Well, you wouldn't have said that to any of the guys I worked with in Monte Carlo, at the Hôtel de Paris - no sirree, Bob. The fifty cooks in the kitchen took their job seriously, althougth the famous hotel was only a Two-Star Michelin in those halcyon years of the 1970s when I was fortunate enough to work there. Proud to be Provençal, proud to be chefs, proud of tradition, they were a far cry from the crew of bored professionals I had worked with at the Hôtel Ritz in Paris.
Although many of these cooks had been working together for more than twenty years, seldom a week went by without fiery southern tempers flaring over "discussions" of the best way to do this or that. Two very hot topics were Bouillabaisse, and Salade Niçoise.
We'll leave the soup for another time, and tackle that controversial salad now. Now, up in Paris, and even for our duly canonized American authority Julia Child, this was a salad "composé" with boiled potatoes, boiled green beans, tuna, anchovies, a few indifferent tomatoes, and hard boiled eggs.
That wasn't a recipe that worked for my friends in the south- for them a Niçoise had only "Crudités" - raw vegetables - ripe, Provençal tomatoes bursting with flavor, local "mesclun" greens which usually included roquetta - dialect for arugula, a few raw fava beans, beautiful pale green, and either tuna or anchovies - both, all agreed, was just too extravagant. This was poor country, Provence, after all.
All agreed on "Non!" to the potatoes and green beans, never any cooked vegetables. The tuna wasn't seared, it was conserved - canned - in olive oil. The olives were not pitted, and were from Nice. We'd cure the olives in the off season when things were slow. And if Princess Caroline caught a tuna, well, I got an opportunity to learn how to can tuna. Hard boiled eggs? Well, they were okay.
What didn't they agree on? Croûton or no croûton - I side with the "with" crowd myself. Rubbed with lots of garlic. And if that wasn't enough to argue about, well, there was always the bouillabaisse.
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