Sublime

NIH support.” Charles “Bob” Schuster, who had served two Republican

In the US only the Hispanic population ate olives; they alone knew how to cure them and how to cook with olive oil.

eating.

MADAME SOLIVA, the eighty-year-old chef whose nom de cuisine was Tante Yvonne, had first told us about an olive oil that she said was the finest in Provence. She had better credentials than anyone we knew. Apart from being a magnificent cook, she was olive oil’s answer to a Master of Wine. She had tried them all, from Alziari in Nice to the United

“I usually keep my peanuts next to a jar of peanut butter, so they understand what I’m capable of!”

More recently, Paul Ricard, who became Marseille’s most celebrated and flamboyant tycoon—he once took fifteen hundred of his staff to Rome to be blessed by the Pope—decided as a young man to make his own brand of pastis. It wasn’t an original idea. The Pernod distillery near Avignon had turned its production over to pastis when the dangerously addi

Then there is the uncanny business of the truffle that somehow gains weight between leaving the ground and arriving on the scales. It could be that it has been gift wrapped in an extra coating of earth. On the other hand, it could be that a heavier substance altogether has found its way inside the truffle itself—invisible until, in mid-slice, your