Duck Season Read online

  IT WAS ALMOST TIME TO EAT. I went inside the house to fetch the duck breasts, which, in the interest of quicker grilling, I’d cut into dainty, heart-shaped steaks, each side generously rimmed with fat—this was a trick I’d seen at a cookout on one of my earlier trips to Gascony. I brought out the duck on a fancy serving platter and placed a metal grate over the fire pit. Not without a respectful sense of moment, I laid the duck steaks onto the grill. They made a satisfying sizzle.

  Michele and Charlotte were still on the balcony. Charlotte was gnawing on the end of a baguette. She looked down at me and grinned. Michele pushed a breeze-blown strand of hair behind her ear and raised her wineglass. We made an air-toast.

  An orangish glow flared in the corner of my eye. I turned to see my steaks engulfed in flames. The fat was melting off them in great glops and igniting. Kneeling in the grass, I frantically flipped the steaks and moved them around, but the fire pit was so small that there was no cool spot where the meat could take refuge. My maneuverings were just releasing more fat into the inferno. I batted at the smoke and cursed.

  Charlotte yelled down to inform me that the fire was too big.

  “I know!” I yelled back.

  The hairs on my fingers singed.

  By the time I got the steaks off the grill, they had blackened and curled up like tulip bulbs. It was a dispiriting sight. I brought the duck to the table anyhow, along with the rest of dinner. At least the potatoes looked good—I’d cooked them in the duck fat until they’d turned deep golden brown and, to my delight, had filled the kitchen with the smell of roast duck.

  Michele and Charlotte sat down.

  “What happened out there?” Michele asked.

  I poured myself another glass of wine, took a swig, and stared at the charred meat. “Rookie error,” I said. The longer answer was that I’d broken the cardinal rule of cooking duck: Manage the fat. What I’d failed to recognize is that with Gascon ducks, there’s a whole lot more fat to manage.

  We started in on dinner. The duck actually tasted okay, with a touch of rosiness left in the center. You just had to get past the carbonized flavor on the outside. The wine helped.

  2

  Market Day

  Like hundreds of small burgs in the Southwest of France, Plaisance du Gers, as our village was officially called, had been constructed around a bastide, which is a central market square bordered by arcaded sidewalks. Today bastides are to Gascony what covered bridges are to Iowa and New England—quaint examples of the local vernacular—but in the socioeconomic history of the French countryside, they were a big deal, as their rise signaled the moment (beginning in the thirteenth century, by most accounts) when trade started to replace mere survival as a reason to build villages. Instead of evolving pell-mell as an agglomeration of houses and workshops in the shadow of a church or a feudal château, like scared children huddling around their mother, bastides were boldly laid out on a grid, with a few wide main streets converging at the arcaded square, where all manner of buying and selling and fraternizing could be conducted in the light of day.

  Plaisance, though not the prettiest of bastide villages, had the rare distinction of having not one but two arcaded squares. This owed to a quirk of history. By the early nineteenth century, Plaisance was a boomtown, its riverfront lined with tanneries and ateliers, its streets clogged with all kinds of conveyances and livestock. The village was quickly outgrowing its medieval bastide. So, in the mid-nineteenth century, the town fathers, full of bullish optimism, built a bigger bastide just west of the old one, and, for good measure, erected a pointy-spired neo-Gothic church to go with it, creating a second node of commerce and civic life for the town.

  This had resulted in a curious circumstance. Plaisance, which you could drive through in about ninety seconds, had two of everything: two pharmacies, each with its green neon sign and sexy window advertisements for butt-slimming creams; two tabacs, each with its lozenge-shaped shingle; two café-bars, each with its sparse clientele of men sipping beer and pastis; two bakeries; two butcher shops; two newsstands; and so on. Plaisance also happened to be a chef lieu du canton—basically a county seat—which meant that the inhabitants of a small constellation of surrounding hamlets drove into town in puttering Citroëns, Renaults, and, occasionally, farm vehicles to mail letters, deposit checks, fill prescriptions, exchange gossip, and provision meals. All this gave Plaisance a pleasing hustle-and-bustle, especially if it happened to be a Thursday, which is when the village held its weekly market.

  RURAL FRENCH MARKETS HAD ALWAYS filled me with a kind of manic, electric energy. Often when traveling I’d work myself into an acquisitive frenzy and end up buying way more food than I could reasonably consume in a hotel room or carry home on a plane. Now, as I followed a small stream of villagers toward Plaisance’s market, I had the calming realization that I could slow down and take my time. I could focus just on what we needed for the next few meals. The market would be back the following week. And there’d be a half dozen other markets on the days in between, in villages just a short drive away. The Gers, which contains fewer people than the farmers’ market–less suburb where I grew up, boasts more than fifty weekly village markets—including several marchés au gras, or fat markets, devoted exclusively to the buying and selling of fattened ducks and geese and their tasty constituent parts.

  And so I kept my wallet in my pocket for a while and wandered among the tented stands that filled the wide square of Plaisance’s new bastide, catching the odd sidelong glance from a local here or there, but generally feeling comfortably invisible. I noticed some interesting things that had little to do with food. One was that while I saw money and merchandise being exchanged, mostly what people were doing was cheek kissing, shaking hands, and gabbing—in pairs, in trios, in quartets, clustered in front of the church or over by the tabac or the bank or the hair salon, the talkers discoursing on subjects that, from what I could pick up in passing, ranged from rugby matches and crop yields to rainfall and hip replacements. While Gascons have for much of their history been a people apart—with their own dialect, their own customs, their own insular culinary predilections—it seemed they nonetheless shared one salient trait with rural French folk everywhere: They consider the marché to be the supreme social event of the week.

  Most everyone at Plaisance’s market was speaking in the bouncy patois of the Midi, as the South of France is collectively known, but to my ear their accent was lavished with even more extra syllables than that of the natives of the Languedoc and Provence, to the east. And unlike the denizens of Mediterranean France, the Gascons seemed to comport themselves with a decorousness that felt out of sync with the antic nature of their repartee. Hands, for the most part, were thrust into pockets, or wrapped around the handles of a market basket, or, occasionally, held up with a finger extended, when a point was being made.

  As is the case across much of rural France, which has been bleeding its youth to the cities for several generations, a good number of the market-goers were old. Of the men, many wore hats. In a pleasing intersection of stereotype and reality, many of those hats were berets. Of the women, most favored short, sensible hairdos, and there appeared to be a partiality for a certain style of cheap designer eyewear, characterized by severely angled frames and ornate temples. The faces were decidedly Gallic, expressing feeling with the time-honored tics common to French people everywhere: pursed lips, outthrust jaws, raised eyebrows. But these weren’t the polished, aquiline countenances that I’d regarded with mild envy while living in Paris or traveling in France’s big cities. These were the rustically handsome, bold-featured faces of paysans—people who had grown up on farms—or of the sons and daughters of same.

  Plaisance’s market was a good one, its stands well stocked with all kinds of produce and fresh fish and tasty-looking charcuterie, as well as an impressive profusion of preserved ducky things like confit and foie gras. I started where I always tend to start at a good French market: at the meat and charcuterie stand. I got in lin
e behind a woman who was peering over her bifocals at a calf’s liver, held before her in the butcher’s hands like a newborn baby. The two of them were spiritedly conversing about how best to cook it. The conversation went on for a very long time, during which the line grew behind me considerably. No one looked particularly put out as they waited for the lady to conclude her inquiries. Finally, I bought a length of dry-cured sausage and three confit duck legs to crisp up in the oven for dinner. Like the magrets I’d bought the day before, these legs were bigger than what I’d been accustomed to in the States—not because their erstwhile owners had been pumped with hormones but because, like most farmed ducks in Gascony, they’d been fattened on grain at the end of their free-roaming lives for the making of foie gras. These legs were still coated with some of the fat, now chilled to the consistency of soft butter, that they’d been preserved in. Thick, generous flaps of excess skin hung off them. I admit that a better man, if he wanted to dive headfirst into Gascon farmhouse cooking, would have bought fresh duck legs, salt-cured them overnight, and poached them for several hours with garlic and onions in duck fat. But I gave myself a pass. Diving headfirst wasn’t my style. Plus, given my poor handling of Gascony’s sacramental fat in our backyard, making my own confit seemed premature. Prepared duck legs would do for now. Baby steps, I told myself.

  I needed cheese. I saw people queuing up at a cart in front of the church. It was tended by a sprite-like girl in a too-big army jacket and black-and-white keffiyeh. She had a Mao cap pulled tight and low over her head so that it hid her eyes. Her cart contained a few wheels of cheese from the Pyrenees in varying stages of ripeness, plus some cylinders of fresh chèvre. Ceramic goat, sheep, and cow figurines had been placed on the shelves of the display case, and a small chalkboard was affixed to the front, advertising the day’s selection in a frilly script: VACHE, BRÉBIS, MIXTE, CHÈVRE FRAIS.

  I waited my turn. Like the butcher, the cheese monger took an extravagantly long time with each customer. Even after painstakingly negotiating the desired size of the customer’s wedge of cheese by laying her two-handled knife atop the wheel and inching it this way or that, even after meticulously wrapping said wedge in pink-and-white-checkered waxed paper and labeling the package with a ballpoint pen in the same frilly script, even after tallying the purchase on a notepad the size of a golf scorecard, and even after counting out the customer’s change coin by coin, the young cheese monger was not finished. Only when the bubbly conversation that had begun many minutes earlier had reached the end of its full and natural life did she deign to utter the words I’d been panting to hear: “Allez, au revoir, et bonne journée.” Then it began all over again with the next customer.

  This, I realized as I shifted from one foot to the other and looked at my watch, was going to take some getting used to. The long wait, however, did prompt an interesting observation: The smaller-scale vendors were doing better business than the big ones. Not ten yards from the keffiyeh-sporting cheese monger’s modest cart stood a fancy-looking truck equipped with wood-trimmed vitrines that contained a greatest hits of French cheese making: Époisses, Salers, Brie de Meaux, Camembert, Comté, Gruyère, Roquefort, Rocamadour, a Mont d’Or meant to be eaten with a spoon. The market-goers were largely passing it by. The same was true of the immense produce stand, stocked with everything from Israeli oranges to Mexican avocadoes to Spanish onions, which took up a whole corner of the square. By contrast, over by the church, no fewer than five impatient-looking ladies were massed near the folding table of a beleaguered young man with dirt-crusted fingers who was selling organic vegetables grown in the Gers: green cauliflower, eggplants, skinny radishes, beets with iridescent orange flesh.

  Finally it was my turn. Feeling I’d more than earned the right to engage in some lively market banter of my own with the cheese monger, I felt dejected when my attempt failed to achieve liftoff.

  After pointing to what I wanted—a nice-looking round of chèvre—I mentioned to her that I’d just moved to Plaisance with my family.

  She didn’t look up. “Oh, yeah, where from?”

  “Chicago.”

  She wrapped and labeled my order without a word. I handed her some money. She handed me my change.

  “Chicago,” she said finally, chewing over this piece of information as she pulled a pack of cigarettes from her coat pocket and lit one. Then she made a pistol with her fingers. “Al Capone. Bang bang.”

  I made another sortie, telling her that we were living in a house down by the river, opposite the bridge at the edge of town.

  She narrowed her eyes, which, I could now see, were almond-shaped and quite beautiful, and blew smoke from the side of her mouth. “So you live in the old mill?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Must be damp down there, with all that water everywhere.”

  I told her it wasn’t so bad.

  “And the bugs? Ouf.”

  I was unsure how to wrap up our chat. In an untempered burst of midwestern friendliness, I extended my hand and introduced myself, and then asked her name.

  “Amandine,” she said reluctantly.

  “Enchanté,” I replied, and picked up my bags to leave.

  I visited a couple of other vendors and started for home, feeling a bit at sea in the face of what should have been an obvious reality: Procuring one’s food at the weekly village market doesn’t make one a villager. We were outsiders here, for the time being at least. We were from very outside. I considered the possibility that most Gascons’ knowledge of where we came from might begin and end with old gangster movies.

  I strode home briskly along Plaisance’s main drag, the Rue de l’Adour, which sliced arrow-straight through the village—east to the stone bridge and the hills beyond, west out of town and into the broad, flat valley of the Adour River, into which the Arros emptied. I passed a shuttered beauty salon, a couple of vacant storefronts, and a clothing store with mannequins in Adidas tracksuits in the window and a sign on the façade that read VÊTEMENT. The s that should have been at the end had fallen off, leaving a faint outline on the concrete. I turned right and crossed an empty esplanade with a lonely looking war memorial on one end and a weedy boules court on the other. It had begun to rain. Like many a rural market town, Plaisance wasn’t exactly postcard material.

  I HEATED UP THE CONFIT duck legs for dinner. Before putting them in the oven, I snipped off the excess skin, cut it up, and roasted the pieces to make cracklings, something I’d been served as a snack during my first visit to Gascony. I called upstairs for Charlotte. She came down, and I put one of the crunchy fritons in her mouth like a communion wafer. She let it melt on her tongue and pondered for a moment.

  “It’s like bacon,” she said, “but better.”

  I threw some of the cracklings onto a salad and put the rest in a snack bowl, then poured kirs for me and Michele and an Orangina for Charlotte. The sun had peeked out, so I toweled off the table and chairs on the balcony and the three of us went outside for our evening aperitif.

  I brought out the fresh chèvre and spread some on slices of baguette. It was satiny, snow-white, and somehow both dense and airy at the same time. I handed a slice to Michele.

  “Damn,” she said with her mouth full, then managed to add, “That’s some kick-ass goat cheese.”

  As for the duck confit, the skin of which had magically turned golden and crisp after a short spell in the oven, I’ll just say this: If you let someone else do the curing and preserving, it’s a spectacularly easy dish to get right.

  3

  The Country Life

  I have no doubt that sparkling trophy kitchens with granite-topped islands and multiple sinks exist somewhere in the Gers, but to date I’ve not seen one. In a land where meals are as sacred as life itself, the typical Gascon kitchen is surprisingly small and old-fashioned. Indeed, many farmhouses and even some maisons bourgeoises in the farther-flung reaches of southwestern France retain a deep genetic link to the era of open-hearth cooking, with older dwellings often
featuring a fireplace and a wood-fired bread oven in the kitchen, as well as cramped dimensions, the better to keep in warmth. I’ve even heard stories, from various Gascon friends, about old-timers in the Gers still living in houses with dirt-floor kitchens, though I’ve never seen this with my own eyes. Even in homes of newer construction, a certain thriftiness prevails. In Peasants into Frenchmen, his magnum opus about the modernizing of rural France, the historian Eugen Weber alluded to this state of affairs by invoking the old paysan aphorism: “It isn’t the cage that feeds the bird.”

  No surprise, then, that one of the things I had to get used to when I started cooking in the old mill was having to do more with less. The sum of our kitchen’s amenities—which, to my disappointment, did not include a wood-fired bread oven—was as follows: an electric range, a small microwave, a refrigerator no wider than a pizza box, a toaster, a few sauté pans, a well-used Dutch oven, a drawer crammed with utensils, several of which served purposes I couldn’t discern, plus a trio of cheap prep knives, an extraordinary collection of corkscrews, a plastic salad spinner, an orange Moulinex food processor with a blade I couldn’t remove, and just enough counter space to accommodate a splayed-open cookbook and the kitchen’s small cutting board, which was in the shape of a pear.

  Somewhat mystifyingly, our living-dining room was as vast and lavishly stocked as the kitchen was small and spartan. Against the far wall stood a formidable antique buffet filled with pewter serving platters, domed cake trays, cut-glass pitchers, a vintage raclette set, and a variety of decanters. The room was also furnished with two handsome wood sideboards that held porcelain plates and demitasses, Laguiole cutlery, a dozen brandy snifters, and enough champagne flutes for a small wedding. Occupying pride of place in the middle of the space—which had an immense stone hearth on one end and a set of French doors leading to the balcony on the other—was a heavy, varnished-wood dining table the size of a barn door. Finally, consigned to a kind of Siberia in the far corner of the room, near a TV that didn’t seem to get any channels, sat a few frayed easy chairs and a coffee table on which a handful of outdated guidebooks had been stacked. The overall feel of the place suggested the tastes of someone with an abiding love of estate sales and only a passing acquaintance with the living habits of a modern family.