Marseille

Jean-Claude Izzo was a writer born in Marseille to Italian and Spanish parents. He shot to fame with his crime novels, dubbed the Marseille Trilogy, detailing the exploits of a certain detective Fabio Montale. Izzo is widely credited as being the founder of the modern Mediterranean noir novel. Aside from crime fiction, in a lovely little book published in English under the title Garlic, Mint & Sweet Basil Izzo writes beautifully of the food and spirit of Marseille and its people: of their shared love of food, family and all that intertwines the two; of garlic, first kisses and ‘the joys of bread rubbed in garlic and the spicy bodies of women’.

Izzo sees Marseille as a bridge to the rest of the Mediterranean Sea. A melting pot, of course, but perhaps also some sort of capital, where the life, food and music of the entire sea meet and are celebrated: ‘I like to believe it will always be this way. On both shores of the Mediterranean. That our shores will still join together. And that they will remain without borders, as Louis Brauquier wrote in the Cahiers du Sud [a literary journal].’ Izzo looks out across the sea to his Mediterranean cousins, and standing in a city that is more than 2,600 years old, feels a sense of community and belonging to something bigger.

Marseille has an unfair reputation for being ‘rough’, a particularly Parisian view of France’s oldest city, and one awash with a fear of the Other. I suppose a better description might be ‘rough around the edges’, in a way that many cities are when they are overbrimming with life.

Living in Paris in my twenties I heard people talk of Marseille in a disparaging way. Dirty, dangerous, less French than African. Years later, talking to my Marseillais colleague, he explained that the people of Marseille feel Marseillais first, French second – the same way Sardinians or Sicilians identify themselves first and foremost, rather than Italian. One might argue that Marseille has always been at odds with France’s idea of what it is to be French. The city that gave its name to the French national anthem – a terrifying, thrilling song of violent revolution – stands alone in its self-perception as a city of the outsider, a city apart. Emmanuel Macron, seeking his re-election as President, started and ended his campaign trial in Marseille, paid tribute to its multiculturalism: ‘I see Armenians, Comorians, Italians, Algerians, Moroccans, Tunisians, Malians, Senegalese … But what do I see? I see citizens of Marseille, I see citizens of France.’ At least certain sections of France’s political classes recognize the importance of Marseille as a litmus test for a modern, multicultural France, but in the context of France’s colonial history, Marseille poses a question: is France willing to accept, not just assimilate, the Outsider?

Unlike Paris – where, as a general rule, the further from the centre and beyond the périphérique (ring road), the poorer neighbourhoods become, and the more diverse their populations – as writer, broadcaster and long-time Marseille resident Jonathan Meades expounds, ‘Marseille is more like Britain in that the social housing is spread around, and there’s no boundary outside of which to put poor people.’ Marseille is and always has been a melting pot – Izzo’s city of exiles or outsiders – where mainland France is confronted with its future. Izzo frames the struggle with reference to the Greek mariner, explorer and astronomer Pytheas of Massalia (the name for Marseille when it was a colony of the ancient Greeks): ‘the new Italian-style ochre façades try to make everyone forget the ancient roots of the city, which are Greek, and therefore tragic, drowned now beneath tons of concrete to create shopping malls and parking garages, obliterating all maritime, Oriental and adventurous daydreams. Charles de Gaulle against Pytheas.’

During the research for this book, I cooked lunch for Meades in London and, talking of Marseille, he explained that when his friends come to visit they ask for restaurant recommendations. What kind of food? French of course! But this reply puts Meades at a loss – when he eats out he doesn’t eat French food; the restaurants he goes to are anything but:

‘French or pan-French restaurants in Marseille are not part of the city’s vernacular. They exist as something close to intruders. They are unremarkable – save when they have an Italian accent, which is often. That accent is generally southern. It was from Campania and Sicily and Puglia that people came seeking a livelihood …’

Marseille is the capital of Provence, but the food of the city is far from strictly Provençal. On the street there’s panisse, a savoury chickpea pancake originally from Liguria, and another Italian import – fritto misto of baby squid, sprinkled with salt and doused in lemon, the oil seeping into the cone of paper these crispy fried morsels come in. There are fricassées – at first glance a short baguette, but on closer inspection a fried savoury doughnut stuffed with tuna, boiled egg, mashed potato, coriander and fiery harissa, topped with a fried pepper, rather like a pan bagnat from across the bay. Or the unlikely sounding chapati, more a cross between an Indian roti and an English muffin, stuffed with soft cheese, harissa, grated egg, meat or tuna and chopped onion.

Noailles market, in Marseille’s central district a few hundred metres from the fishermen’s boats and pleasure yachts of the old port, has a different flavour from the market in Aix-en-Provence and the village markets further inland on the massif of the Luberon. Noailles has overflowing, colourful displays of Provençal vegetables, sure, but also of North African fabrics, with the scents of spices and the sounds of spoken (and shouted) Arabic in the air. This market is enriched with North African and Middle Eastern exoticism: alongside tapenade, anchoïade and wood-fired pizza are olives drenched in harissa and sizzling cumin-scented sausages oozing lamb fat. Here it’s freshly baked flatbreads – m’semen – dusted in semolina for breakfast instead of croissants, mahjouba not crêpes, and raï music plays, rather than French chansons

The ultimate Marseille street food is a slice of thin, crisp, really good pizza, woodfired in a small shop or in the back of a van, probably topped with the famous moit-moit (half and half): tomato, anchovy and raw garlic on one half, Emmental and olives on the