of what might be called `culinary anthropology'. The works I know in this field are few in number but very high in quality and in the rewards for interested readers.

The leading work in this field is certainly `Honey from a Weed' by Patience Gray. Other notable titles are `The Cook and the Gardener' by Amanda Hesser and `The Tuscan Year' by Elizabeth Romer. Befitting Olney's influence, almost all of John Thorne's essays also belong to this tribe of writing. Also befitting this influence, it is Thorne who writes the new introduction to this very substantial work. In this piece, Thorne cites Madeleine Kamman's `When French Women Cook' as another member of this select tribe. I cite this in deference to Thorne's expertise in the area and I hope to review it very soon.

Like my reviewing of `Honey from a Weed', I owned the book for almost a year before I opened it up and I deeply regret my delay, as this is a vicarious culinary pleasure of the first order. The subject / cook / interviewee of the book is Lucie Tempier Peyraud, known to all as `Lulu', the wife of the important French vintner, Lucian Peyraud and co-owner of Domaine Tempier, a vineyard and dwelling `nestled in the hillsides outside the neighboring fishing ports of Bandol and Sanary, some ten miles from Toulon and thirty miles from Marseilles.' Author Olney became friends with the Peyrauds shortly after purchasing a very run-down cottage near Domaine Tempier, before he was the renowned culinary writer he was to become with his books on French cuisine and his editorship of the Time-Life series of books on world cuisines.

Olney was talked into doing this book by another Peyraud friend, Alice Waters, whose Chez Panisse has been a buyer of Peyraud wines for many years. The inspiration for the book is Lulu's great cooking experienced by Olney for decades, and experienced by Waters during frequent trips to Provence on wine testing and purchasing expeditions. In fact, according to Thorne, it was Waters who initiated the project and talked Olney into carrying it to publication.

On the surface, the book may appear to be just another Provencal cookbook, similar to several titles from the likes of Patricia Wells and Lydie Marshall. And, it can be used in this way, but it is much, much more.
The book was built out of interviews by Olney of Lulu as she prepared her various dishes. As Lulu was the consummately instinctive cook, she rarely knew on a conscious level exactly how much of a particular ingredient she uses for most recipes. As one reads Olney's asides on this archeological aspect of the interviews, one senses they are reading the captured essences of an ephemeral form of cooking which arises out of a great love of the art and the ingredients to the cooking.

This is also what makes this such a great `reading' cookbook, yet it is not a culinary memoir with recipes added in here and there, which always play second fiddle to the narrative. Every other recipe offers important hints on general cooking technique such as the suggestion to leave the outer membrane on squid to add to the flavor and to search out the leafy bible tripe from the cow's third stomach, a very delicate addition to the traditional honeycombed tripe from the second stomach. While this is a relatively simple form of cooking, it is not primitive, as many recipes especially the famous French daubes take many hours to prepare, even with the addition of major modern kitchen equipment such as the blender and the food processor, which Lulu and Olney use frequently.

Waters describes Lulu's cuisine as `la cuisine de bonne femme', which may be loosely translated into what Emeril Lagasse labels as `a food of love thing'. This is part of the reason this is both simple, but requiring a great amount of attention. This style of cooking will fail if it gets only half your attention, the other half being spent with Opra, the Knicks and Lakers basketball game, or an errant adolescent not quite old enough to be counted on to stay out of trouble on its own. This means that this book jumps to the top of the list of books I recommend to people who like to read cookbooks. It also jumps to the top of my list as a source for Provencal cooking. Since both author and subject are true to the terroir of coastal Provence, there may be a few recipes, such as the classic nine page long recipe for Bouillabaisse which you will not be able to duplicate as you may simply not be able to get whole rascasses, wrasses, combers, and John Dory's. Scribe Olney is true to his mission of describing how Lulu actually cooks, but he does transpose an aside here and there for us New World suburbanites so we may approximate the classic dishes.

I heartily agree with Thorne when he says that the first sixty pages of the book can easily be left to a later time, as it is largely a `pro forma' recitation of the history of Lulu, Lucian, and their Bandol vineyard. The real action starts on page 61 with `Lulu's Kitchen: Recipes'. This recipe by recipe table of contents demonstrates that this is a really serious cookbook that just happens to be a great culinary read as well. The recipes cover all standard courses and food ingredients, with each and every recipe being a part of Lulu's real cuisine. There are no fillers here, so you will find no bread baking recipes, as it is apparent that Lulu did not bake her own bread.

This is an important culinary book, a superb mix of cookbook and memoir of the Provencal terroir and style. Very highly recommended.

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Like a bit of the Domaine in my house, August 11, 2006

By	J. V. Lewis (secure undisclosed location) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Richard Olney probably came closer to perfection as a cookbook author than any other American. His books are exquisite models of focus, structure, warmth, and practicality, and his treatment of food and wine somehow manages to be simultaneously perfectly balanced and highly personal. Next to Olney's cookbooks and vinyard monographs, the oevres of James Beard and Julia Child, for example, feel overblown, oversold, and downright sloppy.

Olney's warmhearted incision is the perfect match for the home cooking of Lulu Peyraud. Mm Peyraud is the Marseille native, mother of seven, keystone of the Bandol food and wine community, renowned home cook, and owner-operator of Domaine Tempier, widely considered the finest vinyard of France's Mediterranean coast. Most famously, she is gratefully credited by Alice Waters, Kermit Lynch, Jeremiah Tower, Paul Bertolli, and a host of other American food heirarchs with being their inspiration and touchstone. But for years before America found the simple pleasures of expertly-prepared, highly-local, regional foods, Lulu and Richard were cooking lunches for each other under their respective grape arbors. This book is a broad sample of those meals. In it, Olney documents the preparation, from farm and fish-market to plate, of Mm Peyraud's favorite family meals. Each recipe is presented with notes on ingredients, irregularities and seasonal adjustments in Mm Peyraud's preparations, lucid explanations of techniques, and reminders to keep things loose. The result is a highly-informative glimpse into the regional cuisine that forms the culinary hunge between France and Piedmont-Liguria. This cuisine is one of the world's most satisfying, and I believe that this book is its greatest Testament.

I won't single out any recipes this time. The book is full of stunners from salad to desert. Buy this book and a couple of bottles of Domaine Tempier [a rose and a red, for starters], and serve those wines, chilled Provence-style, with a sampling of these magical dishes. Serve them, if at all possible, under a grape arbor on a hot, sunny day in an ocean breeze. And raise a glass to Lulu and Richard for their generous hospitality.