I showered the crêpes with black pepper, Parisian-street-vendor style, and tossed a salad. Then I poured some wine and we sat down to dinner.
Charlotte, I observed with some relief, finished every bite.
4
Old School
Today the Gers, which constitutes Gascony’s geographic, cultural, and spiritual core, is not exactly an A-list destination for epicures of the Michelin-star-chasing ilk. The département has only two starred restaurants: Le Puits St. Jacques, in the village of Pujaudran, and La Table des Cordeliers, in a town that goes by the misbegotten name of Condom. By comparison the Gironde, just to the northwest, has sixteen restaurants étoilés. The Bouches du Rhône, in Provence, has twenty-four. A little to the east of that département is the Alpes-Maritimes, with forty. Take from those numbers what you will, but it’s safe to say that in the Gers, the home cook reigns supreme.
This is not to say that the Gers doesn’t have its own peculiar haute-cuisine pedigree. In the 1970s and ’80s, a league of amply starred chefs who called themselves La Ronde des Mousquetaires presided over a brief golden age of Gascon gastronomy, traveling around France and overseas to promote the food and wines of the Gers and its neighboring départements, rallying—no surprise here—under the musketeers’ famous “One for all, all for one” credo. Roger Dufour of Le Relais de l’Armagnac, Joseph Sanpietro of La Bonne Auberge, Bernard Ramounéda of Le Florida: These were the grands gourmands of Gascony’s postwar generation, cooks who had apprenticed at the knee of a mother or grandmother, and whose names had once enjoyed currency well beyond the Southwest of France. These were the same chefs who, in their prime, had offered recipes and wisdom to Paula Wolfert as she made her five-year odyssey across the region while compiling The Cooking of South-West France.
The most famous and laureled member of La Ronde des Mousquetaires was André Daguin, the chef at the Hôtel de France in Auch, Gascony’s historic capital. He was considered the godfather of French duck cookery, the man credited with, among other things, the rather game-changing feat of being the first professional chef in France to cook duck breast rare, like a steak. (Most cooks had long believed that ducks weren’t clean enough to eat unless roasted or confited to total grayness.) I’d interviewed Daguin back in 2012; he had a Legion of Honor medal on his wall, a practiced spiel for journalists, and a piercing gaze. Daguin’s daughter, Ariane, was famous, too; she’d moved to the States in the 1980s and became a successful purveyor of foie gras and specialty meats. She named her company—no surprise again—D’Artagnan.
What I hadn’t known until after we arrived in Gascony is that Plaisance du Gers boasted its own Ronde des Mousquetaires chef. Maurice Coscuella, a contemporary of Daguin’s, had for a number of years run a Michelin-starred restaurant under the arcades of Plaisance’s new bastide. Called Le Ripa Alta, it had closed years ago, though the old sign for the place was still there, above a real estate office.
I learned all this from Henri, who stopped by the moulin to drop off a flier he’d saved for me. It was a laser-printed announcement for weekly cooking classes being taught by Coscuella. The chef was getting on in years, Henri explained, and had a bad stammer, but his classes were popular among le troisième âge, as retirees are affectionately referred to in French.
“Coscuella was quite famous in his day,” said Henri, in an elegiac tone. “Everyone knew Le Ripa Alta. Locals used to go to the square on Saturday nights just to watch the fancy cars with Paris plates pull up.”
I did some research on the chef, but turned up little. All I was able to learn was that, beyond cooking at Le Ripa Alta, Coscuella had worked for a while on a transatlantic luxury liner. I found an archived article in La Dépêche du Midi—a hagiographic profile of a type common to French regional newspapers—that claimed Coscuella had been invited to stay in New York City to start a restaurant, but had heeded the “siren call” of his native Plaisance. That seemed hard to fathom, but whatever the case, Plaisance is where Coscuella ended up.
Classes were held on Saturday mornings in a cramped communal kitchen, only slightly bigger than the one in our house, that was rented out by Épisode, the local seniors’ association. I showed up for the first class at nine thirty. A dozen men and women, all older than me by at least a couple of decades, were already seated at a plastic-covered table crowded with ingredients, bowls, knives, and cookware. Everyone seemed to be talking at once. At the stove stood a rotund, gnomish man in thick glasses and a chef’s tunic. He was placing bricks of butter into a saucepan.
I paid my fee to a woman seated behind a desk near the door. She placed the money in a cash box and marked something in a ledger. Then she looked me up and down. “You didn’t bring an apron?”
I told her I hadn’t.
She turned toward the table. “Alphonse!” she called out, “can you find an extra apron for Monsieur?”
A wiry man who had to be Alphonse handed me a maroon apron with the silhouette of a bull appliquéd onto it. He shook my hand and asked where I was from. I told him, and his face lit up. He led me over to Coscuella.
“Momo!” Alphonse shouted, leaning in so close to the chef that I thought he was going to kiss him. “We have an American with us today!”
Coscuella turned slowly in my direction and extended a plump hand. I gripped it but received no squeeze in return. The chef mumbled something I couldn’t quite make out.
Alphonse paraphrased. “Momo says he visited New York nearly a hundred times when he worked aboard the liner.”
I asked the chef what we were making today.
“Gras double,” he said, pointing to a cutting board next to the stove. On it was what looked like a length of terry cloth.
“It’s tripe,” said Alphonse, patting his own midriff. “Cow’s stomach!”
Alphonse handed me a printout of the day’s dishes, which could have been culled from a French restaurant menu circa 1965. In addition to tripe, there would be white asparagus with a sauce Maltaise, a salmon terrine, and a strawberry mousse.
Alphonse introduced me to his wife, Lorette, and then to a tall man named Bernd, who had a long scar running down the side of his neck and spoke in the hoarse, sawing-wood voice of a dedicated smoker. I shook hands around the table and found a seat between a man named Thierry and a terse woman called Lydia. I was given the task of peeling asparagus.
Coscuella had remanded the care of the saucepan to a nervous-looking gentleman named Philippe, who began stirring the butter vigorously.
“Trop vite, trop vite!” Coscuella snapped. He shooed Philippe aside and took over.
“Sauces are not my forté,” Philippe said sheepishly.
Thierry called out to Coscuella, “Demote him to dishwasher!”
Lorette swatted Thierry with a dish towel.
At ten thirty we took a break. Alphonse opened a couple of bottles of rosé and poured the wine into plastic cups. Bits of gossip were traded.
“I hear the wife of the grocer is sick,” said Lydia.
“Crohn’s disease,” said Lorette.
“Horrible,” said Alphonse.
Conversation turned to the recent D-Day commemorations, which had been covered extensively in the morning papers. President François Hollande had been criticized for sucking his teeth like a bored schoolboy while Queen Elizabeth stood at a dais speaking of sacrifice and heroism. Around the table there was a spirited round of Hollande-bashing, followed by reminiscing about Les Trente Glorieuses—the thirty years of prosperity in France that followed the war—and then about France under Mitterand, whom Lydia referred to as “un vrai socialiste.” It seemed that on the whole Gascons, unlike so many of their counterparts in other parts of the Midi, are leftists of the old school.
Coscuella, who had been slicing the tripe, spoke up. “I cooked for Mitterand. He knew how to eat, that one.”
I asked Coscuella if it was true that Mitterand ate ortolan—the banned delicacy of southwestern France consisting of tiny songbirds drowned in Armagnac and fried whole�
�as his last meal before dying of cancer.
The chef waved off the question. “That was a long time ago.”
Coscuella’s evasiveness caused me to wonder for a moment whether he had been the anonymous chef who’d prepared that famed meal. But I decided to let it drop. Instead, I mentioned that I’d been reading about La Ronde des Mousquetaires, Le Ripa Alta, and André Daguin.
At the mention of Daguin’s name, Alphonse looked as if he’d smelled a fart. He took a seat opposite me and leaned in conspiratorially. “Daguin stole recipes from Coscuella. Momo was doing grilled duck breast before Daguin. C’est vrai!”
Alphonse glanced behind him at the chef, who was now poking desultorily at the strawberries that Lorette and Lydia had trimmed, and then leaned in even closer. “But Momo was never a good self-promoter like Daguin,” said Alphonse, his face a mask of concern. “He didn’t know how to market himself. His stammer made it hard.”
I wanted to press Alphonse for more details, but Coscuella was summoning him to the counter to help out with the salmon terrine. As the two of them worked together, Alphonse talked to the chef with a mix of deference and affection.
The terrine went into the oven in a bain-marie, and Coscuella instructed Bernd to fold big dollops of fromage blanc into the strawberries, which Lydia had just puréed, to make the mousse.
Then Alphonse and Coscuella began frying pieces of gras double. The kitchen filled with the thick, sweetish scent of cooking offal—a comforting aroma if you grew up with it and, as a rule, an off-putting one if you didn’t. Bernd stepped out for a smoke. I could see him standing just outside the kitchen’s open window, sucking at a cigarillo and looking like a delinquent schoolboy.
“Frying isn’t the proper way to do it,” Coscuella said to me over his shoulder, “but it’s fast. Proper gras double is cooked for six hours.” I tried to imagine how the kitchen would smell after that.
When the tripe was done and set on paper towels to cool, Coscuella brought the bowl of strawberry mousse to the table. Fingers swiped the sides of it and were sucked lustily.
Alphonse poured more wine, and Coscuella handed me a piece of the tripe. It was salty, fatty, and quite good.
The next couple of classes were much like the first, fueled by gossip and cheap wine and featuring menus—some more Gascon than others—that harked back to a bygone era: sweetbreads in Madeira, caviar d’aubergine, melon balls marinated in sweetened eau-de-vie and served in hollowed-out melon halves, the edges of which Coscuella had instructed us to cut in a crenellated pattern. The chef was a harsh taskmaster, but, with the exception of the perpetually browbeaten Philippe, his students treated him with affection, referring to him as Maurice or Momo and ignoring his fits of pique. Lydia would sometimes say, “Oh, Maurice, you’re a piment”—“a hot pepper.” Coscuella was no Daguin, but he was Plaisance’s culinary mascot, a treasure to be looked after and cherished.
Not long after the classes ended, I ran into the chef at the bakery. He insisted I accompany him to his house, around the corner. He had some books he wanted to lend me. I waited as Coscuella padded about his cluttered library, pulling various volumes off the shelves. He handed me a stack and said I could keep them until I returned to the States. I decided to peruse the books on a bench facing the arcades of the new bastide. Like Henri’s library loan, Coscuella’s contained an odd mix. There was a coffee-table book from the ’80s showcasing the architectural creations of the Gascony-born chef Jean-Louis Palladin, whom Coscuella had referred to as a “dear friend.” There was an equally hefty tome grandiosely titled La Grande Messe de l’Armagnac by Abel Sempé, a master distiller who, Coscuella had told me, went on to become a senator representing the Gers. To my surprise, at the bottom of the stack was a first edition, in somewhat better condition than the one I had, of The Cooking of South-West France. A yellowed courtesy card from Wolfert’s first editor at The Dial Press was still paper-clipped to the dust jacket: “For M. Coscuella, with compliments.”
THOUGH I WAS MORE INTERESTED in Gascon home cooking than in restaurant food, eventually curiosity got the better of me, and I persuaded Michele to join me for lunch at La Pergola, an unprepossessing plat-du-jour joint at the edge of town. I’d been eyeing the place for some time, noting that it did a brisk business at lunchtime.
At 12:15, the restaurant was already packed. Michele and I stepped into a garish, mirror-walled bar area crowded with men in worker’s coveralls drinking a pre-meal beer or pastis, making the most of their state-mandated lunch break. Just beyond the bar, I could see an enormous dining room with a drop-ceiling. Some patrons were choosing cold hors d’oeuvres from a refrigerated case. More men with weather-chapped faces were squeezed shoulder to shoulder at four-tops set with paper placemats. Still others sat around a huge communal table in the middle of the room, sawing into steaks and duck legs. Unlabeled liter bottles of red wine sat on every table.
I liked the place right away. Michele looked less enamored. I should note here that on matters of eating out, she and I differed. Having grown up in Los Angeles, weaned on fish tacos, sushi, bibimbap, Chinese chicken salad, and the occasional In-N-Out Burger, she favored quick and casual meals over two-hour repasts anchored by cured and braised meats. When she did go out to proper sit-down restaurants, she preferred ones where the server would happily oblige her request to taste a few of the wines before she decided on one, and where she could choose lots of small, fresh-tasting things to eat, preferably in a room generously endowed with blond wood and natural light. Such establishments, alas, were few and far between in provincial France, and virtually nonexistent in Gascony.
After we’d waited for a minute or so at the threshold of La Pergola’s dining room, a harried-looking man caught our eye and looked at us with an urgent and inquisitive expression. I held up two fingers. He motioned for us to follow him. He led us to the big shared table and brusquely pulled out two chairs.
When I asked if he had a table for two, he tapped his watch. “Ah non. You have to get here early for that.”
And so we sat. Each of the men at our table lifted his face long enough to give a perfunctory b’jour before returning to the midday feeding. Moments later the proprietor returned, pen poised over pad. “Alors,” he said, eyes darting between Michele and me, “onze ou treize?” After a brief exchange, I understood what he meant: Did we want the 11-euro menu or the 13-euro menu? There were no other options. The pricier menu got you soup, appetizer, and your choice of three different plats du jour, plus dessert. The cheaper one got you soup and a plat du jour, but you had to choose between appetizer and dessert. We splurged on the treize.
I asked about wine. The proprietor leaned between me and Michele, reached for one of the open bottles that were distributed across the table, and plunked it down in front of us.
“À volonté,” he said. “As much as you want.”
The soup was a garbure—the standard opening act for every cheap prix-fixe menu from the Pyrenees to the Garonne River—and a hearty one at that. It came family-style in a large metal tureen, and consisted of potatoes, turnips, cabbage, carrots, and ruby-colored chunks of duck confit swimming in a murky broth that had been fortified with a ham hock or two, and quite probably some other non-premium parts of the pig. A few confit duck wings were poking out of the tureen.
Michele remarked that the soup on its own would have been enough for her. I told her to loosen her belt—Gascons don’t do doggy bags.
When we’d finished, a server cleared away our bowls and gestured toward the cold case. We got up and scanned the selection of prepared salads and charcuterie. Michele went for shredded carrots in a vinaigrette with hard-boiled eggs, and I chose a slab of pâté garnished with cornichons. The appetizers seemed superfluous after the garbure, knowing we had a main dish with sides on the way, to say nothing of dessert, but this was a French worker’s lunch of the old order.
The plats principaux arrived. I got a half chicken braised in a tomatoey ragoût, with green beans. Michele had ordered a
skirt steak in a mushroom sauce; it came with sautéed potatoes possessed of a roasty aroma and lacy crispness that strongly suggested a romp in the pan with some duck fat. We returned to the cold case for dessert: a rice pudding for me, chocolate mousse for Michele. Then coffee.
A lot of restaurants bank on some version of the claim “home-style cooking.” Not many deliver on the promise. But this lunch really did remind me of a homemade meal. The food was simple. It wasn’t garnished with frilly herb sprigs or squiggles of sauce. Some of it had been prepared ahead of time and tasted faintly of refrigeration. The chicken was slightly overcooked and the steak was a little tough; I couldn’t think of two more common home-kitchen pitfalls. But the soup, the sides, and the sauces were good—excellent, even. Someone back there was cooking with love, or at least with savoir faire. Dab boune sauce, machant tros que passe—“a good sauce helps the tough morsel go down.”
5
Magret
Virtually every farmed duck in Gascony is a moulard, also variously known as a mullard, a mulard, or a mule duck. This sterile hybrid breed is not to be confused with the mallard, which is a wild waterfowl, the one with the iridescent green head. By contrast the moulard, a cross between a Pekin duck and a Muscovy duck, is usually white-feathered. Also, it has a knack for putting on weight quickly, making it ideal for gavage. These canards gras (fat ducks) have more of everything: more fat, more flesh, and—at least when compared with other kinds of domesticated ducks I’ve tasted—more flavor.
The magret, or breast, of a Gascon moulard, as I had already discovered firsthand, is an imposing specimen. (The word magret, somewhat deceivingly, comes from maigre, for lean or thin.) In addition to being topped with a prodigiously thick layer of fatty skin, the moulard breast is roughly twice as big as that of a standard American Pekin, and thicker than a porterhouse. Its flesh is firm and deep red.
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