At Ponge's table, the Provençal meal does not follow the starter-main-course-dessert grid: it unfolds as a sequence of simple things, each presented for itself and celebrated in its own material — a shell, a crumb, a fruit, a black paste. You pick, you contemplate, you taste object after object, like turning the pages of a notebook where each food has its own poem. Olive oil ties it all together, a thread of light from the Midi.

Pressed from the olive trees of Le Bar-sur-Loup and the Montpellier region, it coats the bread, binds the tapenade, perfumes everything. It is the ingredient-matter par excellence: frank, green, without rhetoric — exactly what Ponge loved about things.