90 JANUARY 2021
“Il faut toujours rigoler,” she declared. “Rigoler, et ne pas faire
attention à tous ceux qui vous emmerdent.” Lulu’s credo: You
must keep laughing. Laughing and ignoring all the assholes.
The mussels came and went. Then the pissaladière, each slice
topped with crosshatched anchovies and a limp black olive.
And then Marc was at the sideboard, where he had set a low
earthenware dish, and I got up to look over his shoulder.
Pieds et paquets is a canonic Provençal dish, made of lamb
tripe pockets stuffed with salt pork and garlic persillade, cooked
with lamb’s feet for a day or more in a tomato, thyme, and garlic
sauce. Marc had been tending this one for about 18 hours.
“The key is to make it the night before, like a daube, and then
reheat it,” he said. “Even better: Reheat it again.”
Delicate tendrils of steam rose from the roasted-red surface of
the sauce, which was pocked like a Bolognese that has cooked
down all day and crusted to almost black around the rim. Marc
fished out several paquets, then lifted a dripping, steaming foot
and set it on a plate, spooned sauce over everything, including
two boiled potatoes, and served this to Lulu.
As I placed my face over the dish and inhaled the smell of
garlic and tomato and the muffled but unmistakable organ scent
of lamb tripe, Marc asked me casually if I would pour.
I looked at him, and over at the decanter, and I felt a surge of
anxiety. I felt suddenly sure that to prepare properly for such a
moment, I should have lived my life quite differently.
But the main course had arrived. It was the point in the meal
when one switched from white to red.
So I half-filled Lulu’s glass, a little shakily, then everyone
else’s, with Domaine Tempier La Tourtine from Richard Olney’s
cave, wine that Lulu had overseen the making of some 23 years
earlier. Our glasses met musically above the decanter in the
middle of the table, and the conversation resumed—conversation
being so much more the point of all of this than the solemnity
of a carafe of old wine, no matter how symbolic or good.
In Provence, sandwiched between resinously aromatic hills
and the sea, it has been decided that stronger smells and fla-
vors most often equate to better food, resulting, among other
manifestations, in the peculiar form of dumpling on the plate in
front of me—chewy-tender pyramids of the stomach linings of
lambs wrapped around aromatic pork. You have to be unafraid
of the faintly gamy essence of the tripe, which the French tend
to love in their organ meat and love equally in their wild game,
which they hang for days in order to accentuate the intestinal
smell of early decay.
And if you’re going to drink wine with such a dish, it should
not be a wine that holds its nose at the joyful reek of garlic or
a certain intimate pungency of animal flesh. It should be well
built and bulging with muscle, and it should leap into the ring
with a happy shout, to contend with the strength of such a
partner and competitor as pieds et paquets. A bottle of Domaine
Tempier serves nicely, was in fact conceived to perform this
exact function—not to be timidly sniffed and sipped, but to war
amicably with flavorful food.
Amid the clicking of knives and forks, Lulu asked if we knew
the secret of her longevity.
“One should only drink wine,” she said. “Water makes one
rust.”
She spent a moment working on the lamb’s foot on her plate
with a knife and fork and then shook her head.
“The things one says to sell one’s wine.” She chuckled and
took a forkful of the tender, cartilaginous meat she had expertly
removed from the lamb’s complicated foot.
She took a sip from the glass of wine in front of her—her wine
in every conceivable way—and decided that “he was very good.”
And for the next half an hour or so, she more or less held the
floor, ending with this story.
When she was a young girl in Marseille (“and remember, I
was born in 1917!”), during the annual sailing ship festival, they
used to line up cauldrons along the wharf in the Old Port, each
cauldron hanging from a wire that ran from post to post. In the
morning, everyone would put carrots and leeks and garlic and
onions in the bottom of the cauldrons, then place the bigger
fish on the vegetables, and finally scatter the smaller fish and
crabs on top. Someone would walk along the row with a hose,
filling each cauldron with water. They would light fires all along
the wharf with scrapped ship’s wood, and by lunchtime, when
the ships had returned, the port smelled like woodsmoke and
cooked fish and saffron broth, and everybody’s bouillabaisse
was ready.
Lulu always cooked her bouillabaisse in her fireplace over
wood, a dish of sufficient renown that, as Laurence reminded
us, Francis Coppola’s wife had once come out to film it.
A cheese course followed, and Lulu’s gaze, for the first time
all day, began slipping. She looked at Marc, and Marc leaped
up from his chair and asked if he could propose to her a little
siesta in the house on Richard’s couch, and she nodded her
acquiescence. With one hand in Marc’s crooked elbow, and a
cane in her other, she walked slowly among the chickens, under
the leafless persimmon tree still decorated with ornaments of
winter fruit, past the door to Richard’s cave stocked with last
century’s Domaine Tempier, through the front door into the
mythical Olney kitchen. And then Lulu Peyraud took a nap.
NCE ANYBODY has reached age 102, it is
understood that the bad news may come
at any moment. And yet, arriving at such
an age implies a kind of talent for living, a
thumbing of one’s nose at the oddsmakers.
Lulu Peyraud recovered from a broken leg in her 90s, took 50
swings on her swing set every day into her second century, and
advocated a glass of her own red wine at midday and another
with dinner as her personal longevity regimen. She led some
of us to cross our fingers, in secret, wondering if her inimitable
collection of gifts—her immense personal warmth, the intensity
of the fire in her dark eyes, her mulish stubbornness, her mas-
terful Provençal cooking, her mischievousness, her hospitality,
her total and earthy embrace of the sensual pleasures of life, her
talent for filthy jokes—might just unlock the door to eternity.
Thus when I learned of her death last October, two months
shy of her 103rd birthday, I felt unaccountably taken by sur-
prise, stricken as if by the death of a child. This was not how
the universe was supposed to work.
The first person I contacted was Marc. He reassured me that
Lulu was fine, having some trouble walking but in good spirits.
“No, my friend,” I said. “We lost her yesterday morning. I
just found out.”
“Non,” he said.
“I feel sick,” I said.
There was a long pause, and then an infuriated, anguished,
“Putain de merde!”
And we were silent together, contemplating the world that
was left, now that Lulu was gone.
O
PHOTOGRAPHY (FROM TOP): ANDY HALL/GUARDIAN/EYEVINE/REDUX, MARY JO HOFFMAN (2), COURTESY OF BYRON OLNEY
