“Passing 50 Without Breaking the Speed Limit” is Peter Mayle’s paean to picnics. It’s a pun on the celebration of his fiftieth birthday pique-nique and not the speed limit on the twisty roads of Province in restored 19th-century caléches.
Mayle associates “le pique-nique Anglais with “memories of rising damp creeping up the spine from permanently moist earth, of ants disputing with me over food, of tepid white wine.” With memories such as these, he says, “I loathed picnics.” But in France, especially in Provence, where it is always sunny, pique-niques are inherently civilized, where food and wine are served at tables in the shade to shelter guests from the heat. (Oh, that cloudless blue sky.)
Mayle and company travel by carriage, but food and wines are shipped by car to be ready when the picnickers arrive. It’s a four-hour lunch that begins with peach champagne and then moves on to melon, quails’ eggs, creamy brandade of cod [cod and potato purée], game pate, stuffed tomatoes, marinated mushrooms, birthday cake, and gâteau. The meal is served in a grassy clearing, at a table for ten had been set in the shade with a white cloth and napkins, ice buckets, bowls of fresh flowers, dishes, and cutlery. Mayle says that at this sight, “All my misgivings about picnics vanished.
Featured image: Ronald Searle. “The forest became thicker and the track narrower,” In Toujours Province (1991). Originally in Telegraph Magazine (1991) as an illustration for the essay.
See Peter Mayle. “Passing 50 without Breaking the Speed Limit,” In Toujours Province London: Hamish Hamilton, 1991