MAG[C SANDWIGH
fn th. scene that I replayed in my mind for many years, I,m
standing in a market in Nice. (yes, I realize that in many of the
scenes that I replay in my mind I am standing in a market
somewherel I have no control over that.) In this case, I,m in
the produce and flower market that runs down the center of
the Cours Saleya six days a week. The Cours Saleya is an
elongated plazathat'sused as a sort of pedestrian boulevard in
Old Nice, iust inland from Nice's world-famsus fsagh_
a wide strip of jagged srones that an American accustomed to
the great sandy edges of Long Island or Southern California
might at first mistake for an unpaved parking lot that happens
to have an ocean next to it. In the scene, it,s 1983. Our family
is staying in a house in Tourrettes-sur-Loup, not far away;
this is before our daughters, oblivious of my efforts to locate
some process that would freeze them at an age that made it
appropriate for them ro remain under my roof, simply went
44 I f E E I I I N G A Y E N
ahead and grev/ up. Feeling a twinge of hunger late in the
morning-being in a market, particularly a market anywhere
near the Mediterranean, tends to do that 1e fi1s-l steP uP to a
serving window over a display case and ask for apan bagnat.
The woman behind the case reaches in and withdraws a
sandwich. It's on a circular bun that looks large enough to
accommodate the sort of outsized hamburger you might fashion
for Popeye's friend Wimpy-whq I might as well admit,
was a boyhood hero of mine in an era when other lads were
gaga over Batman or Captain Marvel. She removes the top of
the bun, revealing a damp m6lange of tuna fish and chopped
onions and lettuce and tomatoes and olives and hard-boiled
eggs.
She pours on some olive oil, presumably to make up for
whatever might have evaporated since she prepared the sandwich
earlier that morning. She hands the sandwich over the
counter. I pay her and take the first bite before I've moved an
inch. I turn to Alice. "If I could speak French, I would say
Mon Dieu!" I tell her. But even as I work my way through the
huge sandwich, it begins to dawn on me that leaving the Nice
area will mean giving vP pan bagnats; I have never eaten one
anywhere else. I can see myself adding them to the list of
favorite dishes that never seem to aPPear outside their place of
origin-the Register of Frustration and Deprivation.
I am momentarily saddened, but then it occurs to me that a
pan bagnat is not something that requires rare ingredients or
some special ovenl we're essentially talking here about a tunafish
sandwich. How long could it be before the pan bagnat
catcheso n in Americal (After all, this vision takesp lacei n 1983,
at a time when a previously unknown Italian bread ol a Previously
unknown Chinese provincial cuisine seemed to sv/eeP
UACIC SANDWICE | 45
over Manhaftan every week.) As I finish the last bite and begin
to deal with the olive oil stains on my shirt, I am buoyed by the
thought that the sort of New york joints that once went from
being totally squidless to being buried in fried calamari will
soon havepan bagnat as a familiar menu item. Having to go to
Nice to getapan bagnatwillbe told as a tale from the Model T
days of preglobalized eating, when you had to go to Italy for
sun-dried tomaroes and couldn,t find sourdough bread outside
the confines of San Francisco.
Wrong. The day came when I realized that I hadn,t had a
pan bagnati n seventeeny ears.I can,t imagine why sandwiches,
vrhich seem eminently transportable, are so often tethered to
their place of origin. I have never seen an Italian beef sandwich
outside of Chicago or a_hgglgs=nzeqk' j!1side of Buffalo_
although I was once told that homesick s"ff Lni""r;h;lr*
setded in the vicinity of Hollywood, Florida, hold a beef_on_
weck banquet every winter to srave off melancholy. The ten_
sion of which sandwich to have on a short stopover in New
Orleans-an oyster loaf at Casamento,sa, muffuletta at the
Central Grocery a Ferdi's special at Mother's, a shrimp po,boy
at Uglesich'--is intensified by the certain knowledge that
you're not going to ger rhe precise match of any of them outside
of Louisiana. A similar cloud of anticipated deprivation hangs
over the sunny pleasure of eating four or five barely .ook"d
scallops on a hamburger bun, with tartar sauce and letnrce and
tomatq at the Innlet Cafe in Mahone Bay, Nova Scoria, the only
placei n my experiencew here this simpled elight is available.
Finally ast he century waned, I spottedpan bagnatlistedo n
the lunch menu of a pleasant-looking bisrro not far from where
I live-the first time I'd seen it mentioned in New york.
46ITEEDTNGAYDN
Naturally, I stopped in. The sandwich I was given was a cooked
paffy on a square fu1-q/h31 I would call a tunaburger. "I
don't crave a take on apan bagnatr" I told Alice. "I don't crave
a statement on the pan bagnat theme. I do not crave an interpretation
of a pan bagnat or an Asian fusion version of a pan.
bagnat.I crave apan bagnat We'd better go to Nice."
"Thi, is not exactlv what I had in mind." I said to Alice. I had
taken a couple of bites from a pan bagnat and had yet to reach
what I believe rocket scientists call the payload. The bread
was dry, even after the last-minute spray of olive oil. I inspected
the small mound of tuna and fixings that formed an
island in the middle of the vast whiteness of the lower bun.
I suppose you have to admire the enterprise of someone who,
at the height of the tomato seasonin the Southo f France,m anages
to find the precise eguivalent of those American supermarket
tomatoes that have the same shelf life as a can of
cleanser, but I was reminded of the phrase a serious eater I
know in Paris had used to describe a run-of-th e-mill pan
bagnat: "yesterday's salade Nigoise on a bun." TIis pan bagnathad
been handed to me through a window over a display
case-perhaps not precisely the same window as in 1983, but,
still, a window on the Cours Saleya in Nice. It seemed to constitute
disquieting evidence that some of the people I'd talked
to before leaving New York were correct in saying that it's
becoming difficult to put your hands on a decent pan bagnat
even in the heart of Nice. I tried to remain calm.
I was helped in that endeavor by a large can of olive oil. It
staso n our tablea t a restaurantw e stoppedi n for lunch just after
MAcIC SAlllDWTCH | 47
I had the infeior pan \agnat as a sort of hors d,oeuvre. This
was nor rhe discreet little saucer of olive oil that a Tuscan tranoria
in Houston or Minneapolis might bring to the table these
days in case you want something to dip your bread in. This was
a serious can of olive oil from a local makel-a beautiful cvlin_
der in blue, with gold stars on it. It reminded me of th. Lrg"
pitcher of schmalz-liquid chicken fat_that the earkway, a
Rumanian Jewish restaurant on the Lower East Side, used to
placeo n its tablesf or the convenienceo f customersw ho felt the
need to improve on the chef 's excessesA. mong the other theo_
ries offered for why I so look forward to eating in iust about
any modest bistro near the Mediterranean and can contain mv
enthusiasm for eating in three-star restaurants in paris is the th"-
ory that I have a limited rolerance of butter and an unlimited
tolerance of olive oil. The can in the middle of our tabre tord me
that I was in the olive oil zone of influence. I was in a ciry that as
late as 1860 had still been pan of Italy.
I was sitting a matter of
yardsf rom the MediterraneanI. was in aplacew hoses pecialties
include some of my favorite foods__pissaladiire and sardines
and ratatouille. I had not yet even tasred what some peopre think
is the truly great market dish of Nice_socca, a thin pancake,
not much thicker than a crepe, made of nothing but chickpea
flour, water, olive oil, and salt and pepper. I felt optimistic that I
would find a superiotpan hagnat;even if I didn,t, I wouldn,t go
hungry. I ordered some grilled sardines and pulled the olive oil
toward my end of the table, just in case they needed improving.
E
Io help searcho ut gualityp an bagnats,Ih ad assembled a small
team that included Lydie Marshall, a noted cooking teacher and
48 EEDING A YEN
cookbook writer who used to live in New York and now holds
her classesin a chAteauth at she and her husbandh ave restored
in Nyons, a few hours northwest of Nice. Lydie had brought
with her a sort.of pan bagnat treasure map drawn by a friend of
hersn amedB runq a landscaped esigner,a nd when we gathered
the next morning to plan our first foray, she spread it out before
us. It showed the shorefront promenade and inland boulevard
that form the borders of Old Nice, and, between them, a rather
detailed drawing of an intersection. Just which intersection, of
the dozenso f intersectionsin old Nice, was not indicated.
"If this is Bruno'si deao f perspectiveI,' d like to seeo ne of
his gardens," I said.
Lydie said Bruno was a brilliant designer and a serious
eater. "He says that this is the place where everyone goes for
pan bagnats," she said, tapping the drawing of the intersection
with her finger.
As I was about to make another disparaging remark about
Brunq I suddenly recognized the intersection. I had been
there on an early morning walk a couple of hours before; it
was obviously the end of a one-block street called Miralheti
that juts down into Old Nice from Boulevard Jean Jaure. I
remembered seeing the tables and stools Bruno had drawn in
the street, between a bar called Ren6 Socca and a place with
two outdoor serving windows over display cases of Nigoise
specialties.
F ifteen minutes later, we were sitting
at one of the
tables with half a dozen empty plates in front of us, and I was
saying that, upon some reconsideration, I had decided that
Bruno was a man of considerable sagacity.
Yes, I'd just had the sort of pan bagnat I hadn't eaten since
1983B. ut I'd alsob eenw owed by the other Nigoises pecialties.
UAGIG SANITWICH I 49
We'd had sardine beignets.
We,d hadp issaladi\re that had a
fine crust and caramelized onions good enough to make you
forget the crust. We'd had at least two orders of socca, and.
only the certain knowledge that we were going to have to eat
lunch in about an hour kept me from going to the window to
get more. we'd also had a dish that consisted of fresh sardines
split and then topped with a sort of paste made mostly of what
the French call blette and we call Swiss chard.
(What people in
New Orleans do with oysters and spinach ro create oysters
Rockefeller is simply a ronier version of what people in Nice
do with sardines and Swiss chard-a piece of evidence to sup_
port A. J. Liebling's theory that N.ew Orleans is essentially a
J[e.dlterrgneal city.) All in all, r *u,,o i.pr."Jlfi,iil;il
hardly waii for lunch.
A frierra of Lydie's who lives in Nice had arranged a lunchtime
interview with Th6r6sa, a purveyor of socca and pan
bagnata nd other Nigoise specialtiesi n the Cours Saleyam ar_
ket.
In general, what would be the median strip if the Cours
Saleya were a conventional boulevard is reserved for market
stalls-except on Mondays, when it becomes antiques stalls,
and evenings, when it's transformed into extra tables for the
restaurants and caf6s that run along what would be the
curbsides.
But amidst the stalls of vendors selling fruits and
vegetables and olives and spices and special Nigoise sweets in
the middle of the Cours Saleya, Th6r6sa stands behind what
loohs like one of those barrels that down-and_outers some_
times build a fire in to give themselves a little warmth on chilly
nights. The barrel has a charcoal fire in it, used to keep the
5 0 I F E E D T N G A Y E N
soccao n top of it warm.
Soccaism ade in a very shallow circular
pan, about three times the diameter of an extralargefamily-
size-pi g-out-spec ial pizza-a pan that fi ts precisely on
Th6r6sa'sb arrel. Sincet he twenties.
Chez Th6r6sa'ss occah as
been made in a wood-burning oven a couple of blocks from
the market. It's transported to the barrel on a specially
designed cart that's pulled on a motorbike by a man named
Robert, who is, as far as I know, the only person on earth who
can accuratelyd escribeh is occupationa s.roccas chlepper.
Behind Th6r6sa and her barrel, there are a few tables,
which she somehow serves while handing out helpings of
soccaa ndp issaladiire and tourte aux blettesa nd, of coutse.p, an
bagnats to those who prefer eating on the stroll.
Th6r6sa herself
is a handsome middle-aged woman, brassy in the way
'women who preside over market stalls often are. She wears
tight clothesa nd huge gold earringsa nd is sometimesd escribed
as Felliniesque. She has become a sort of Nigoise is6na
symbol of the market and Old Nice and the deeply traditional
Nigoise dishes.
As soon as she found time to join us at one of
the tables, she said that she was the third Th6r6sa, that her real
name is Suzy, that she is half Jewish and half Spanish, and that
her lengthiest commercial experience before she bought the
operation from the second Th6r6sa, twelve years before, was
in the clothing business in Israel.
"I make thebest pan bagnat
in Nice," she said, in the same tone a Louisiana chef had once
told me that after I tasted his 6touff6e I'd throw rocks at other
people's6 touff6es", and I'm not evenN igoise."
Could sheb e rightt If the world were consistent)y ou might
expect the most photographed and colorful vendor in the Nice
market to produce a pan bagnar that could impress only a
MAGr cS ANDWICH| 5 l
tourist whose sandwich eating normally did not stray beyond
his suburb's fast-food double lane.
But the world is nor consistent.
Years ago, when I was looking into a shortage of Dunge_
ness crabs in San Franciscq I,d been surprised to discover that
the only people who were almost certain to have fresh crabs
iust trucked in from Eureka were rhose colorful and often pho_
tographedc haractersm anning the pots on Fisherman,sW harf.
Among the purveyorc of pan 6agna* in Nice_the bakeries
and caf6s and take-out places-_Th6r6sa is one of the few I
found who understandst hat the word,o verstuffedw henapplied
to sandwichesis a compliment. Shet akesg rearc arem arinating
the onions with olive oil and red wine vinegar and black
pepper-a mixture she allows to stand overnight. She uses
bread baked in a wood-burning oven.
On my third or fourth
visit to Chez Th6r6sa for a pan bagnat,I decided that even if
what I was eating didn,t make me want to throw rocks at
absolutely every otherp an bagnat served in Nice_the one ar
what we'd started calling Bruno,s place or the one at a bar near
the market called Chez Antoine-it was as good as pan bagnats
get.
I would have cleaned my plate if I,d had one.
t
I had never thought of Swiss chard as a staple of Nigoise
cuisine.
Actually, I hadn,t done a lot of thinking about Swiss
chardi n any context.B ut aso ur team searchedo ut Nigoises pe_
cialties,t rying a plate of stuffed vegetablesh ere and a zucchini
tourte therc and a grilled fresh anchovy somewhere else, Swiss
chard seemed to pop up at odd times_during dessert, for
instance, since tourte aux blette is made not only in savory form
but in a terrific sweet version that has pignons and honey.
I often
I
lr
I
l
I
52IDEEDINGAYEN
found myself muttering bleue, a word that can sound like an
imitation of a small animal. "Blette, blette," I'd say.
"We are in
the presence of blette." The pAt6 maison at a restaurant called
Les Arcades, in the pottery village of Biot, near Nice, had an
unusual and satisfring taste. "Bletter "I said.
"Blefte, blette." At
a place called Restaurant Simon, on the outskirts of the ciry we
had a stupendous version of the traditional Nigoise ravioli,
made with /azle (stewed beef) and Swiss chard. I wanted to ask
Alice whether Simon's ravioli eaten with a side dish of its gnocchi
(covered with the same sauce) would be considered a balanced
meal, but all I could say v/as "Blette."'
When we had
finished our first meal at a tiny restaurant near the Cours Saleya
called La M6renda and immediately made reservations for our
second meal, we asked the waiter to reserve us some stuffed sardines,
w hich they'd been out of, becauseit didn't take a genius
to know what they'd be stuffed with.
The proprietor of La M6renda, an informal litde place
with no phone and no credit cards but also no attitude, turned
out to be Dominique Le Stanc, who had previously been at
Chantecler, the two-star restaurant at the H6tel Negresco.
At
our first La M6renda meal, we'd had, among other things, a
ratatouille that was so much better than any other ratatouille
I'd ever eaten that it seemed to be a different dish and a pistou
soup that brought to mind the days when Lydie Marshall was
still our neighbor in the Village and made us pistou every
autumn as soon as the cranberry beans began appearing at
Union Square market.
The stuffed sardines were everything
we'd hoped fon "Blette! Blette! Blene./"I said, after I polished
mine off and reached over to Alice's plate for a4other taste
test, iust to be sure.
If France permitted those American-sryle
MACIG SANDWIGH I 53
city limits signs rather than the uniform signs that mark the
city limits of every village and ciry in the country, I thought,
the one announcing Nice might say, wELcoME ro NrcESWISS
CHARD CAPITAL OF THE \PORLD.
Unless it said soccA cAprrAL oF THE woRLD.
On our last
evening in Nice, after the rest of the team had left, Alice and
I went to Chez Pipo, a sort of corner tavern near the port.
Pipo's food menu lists only four or five items.
One was a
delicious pissaladiire with an almost sweet crust-a crust
that made you think that some dear old granny nearby had
been preparing the crust for an apple pie, in the loving way
she'd gone about it for forty or fifry years, when someone
rushed into her kitchen and snatched it away, muttering,
"Pipo needs this."
Another was the best socca we'd had in
Nice. In Pipo's hands, a pancake that is almost too thin to be
measured somehow has a soft inside, a crisp bottom, and a top
that is done to the point at which it almost blisters. soccA cAp-
ITAL oF rHE woRLD would be appropriate, but, then, Nice
could also be the stuffed sardine capital or the daube and blette
ravioli capital, not to speak of the pan bagnat capital.
It
occurred to me that I had never had any of those dishes outside
of Nice, and that one result of our trip to Nice was rlre
necessity of adding more items to the Register of Frustration
and Deprivation that so often tormented me. Pouring each of
us another glass of ros6, I asked the waitress for another order
of socca,iu st to cheerm yself up.