How Nice stole her heart
ROSA JACKSON DISCOVERED REAL NIÇOISE COOKING AMID BEACHSIDE GLAMOUR.
THERE’S A certain reverse snobbery that some travelers may feel when they first arrive in Nice. So sleek. So sunny. So touristy.
I admit that after a dinner of indifferently prepared Niçoise specialties in a restaurant along the Cours Saleya, when light-up pedicabs and street performers replaced the famed daytime market vendors, I thought I’d missed my chance by decades to experience the pleasures that attracted Julia Child and her husband, Paul, when they kept a house 20 miles outside the city.
Then I took a cooking class with Rosa Jackson.
At first it was the setting that drew me in. Jackson, who spent years in Paris as a restaurant reviewer and market tour guide, usually holds classes of eight or so people at her Les Petits Farcis cooking school in the heart of Nice, not far from the artificial waterfall in the Colline du Château parkland. But our group was large so we took a bus into the Nice countryside and arrived at Le Potager de Saquier, a dreamscape of an organic farm run by Anne and Pierre Magnani.
Upon disembarking, we found an aproned Pierre Magnani cutting into deep orangered persimmons he’d just taken off a tree. He handed slices to some of us with a gleam in his eye that seemed to anticipate our delighted reactions once we bit into the intensely flavored fruit. Others in the group were drawn to the scent of bumpy, bulbous globes of citron, hanging from the trees like enchanted Christmas ornaments.
We made our way past a wheelbarrow full of orangeskinned squash and a Hobbitlike hut under construction for future overnight guests, then entered the outdoor kitchen where Jackson and her team greeted us with pitchers of fresh lemonade.
Le Potager de Saquier, situated above the Var Valley, functions part of the year as a bedand-breakfast. Some guests sleep outdoors next to one of the vegetable plots and near the open kitchen, fitted with a wood-burning stove and shaded by recycled tarps and netting. There are couches and cushioned benches covered in pink, orange and purple throws and pillows. Flea market finds are scattered among bowls of fruit, vegetables and herbs harvested from the farm.
It was easy to get lost along the garden paths and ask Pierre Magnani about his crops or to fall into conversation with Anne Magnani as she poured a liqueur made from herbs on the farm and stirred it with a rosemary sprig. But our goal for the day was to make lunch together as a group with Jackson as our guide. Then we would enjoy the results of our lessons at a long table with wine and good conversation.
One of the best parts of Jackson’s class style is that it’s easy for cooks of different experience levels (or energy) to participate in their own way. On this day at the farm, some chose to sit back and observe the proceedings from a comfortable chair with a glass of wine while others got right in the thick of things. Jackson is a non-judgmental cooking guide.
“The ones who want to be there stirring all the pots and everything can do that,” she says. “And I also like having kids in the class because I love to feed the enthusiasm that kids bring to the kitchen — and also maybe give them a taste of cooking that will stick with them.”
Jackson’s first experience in the South of France was on holiday with her family when they’d left their home in Edmonton, Canada, and were living in Paris for a time.
“I mostly just remember beautiful beaches,” she says of the French Riviera, “but not so much the food.”
Later, she came to Cannes after friends offered her a place to stay for vacation, but she still wasn’t smitten. “Cannes is a fun place to spend a holiday,” she says, “but it didn’t capture my imagination.”
Things changed when she visited Nice.
“Suddenly I felt the history. It has its Italian feel and then the food is so different from other parts of France,” she says. “Even Cannes,” which is just about an hour away.
“You know you can compare the food of Nice and Cannes, they’re not the same,” she continues. “I just got really curious. I wasn’t that concerned with the glamorous image of the Riviera. It was the contrast between the image people have of the Riviera and what you actually find when you start digging around the