A recent visit to Nice provides the inspiration for today’s recipes, full of the flavour and colour of Provence, seen at its best in the Cours Saleya, the city’s open-air market.
The stalls are piled high with seasonal fruit and vegetables, glistening silver fish and bright crustaceans, jars of local honey and beeswax soap and candles, bottles of golden green extra virgin olive oil from Les Baux de Provence, earthenware bowls of tiny, black olives from Nyon and bottles of local wine.
The outer perimeter of the market is lined with restaurants, where tourists and locals alike sit down to bouillabaisse, supions (tiny octopus), petits farcis (stuffed and roasted baby vegetables), fougasse (bread baked in the bottom of the oven) and socca (chickpea flour savouries) among the many traditional niçoise dishes.
In fact, for authentic local cooking, we liked La Maison de Marie, in a small courtyard off 5, Rue Masséna, one of the city’s main commercial streets, where one would expect nothing but tourist haunts. But this is clearly a favourite of the local business community as well; it was so good that we did what we rarely do and returned for lunch the next day.
The daube recipe that follows is based on the one we ate there. At Le Bistrot Gourmand, 3, Rue Desboutin, David Vaqué does a modern take on the traditional food of Nice and I recommend it highly, especially its comprehensive local wine list.
Keisuke Matsushima, a long-established Japanese chef in Nice, offers an exemplary €28 menu for lunch, with plenty of wines by the glass. We were there in early summer, so strawberries, rhubarb, fresh peas, morels and poivrade artichokes featured, alongside slow-cooked black-leg pork garnished with hazelnuts.
For fine dining in Nice, you cannot do better than the city’s Michelin-starred Christian Plumail at 54, Boulevard Jean Jaurès, which has a wine list to match; the 2007 Chateau Pibarnon was outstanding. Roast, line-caught sea bass with a celery cannelloni and tempura of courgette flowers stays in the mind, as does the roast suckling pig.
As well as the market, Rue de France, Place Masséna and Avenue Jacques Médecin are where to shop for wonderful fruits glacés, marzipan fruit and figures, flower syrups and essences, and of course, Fragonard perfume, from nearby Grasse.
Rue Saint François de Paule, near the Cours Saleya, home of the Nice Opera House, has some good places for a drink and a bite to eat, as well as the famous Alziari olive oil mill and shop for more gastronomic souvenirs.
If you want to buy local olive oil, take care to read the label carefully; while it is all excellent, some is a blend of EU oils rather than purely from olives grown in Provence.
Daube niçoise
Leftover daube is excellent reheated and served with fresh pasta or gnocchi; it also makes a very good filling for home-made ravioli. In fact, it is worth making double quantities of the meat casserole, as it is so versatile and can be frozen.
Serves 6 to 8
1 onion, peeled and thinly sliced
3 celery stalks, trimmed and cut into batons
2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
1kg shin or blade of beef, or other casseroling cut
3 tbsp seasoned flour
½ bottle full-bodied red wine
Finely pared zest and juice of an orange
2 tbsp black olives
8 pieces dried tomato, snipped in two or three chunks
Freshly ground pepper
1 bayleaf
Sprig of rosemary
½ tsp fennel seeds (optional)
Gozo salt, if needed
250g meat tortellini or raviolini
Heat some oil in a frying pan over medium heat, place the onion and celery in the pan and fry until the onion is golden brown. Transfer to a casserole. Dust the meat in the seasoned flour and brown it in the frying pan. Add it to the casserole. Pour the wine into the frying pan and boil it up, scraping up any cooking residues. When reduced by about a third, pour it over the beef.
Cut the zest into fine shreds and stir together with the juice into the beef, also adding olives, tomato, pepper and herbs. Put the lid on and cook the casserole in a pre-heated oven, at about 180˚C, gas mark 4, for two to three hours, depending on the cut of meat. You can cook at a lower temperature for a longer period; this is not a temperamental dish.
Half an hour before it is ready, add the pasta to the simmering stew, return the casserole to the oven; the dish is ready when the pasta is tender. Check the seasoning as the olives are salty. No other starch is needed with the daube and instead of a vegetable accompaniment I would serve a green salad afterwards, to mop up any remaining gravy.
Bouillabaisse of vegetables and eggs
The vegetables listed below are only suggestions; you can add or substitute cabbage, cauliflower, pumpkin, marrows, onions and potatoes according to taste and availability.
Serves 4-6
2 leeks, trimmed and sliced
2 small onions, peeled and diced
4 garlic cloves, peeled and crushed
2 medium courgettes, trimmed and diced
1 medium fennel bulb, diced
4 or five tomatoes, peeled, halved, seeded, and roughly chopped
75ml extra virgin olive oil
Sprig each of parsley, thyme and sage, or rosemary, tied together
Generous pinch of saffron
Gozo salt
Freshly ground black pepper
1.5 litres water or vegetable stock
4 or six eggs, farm eggs or organic eggs, if possible
4 or six slices Maltese bread
In a large saucepan gently fry all the vegetables in olive oil for five to 10 minutes. Add the herbs, saffron and a little seasoning, together with the water.
Boil for 30-40 minutes, the boiling of the oil and water being the bouillabaisse of the title, then lower the heat to barely simmering, and poach the eggs in the soup for three minutes.
Meanwhile, toast the bread, and put one slice in each heated soup bowl. Place a poached egg on top, check the seasonings of the vegetable broth, remove the herbs and pour the broth and vegetables over the eggs.
Serve immediately. A hot piquant rouille will go very well with this as it does with the more traditional fish and seafood version.
Panna cotta
Nice being so close to Italy, we were not surprised to see panna cotta on more than one menu. Something of a misnomer, in that this is a cream jelly rather than a cooked cream, panna cotta is an exquisitely silky, rich pudding, to be served with chocolate sauce, a fruit purée or simply with local honey.
4 tsp gelatine granules
600ml cream
300ml full cream milk
1 vanilla pod or a tablespoon of orange flower water for a real taste of Provence
Sugar to taste
Soften the gelatine in some water, then drain. Heat the cream and milk with the vanilla pod (if using it) to blood heat (about 37˚C), then add the sugar and drained gelatine. If using orange flower water instead of vanilla, add it at this stage.
Stir until the sugar and gelatine have dissolved and allow the cream to cool.
If you have used a vanilla pod, remove it, split it and scrape the seeds into the cream, then rinse and dry the pod to use to scent a jar of caster sugar.
Before the mixture begins to set, pour it into a wet pudding basin or jelly mould, or individual moulds.
Refrigerate overnight. To serve, loosen the pudding by holding a hot cloth to the mould, or briefly dipping its base in hot water, and carefully turn it out on to a shallow dish or individual serving plates.