In the footsteps of food writer MFK Fisher on Provence culinary trail
The south of France has long been a favourite spot of food writers, including the late Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher. Inspired by her book about a 1970 trip, travel writer Tristan Rutherford embarks on a culinary journey
The arrival at Nice airport was something of a ceremony for food writer Julia Child. As she wrote to her fellow cookbook author, Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher: “This has become our ritual gear-shift from the USA.”
In the 1960s and 1970s, both writers were at the peak of their powers – the most famous foodie names in the Western world. It was only natural that both gravitated to the planet’s most fabulous culinary corner: the south of France.
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Today, Nice airport no longer offers the oysters and sole fillet that Child once enjoyed. But my arrival coincides with the launch of several authentically local pop-up restaurants that dot the terminal. There is Chez Pipo, a purveyor of Niçoise chickpea pancakes known as socca. There’s also La Tarte Tropezienne, a pâtisserie from St Tropez that has been using the same creamy recipe since Child and Fisher last jetted in.
That bodes well. Because I’m following the culinary trail set by Fisher, who blazed a decades-long foodie highway from Marseilles to Nice, frequently in the company of other culinary giants including Child, Richard Olney and James Beard. Fisher’s impossibly romantic notes on French cuisine, including Consider the Oyster, still top the Amazon charts.
Moreover, the 2016 opening of La Pitchoune as a cooking school, plus the recent book Provence, 1970 by Fisher’s great-nephew, Luke Barr, has made her route an even more enticing path to follow.
