I'm not really proud of this picture, because apart from my poor photography skills when it comes to photographing food, I had, of course, forgotten to photograph the dish as it was served up. Greedy again - we dived in and then I remembered.
And here I come to the mystery of this post - I cannot find a professional photograph of this dish - Roast pork Provençal - with garlicky green beans. It's a dish we have come across many times in France, and which I have made many times, with either Robert Carrier or Elizabeth David's recipe.
Not only can I not find a photograph. I also cannot find a recipe of what I had assumed was a classic. So let me go back a step.
Many, many years ago a little before we were married, we found ourselves with our friends Mike and Sue, in the small town of Meursault in Burgundy. Ignorant as we were in those days we did not realise that Meursault is one of the finest of white Burgundy wines. I think we had been searching for a campsite on our journey home to England after a few weeks in the South of France. So it was a bit late in the day.
It was too late to cook so we went to the local hotel for a meal, where they apologised profusely for us having to eat what they had - roast pork. This turned out to be one of the most memorable meals of my life. The pork was sublimely tender and garlicky, as were the green beans with which it was served. And the house wine - this being Meursault, was also a revelation, and has caused us to seek out a Meursault wine every time there is a really special occasion. This is the Hotel du Centre in Meursault. I have no idea whether it was the hotel in which we ate, but it does seem familiar somehow.
So yes, Burgundy, not Provence. However, the meal had been so wonderful that when married a year or so later, I tried to find a recipe that I thought would reproduce what we had eaten there, and found two - one from Elizabeth David and one from Robert Carrier - both of them purporting to be Provençal.
Elizabeth David marinades the pork in white wine and thyme, having inserted slivers of garlic into the pork. Near the end of the cooking she covers the pork with a persillade - which is not what I remembered. Robert Carrier, however, inserted sage leaves into the pork, and then soaked it in olive oil, with crumbled bay leaves and thyme for twelve hours. When it came to roasting, 6 tablespoons each of white wine, olive oil, and water were added together with crushed cloves of garlic. Sounds like nothing. Tastes delicious. No more than that. Perfect.
Having spent an hour or so browsing my cookbooks and the net for a suitable classy photo - or supporting evidence for his recipe, the nearest photograph I could find was this from Marie-Claire - and it has rosemary rather than thyme, and a very thin roast. So not close at all really. However, as to the recipe, I finally resorted to my Larousse Gastronomique, and there, exactly, is Robert Carrier's marinade, although the Larousse adds the crushed garlic to the marinade. And the call it à la Provençal as well. However they don't add the white wine. So maybe Carrier copied their marinade but added his own touch with the white wine.
Of course I don't really remember the detail of that long ago divine meal, and I certainly don't know how they cooked it. I do remember the garlicky green beans however - the same garlicky and buttery green beans that I ate everywhere in France and which I always endeavour to replicate. Mine are pretty good, but they really don't taste the same. And I know I cook it as they did because I watched them all doing it. Boil your beans until tender and then fry with butter and garlic. I don't know what I do wrong. Maybe it's the beans.
It was my guru week, so I decided on Robert Carrier, and married that decision with a tick for my freezer rescue - a boned leg of pork. Actually - big confession - I had already discarded a loin of pork because it was so, so old - a few years - and I really wasn't sure when it thawed that it wasn't a tiny bit green. So I threw it out. And another confession - the leg that I also rescued from the freezer was just as old, but looked and smelt perfectly fine, and I and David too, are still here. Which just goes to prove that you can freeze things for longer than they say.
I drank it with a glass of Aldi's delicious Pinot Grigio rather than a Meursault. Well it was just an ordinary Sunday. I made a gravy as you can see with the juices from the pan, but stupidly forgot to strain off the fat, so it really was not that wonderful. My fault entirely.
So not quite as in the romantic memory of long ago, but a dish I return to every now and then, simply because it's one of those super simple things, that you think, from reading the recipe will be boring, but which is really, really good.
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