One farce, many vegetables — that is the whole grammar of the dish. The stuffed tomato is the celebrity, but in the households that actually cook this way, the tomato is rarely alone: it shares a dish with round courgettes, aubergine halves, peppers, sometimes button mushrooms, all filled with the same pork-and-veal farce, all roasted together until the edges brown and the kitchen smells like a market at closing time. The tray of farcis is not a recipe so much as a summer reflex: whatever the market sold that morning in quantity becomes the casing, and the farce stays constant while the vegetables rotate around it.
The market in question is a southern one, and the star is specific: the courgette ronde de Nice, the round courgette sold by the crate all summer along the coast, bred — or at least cherished — precisely for hollowing. Cut the lid off, spoon the middle out with a Paris spoon or a melon baller, and you have a little lidded pot of vegetable that holds its shape for an hour of oven. Elsewhere the same tray accepts aubergines halved and scored, peppers capped and seeded, mushrooms stripped of their stems (the stems go into the farce — nothing is wasted in this economy). In Provence the whole thing is dressed only in olive oil and the herbs of the garrigue; the dish is the market wearing very little.
The farce itself is the family classic: pork and veal in equal parts, or the butcher’s chair à saucisse when the evening is short — garlic, flat-leaf parsley, an egg, sometimes a spoonful of rice per vegetable if the house belongs to that school. It is the same farce that fills the tomatoes, the cabbage and the Sunday quiche of consequence; once mixed, it is the whole summer’s staffing plan.
Ingredients
Serves 6- Round courgettes (courgettes rondes de Nice) 4
- Aubergine, halved lengthwise 1 large
- Red peppers, capped and seeded 2
- Button mushrooms, stemmed 8 large
- Pork, ground 250 g 9 oz
- Veal, ground 250 g 9 oz
- Garlic cloves, crushed 3
- Flat-leaf parsley + herbes de Provence 4 tbsp + 1 tsp
- Egg 1
- Olive oil 3 tbsp
- Salt, black pepper to taste
Equipment
4 items- Small knife and spoon, for hollowing
- Mixing bowl, for the farce
- Large oven dish, snug fit
- Oven, 180 °C350 °F
Precuit, justement
The rule the whole tray hangs on: pre-cook the vegetables, but only just. A raw courgette or aubergine filled and roasted will shed its water for fifty minutes and deliver a dish swimming in dilute juice — farcis noyés, the classic summer failure. So each vegetable gets a short preparation instead: the hollowed courgettes salted inside and inverted to drain, the aubergine flesh scored, salted, then sweated a few minutes cut-side down in olive oil until it accepts the farce, the peppers blanched two minutes, the mushroom caps brushed with oil. Ten minutes of work that decides the texture of the whole dish. Overdo it and the vegetables collapse into softness before the farce is done; skip it and you serve soup with architecture.
The recipe
- Prep the vegetables. Lid and hollow the courgettes, chop the flesh for the farce. Halve and score the aubergine, cap and seed the peppers, pull the mushroom stems and chop them.
- Drain. Salt every cavity lightly and invert everything on a rack for fifteen minutes while you mix.
- The farce. Mix the pork, veal, garlic, parsley, herbes de Provence, egg, the chopped vegetable flesh, salt and pepper — with a fork, briefly.
- Sweat the aubergine a few minutes in olive oil, cut-side down, until the flesh turns translucent at the edge. Blanch the peppers two minutes.
- Fill each vegetable with a firm dome of farce, line them up in the oiled dish, and thread olive oil over the tops.
- Bake 50–60 minutes at 180 °C350 °F, basting once with the juices; ten minutes under the grill at the end for the browned tops that the word gratinés promises.
- The test. The vegetable wall yields to a spoon without collapsing; the farce is firm and browned on top; the dish holds juices, not a broth.
How to serve it
Straight from the dish, warm or at room temperature, with bread and a Provençal rosé — the tray carried to the table is half the point, a market still-life that everyone serves themselves from. A handful of rice cooked alongside settles the hungriest. And like everything in the farcis family, the dish has a second career cold, the next day, when the flavors have settled and the farce slices clean.
The cliché
Ratatouille is the definitive Provençal summer dish.
Reality
Ratatouille is the side dish — a stew of everything that wasn't big enough to stuff. When the south actually feeds a table in summer, the anchor is the tray of farcis: one farce, whatever vegetables the market ran out of first, browned on top and fought over cold the next morning.