88 JANUARY 2021
MARC LANZA LOOKED AT HIS WATCH. “I hope they haven’t for-
gotten me,” he said, though it was not yet 10 minutes to noon.
The dining room table next to us was set with unfussy, can-
dlelit care. In a shallow marble basin, like a sort of altar, a
decanter of brick-red wine sat next to the bottle from which it
had been poured.
Marc wore his hair, black like marinated olives, pulled back
into a tiny bun. A man steeped from the cradle in the traditional
cooking of Provence. Standing straight, I could tuck his massive
head under my chin, but he had a burly top-heaviness that sug-
gested a wrestling match would likely go his way.
Since the death in 1999 of its legendary former owner, Marc
had been the caretaker of the modest Provençal mas, or farm-
house, just across the courtyard from where we stood, where
Richard Olney had lived, painted, celebrated the pagan joys of
existence, and written some of the most sublime cookbooks
in the English language. My very public love for Olney had led
to a friendship with his brother and sister-in-law (and fellow
Minnesotans) Byron and Marilynn, and their generosity had
led us here—my wife, myself, and our teenage son, who might
someday understand his colossal good fortune—to meet Lulu
Peyraud for the first time.
Lulu.
Lucie Tempier Peyraud. The proprietress of Domaine Tempier;
revered Bandol winemaker; collaborator and inspiration behind
my favorite cookbook, Lulu’s Provençal Table; friend, protector,
and muse to Olney; sainted mother figure to a generation of
Olney acolytes; and a quiet legend in the world of French food
and wine was stopping by to eat her favorite lunch, pieds et
paquets, which only Marc cooked to her satisfaction. I was the
kid who had grown up worshiping Mickey Mantle and had just
gotten a call asking if I could fill in at shortstop for the Yankees.
Marc returned to the kitchen, and I wandered over to the
decanter, lifting it reverently to my nose. The nearly illegible
label on the adjacent bottle of Domaine Tempier was rasped with
age and humidity. But Richard Olney was nothing if not rigorous
about the wines in his cellar. And across the shoulder of the
bottle, in indelible white ink, was written a single number: 93.
“Les voilà!” called Marc.
She appeared in the glass door at the far end of Marc’s kitchen.
She wore a pink wool coat against the mild January chill and
walked slowly, in clogs, leaning a tiny bit to either side with
each step. She held a cane in one hand and Marc’s arm in the
other. She stood an imposing four-foot-eight and was made up,
with pearl earrings, pink lipstick, and a subtle flare of rouge on
each cheek. She was smiling beneath her understated crown of
white hair at something Marc had just said.
Just the previous month, she had turned 99.
We made a delicate bustle around her, taking turns greeting
her and her daughter Laurence. When it was my turn, Lulu
looked up at me and said, “Steve?” I said, “Yes, Steve,” and
leaned way, way down to peck her on her chilled left cheek and
then her right, and she held my face for a second and said, “I’m
so glad to finally meet you,” as if this minor satellite in front of
her were somehow a major planet in her personal solar system.
To be delightful is in some sense to be delighted. To be
interesting is to be interested. Lulu did not allow you to feel
intimidated by her somewhat world-historic presence. She was
beloved because she loved. She insisted in some vibratory but
unmistakable way that what she expected of you was simply
to return the warmth she so visibly felt for your valuable being.
She set off again with Marc, totting slowly through the kitchen
on his arm, navigating the step up into the dining room as he
worriedly held her hand and slipped a protective arm behind
her back, and then perched, like a bird, on a dining room chair.
I took a seat across from her in the dining room, and we
started to talk. She asked, “Do you know how I met Richard
[pronounced ree-SHARR]?” And as the others filtered into the
room and took their seats, she told me how the two of them had
been seated together at a dinner in Paris because they came from
the same backwoods corner of France, down there somewhere
near Toulon—as when a party host grabs two strangers and says,
“Hey, Jim. Dave here is a CPA, too.”
In the sweep of 20th-century gastronomic history, it was
perhaps a minor event, this meeting over dinner in Paris some-
time in the 1960s. But it’s also possible to view it as a kind of
consummation, the offspring of which include Alice Waters,
Kermit Lynch, Jeremiah Tower, Jim Harrison, Chez Panisse,
Lulu’s Provençal Table, the beatification of Domaine Tempier
wine, California cuisine, and slow food.
Such a list represents a channel wandering off to the side of
the main current of Western food in the last century. It slips
through quiet country, mostly out of earshot of televised cook-
ing, monetized social media feeds, and the annual trumpet
blasts of Michelin stars granted and withdrawn. But it is a chan-
nel that passes through my country in a vital and life-giving
way. The meeting of Lulu and Richard, like the meeting of my
own parents, holds a significance for me that is not just personal
and emotional, but constructive, at least in part, of my identity.
Marc keeps a small flock of chickens, as Olney did before him,
and three of them were loitering just outside the dining room
window, aware that around here, lunch hour’s aftermath often
resulted in good things being placed before chickens.
Lulu glanced over and interrupted herself to remark, in her
distinctly enunciated French, “Ces poules sont méchantes. Elles
nous montrent leurs culs.”
It took me a second to replay this and make sure, but yes. Lulu
Peyraud, 99 years old and sporting pearls, had just interrupted
the story of her first meeting with Richard Olney to announce,
“These hens are naughty. They’re showing us their asses.”
She took a sip of Bourgogne Aligoté and tucked into her
mussels gratin.
M
PHOTOGRAPHY: GAIL SKOFF
