Pissiladiere, les petits farcis, socca, torte blette, ratatouille…tongue twisters of words that when translated into understandable English become the backbone of Niçoise cuisine. And today under the tutelage of Rosa Jackson, a Cordon Bleu trained chef who runs her own cooking school here in Nice, I received lessons in the Niçoise method for preparing some of these foods. Six of us met Rosa in our designated spot at the Cours Saleya market at 9:30 AM and learned from her some of the history of food in this area of France. She gave us the menu that we would prepare today and asked for us to choose between Tarte Tatin (an upside down apple pie of sorts) or Plum Galette to make for dessert. Plums are very much in season here and we all agreed immediately that we wanted to make the Plum Galette. (tart). And we set off on a shopping trip to purchase all that we needed for our meal. The shopping experience itself was worth the entire price of admission. I sorely wished I had followed her shopping the first week I arrived rather than the last…BUT…next time I’ll know!!

So will stop here and post shopping photos…

First photo is of our instructor, Rosa. Two different kinds of olives…one with peppers and one with herbs de provence. And the last photo is of fennel and larger-than-cherry tomatoes.  (If you double click on any of the photos on this blog, they will appear full-sized on your computer or iPad screen.)

When we finished the Cours Saleya shopping, we moved on to a cheese store (fromagerie) and then the butcher shop (boucherie) to pick up pre-ordered, already tied rack of lamb. Rosa selected four cheeses for the cheese course…a very light ash crusted sheep’s milk cheese, a more aged sheep’s milk cheese coated with poppy seeds, toasted sesame seeds, and pimente d’espelette which is a form of paprika. The third cheese was Comté which has a nutty flavor somewhat like Gruyere, and finally, a very ripe Roquefort. (There was an order for eating those cheeses and we drank Sauternes wine with the cheese course.)

After climbing to Rosa’s third floor apartment (no elevator), we donned aprons and torchons (towels), washed hands, and began the prep for our meal. In two hours, the six of us had chopped, shredded, coated, seasoned, kneaded, sautéed, roasted and baked all that we ate for another hour and a half lunchtime.

And here I will pause for another batch of photos…[EDITOR’S NOTE:  I am technically challenged so ALL the photos are now below the following text.]

My granddaughter Miriam is gluten intolerant, so I had specifically asked Rosa if I could learn to make Socca during the cooking class. It is not normally on the menu. So of course for good reason, it fell to me to make that crêpe-like snack bread, made from chickpea flour that is gluten-free. You will recall, early on in the Nice part of the blog, I mentioned that Socca is a big Niçoise snack food, and that there is a little cart in the market every single day, selling hot Socca. It was really quite simple to pull the ingredients together and the secrets of success were that it needed to ‘rest’ an hour before being cooked and that it needed to be cooked in a VERY hot oven, or in this case, iron skillet on top of the stove. And of course, the first one came out like first pancakes often do, irregular, stuck to the pan, and generally a mess. I had sprinkled herbes de Provence into the Socca mixture and when the edible ones were removed from the pan, Rosa added a grinding of black pepper to them. Yum. I stopped at a quincallerie on rue Catherine Segurane, where I live, as I walked home yesterday, hoping to buy a Socca pan. Alas, much as I would love to have one, it weighed 2.5 kilos and would simply add too much weight to my suitcase. Greg has a very good cast iron skillet that will work perfectly fine!

We created a delicious pan of ratatouille, cooking each of six vegetables that had been chopped into small dice separately, then after they were all cooked at the end adding them altogether in a rich, homemade tomato sauce that we also made. When Rosa plated the food, she filled a metal ring, just slightly larger than an English muffin ring, with the ratatouille, arranged lamb chops artfully to one-side and topped the plate with a large, fresh basil leaf. See the beautiful photo of our second course.

I was also tasked with preparing the lamb chops after others had prepped the herbs and Rosa had processed them with dried bread crumbs to make a herb crust coating. First we seared each rack in a very hot skillet, then cooked them in a hot oven for a short time. Then I brushed tops and bottoms with Dijon mustard, then rolled the racks in the herb crumb mixture and patted it firmly onto the chops. Back they went into a very hot oven for just ten more minutes, then out to rest while we ate salad, pissaldiere, and socca and sipped Provençale rosé. And then we dined on this marvelous lamb-chop, ratatouille lunch accompanied with another Provençale red wine. While her assistant cleared the table, Rosa plated the cheese and served it along with a fresh rustic baguette and a sweet honey-colored Sauternes wine. She gave us instructions as the the order for eating cheese, always beginning with the mild one and ending with the strongest flavoured one, which in this case was roquefort.

Time for a few more photos before I move on to dessert…