The entire taste of Provence can be summed up in one word – ratatouille. But this is no haute cuisine creation: French speakers are more likely to use the word with a note of disdain than associate it with elegance. In French, the word rata is a colloquial way of saying “food”, and touiller simply means to mix. So ratatouille translates to something like hodgepodge, or slumgullion. For a long time in France the word was even a synonym for bad food. For instance, in a novel by Honore de Balzac, one of the characters complains that “my stomach is much too delicate to digest this tavern ratatouille”. But everything changed at the end of the 19th century, when ratatouille began being featured as a dish by restaurants in Nice. After that, it was no longer a poor man’s dish, but a masterpiece of Provençal cooking. Vladimir Pavlov, host of The Geography of Taste, puts his own spin on the classic, adding ground lamb and a tomato basil sauce.