Unlike the tough legs, which must be slow-roasted, braised, or confited, the tender magret of a moulard takes beautifully to fast, high-heat cooking, as André Daguin so boldly demonstrated to his countrymen and to the world. What makes searing or grilling a moulard breast trickier than searing or grilling, say, a steak or a chop is—as might be guessed—the fat. Not only does it have a tendency to catch fire when the magret is laid over hot coals, but, when the breast is cooked in a skillet, the fat must be given time to gently render out. If a cook sears the skin side too quickly, not enough of that subcutaneous fat will liquefy and the skin will come out tough and chewy. Conversely, if the cook sears the magret too long, the skin will blacken and burn. When faced with this delicate proposition, and occasionally owing to matters of taste, some people strip away and discard the skin altogether before cooking. This, I put to you, is heresy. When a magret is cooked right, that crisp, thin, savory apron of skin is the dish’s raison d’être.
I took all these things into consideration as I prepared to welcome our very first dinner guest with a main course of pan-seared duck breasts in a port wine reduction. Our honored invitee? Nadine Cauzette, the widow from Viella whose home-cooking had fanned the flames of my Gascony-love a year and a half before. It had taken some cajoling to convince her to let me cook for her instead of the other way around, but I’d finally won her over. Michele, on learning that Nadine was coming for dinner, pointed out that a native-born Gascon with duck fat for blood who made her own confit and rillettes was perhaps not the ideal candidate on whom to test out a Gascon duck recipe. But the die was cast.
The magret preparation I’d chosen was from Wolfert’s book, which, given the dearth of clearly written, user-friendly Gascon cookbooks out there, I’d come to regard as something of a sacred text. I’d decided on the magret in port wine after much deliberation, having ultimately dispensed with the notion of making anything that required standing vigil over a three-day braise or pickling a calf’s tongue or deboning a pig’s foot. I’d flirted with the idea of doing a garbure, but Wolfert’s recipe for that elementary Gascon dish ran to three pages, was portioned for eight people, and called for more than twenty ingredients. The recipe for duck breasts called for seven. Salt and pepper were two of them. That was more my speed. I’d tackle a garbure soon enough, but magret would do nicely for now.
After mulling over the menu for a few days, I decided that to accompany the duck, I’d go for something just as straightforwardly Gascon: a salade Gersoise. This was the dish, also sometimes known more generically as a salade Gasconne, I’d been served on my first trip to Gascony years earlier: the one with the lettuce leaves topped with preserved duck products. It probably won’t come as a surprise that Gascons and North Americans have somewhat different expectations when they hear the word salad. It’s not that a Gascon wouldn’t recognize a plate of lettuce, sliced cucumbers, and tomato wedges as a salad—that genre of light side dish isn’t unknown in Gascony. It’s just that he’d probably be disappointed by it. For a Gascon, the word salade holds a certain promise. Within the wide salad rubric is the potential for many savory and often meaty things mingled together atop a layer of greenery. I had a cheap and delicious restaurant meal on my second Gascony trip that included a dish the menu referred to as a “salade saison.” The requisite bed of lettuce was almost completely obscured by tender hunks of brisket and boiled potatoes that had been bathed in broth. When I asked the proprietor what was seasonal about the salad, she told me the beef and potatoes were left over from the previous night’s special: pot-au-feu. Pot-au-feu is a winter dish. It was winter. Voilà.
The morning of the dinner with Nadine, I returned to the duck farm where I’d bought those first, ill-fated magrets. Ferme Tomasella sat at the end of an unpaved, tree-canopied road outside a neighboring village called Aignan. It was a typical Gascon farmstead: a cluster of prim, tile-roofed buildings gathered around a gravel courtyard. Some moulards were waddling about a grassy enclosure behind the main house. Next to the house was a tiny shop selling canned duck confit, jars of foie gras, and, in a cold case by the door, freshly butchered duck parts. As I’d done the first time, I rang a bell, and just as before, the woman in the blood-smeared smock emerged from behind the farmhouse to ring up my order. When I realized my wallet was empty—I’d forgotten to stop by the bank—she just made a note on a chit, handed it to me, and said I could pay on my next visit.
WE’D SAID SEVEN O’CLOCK; NADINE arrived at a quarter to eight, not an excessive degree of tardiness for an evening engagement in Gascony. Nadine was unchanged since the last time I’d seen her: petite and broad-beamed, with a dimpled smile and sparkling eyes. She had the typical short, Gascon-lady hairdo, but her glasses were more old-fashioned than mod, with a cat-eye shape.
In keeping with what I would soon discover to be standard Gascon practice, Nadine had brought gifts. Lots of them. So many, in fact, that I had to help retrieve them from her car and then enlist Michele to create a sort of bucket brigade in the foyer, with Nadine handing a gift to me and me handing it to Michele to set down somewhere: a very tall potted orchid, a bottle of vin de liqueur, custom-made T-shirts emblazoned with the number 32, which is the postal code prefix for the Gers. For Charlotte she’d brought a French activity book, a bracelet-making kit, and a towering Styrofoam-core gumdrop tree wrapped in cellophane and tied at the top with a pink ribbon.
“You really shouldn’t have,” I said.
Nadine flashed me the same bewildered look she’d given me the first time I’d told her that.
We went out on the balcony. I opened the vin de liqueur. As we sipped our apéro, Nadine talked at length about an old widow in Viella whom she’d been taking care of.
“She lived all alone, la pauvre,” said Nadine. “Her children were just waiting for her to die so they could sell the house. It’s been quite an ordeal.”
“That’s awful,” Michele said.
“Bof,” said Nadine with a flip of her hand. “Things are back to normal now.” She cleared her throat. “Well, not for her, certainement. She’s dead.”
I excused myself to start cooking the duck breasts, leaving Michele to manage as best she could with Nadine, who didn’t speak a word of English. Charlotte was busy inside making rubber bracelets.
The salads were already made, and they were a handsome sight: On each plate, I’d fanned out six fat-rimmed slices of cured duck breast on a bed of lettuce garnished with a quartered hard-boiled farm egg and tomato wedges. Then I’d scattered nubbins of foie gras on top and added pieces of duck gizzard, which I’d cut up and sautéed until they were crisp on the outside and chewy in the middle. Duck gizzards, by the way, are a wonderful food, justly prized by the Gascons. The lobed gastric muscle is typically confited, often in the same kettle or crock as the other duck parts; confit duck gizzards are dense and smooth-textured, with a deep iron-oxide color and an even deeper, meaty flavor. One might characterize them as a sort of entry-level organ meat for novitiates.
I’d also prepped the magrets ahead of time, scoring the skin—crucial for hastening the fat-rendering—and seasoning the breasts with salt and pepper. Now I put them in a cold skillet, skin side down, and brought up the heat. Clear liquid fat began to accumulate around the breasts as they started to pop and sizzle. The fat began to rise up the sides of the pan. My God, there was so much of it. Not that I should have been surprised, but still, it was impressive. I flipped the breasts to cook the flesh side. Then I transferred the breasts to a cutting board, covered them, poured off the fat from the skillet, and made the sauce, which entailed reducing the port to a glaze, adding the juice of an orange, some stock, then some cream, and cooking it all down to a nice sheen—a by-the-book French pan reduction.
I let the duck rest some more while we ate our salads. Then I returned to the kitchen, sliced the magrets, and lay the slices on a platter. The flesh was reddish-pink and juicy-looking. The skin was golden. I strained the lustrous sauce over the duck and brought the platter to the t
able.
Nadine clasped her hands together and said, “Que c’est beau!” I took a bite. The flesh was succulent, with a deep, beef-like flavor. The sauce was rich, concentrated, and tart-sweet, the way a duck-accompanying sauce should be. But the skin was a disappointment. It was thick and slightly rubbery instead of thin, crisp, and melting, an overcoat when a light jacket was called for. Michele and Charlotte were peeling it off and pushing it to the side of their plates. Though I’d followed the recipe to the letter, perhaps I had heated the pan too quickly, causing the skin to brown too fast, which in turn must have prompted me to flip the breast before enough of that abundant fat had liquefied. This, alas, was exactly the kind of mistake I was prone to making in the kitchen. I was impatient. I favored speed and high heat over gentle tending. I hadn’t managed the fat.
If Nadine was bothered by the chewy skin, she didn’t let on. She devoured her magret, fat and all, and served herself a second helping.
While Michele read Charlotte bedtime stories upstairs, Nadine told me about her late husband, a winegrower. I remembered seeing the vine rows behind Nadine’s house and, in her living room, a photo of a beaming man whom I presumed to be Monsieur Cauzette.
“During the vendanges,” she said, wiping some crumbs from the table into the palm of her hand, “I cooked for him and all his workers, lunch and dinner, every day, until the last grape was picked. Mon dieu, how those men could eat!”
She laughed, but she had tears in her eyes. This struck me as a peculiarly Gascon disposition: bemusement mingling comfortably with sadness.
“It was his work that killed him. In those days, they sprayed the vines with n’importe quoi. He came home every evening smelling of chemicals.”
She dusted the crumbs off her palm into her napkin. “But enough about all that.”
I asked if she lived alone.
“Hardly,” she said, her voice chirpy again. “My daughter and grandchildren are right next door, and I have a—well, a boarder, you could say. Jenny was in the state home where I used to work—with les handicapés mentaux—but I took her in. She helps me with the house and the cooking. She’s part of the family now.”
I poured us each a little more wine.
Nadine smiled and raised her glass.
I told Nadine how fondly I remembered the meal she’d cooked. Then I confessed to her my frustration with magret, explaining how I’d stuck to the recipe and still ended up with too much fatty skin. Nadine reached over and touched my hand—the best home cooking, she insisted, is not learned from a book.
6
À Votre Santé
The year 2007 was a good one for winemakers in the Southwest of France—not because of a memorable harvest or exceptional weather, but because The Red Wine Diet was published that year. In that book, the British scientist Roger Corder, building on what was already a pretty wide global consensus that consuming a little red wine every day was good for you, singled out the Gers and its cherished Madiran for special mention. I can picture the berets of the local vignerons flying into the air when they got to page 79. There, the following summation appears:
So what is special about living in the Gers? Is this the home of the real French Paradox? Foods high in saturated fats such as foie gras, cassoulet, saucisson, and cheese are regularly eaten here, so what is the protective factor? Could it be the wine? Is this the French “Red Zone” (the zone of exceptional reds)? Well, after analysis of some wines in my lab the answer seemed to be definitely yes. If there is anywhere where red wine can explain a local improvement in wellbeing, it is here.
You can’t buy publicity like that. Corder goes on to identify tannat, the main grape used for Madiran wines, as having especially high levels of procyanidins, a variety of plant chemical that promotes vascular health, and he points out that the traditional, slow-and-steady vinification methods favored by winemakers in the Southwest conserve a maximum of those health-giving compounds.
The directors of the local winemakers’ cooperative, which goes by the name of Plaimont, were so happy that they held a ceremony later that year at a wine-country château in order to bestow upon Dr. Corder an honorary membership in the Royal Order of Madiran. Also invited, and receiving the same honor, was Serge Renaud, the pioneering French medical researcher known as the “father of the French Paradox.” Pictures of the event suggest that both men had a good time and made no small contribution to their own vascular health.
Another observation about Madiran that Dr. Corder makes in The Red Wine Diet, and one that probably gets cited less frequently by locals, is this: “The wines can be astringent, almost brutally tannic, and not at all suitable for casual quaffing.”
The notorious harshness of southwestern France’s tannat is an old challenge for the vignerons of Madiran, an appellation that extends across a tiny swath of hill country at the junction of the Gers, the Hautes-Pyrénées, and the Pyrénées-Atlantiques. (You can drive across the viticultural zone in about fifteen minutes, on curvy roads at that.) In recent decades, a handful of winemakers in the Madiranais, as the area is sometimes called, have been able to make softer, more elegant red wines and sell them at higher prices. The most famous is Alain Brumont, a local winemaker’s son who hit it big with a prestige wine called Château Montus. He is sometimes called “the King of Madiran.” I met Brumont on my first reporting trip to Gascony. He was a hot-tempered man with a penchant for lecturing. After he drove me around in his Mercedes SUV to admire his many vineyard plots, after visiting Montus’s immense, immaculate cellar, accessed via a gleaming elevator, and after a lengthy tutorial, delivered in his office and augmented by a speaker-phone call with a chemist in Montpellier concerning the naturally occurring compounds Brumont coaxes from the grapes to create a signature aroma of truffles in one of his wines, we sat down to lunch. The meal was served in a private dining room at Brumont’s other Madiran estate, Bouscassé. A young chef brought out plates of roasted squab. We tasted many wines, maybe fifteen in all. They were very good. Throughout the meal, Brumont complained bitterly about the paysans, who, he said, begrudged him his success and were mired in superstitions. I was glad to get back in my rental car at the end of the day.
For the most part, though, Madiran’s winemakers toil in relative obscurity, at least compared to the exalted regions of Bordeaux and Burgundy and the massively productive zones of the Loire, the Rhône Valley, and the Languedoc. About half of Madiran growers belong to the Plaimont co-op, which vinifies their fruit at one of three collective caves and helps them improve their methods for growing and harvesting.
The person who founded Plaimont in the late 1970s was André Dubosc, the same vigneron who had invited me to Nadine Cauzette’s house a couple of years back. Like Brumont, Dubosc was born into a winemaking family. Their fathers knew each other well. If Brumont was the king in these parts, then Dubosc was the éminence grise—a man who, by many accounts, singlehandedly rescued winemaking in the Gers and in the Madiranais, not by creating trophy wines but by teaching paysans to be better farmers.
Dubosc was unlike Alain Brumont in every way except one: He liked to talk. At the memorable dinner at Nadine’s, he’d held forth almost without pause, from the first glass of Pacherenc to the last sip of brandy—not just on the subject of wine but on local geography, history, mythology, cuisine, botany, you name it. He was a walking Gascon encyclopedia with a pencil mustache and a black beret. His tone was soft and euphonious, not sharp like Brumont’s. He spoke with a professorial lilt, pausing from time to time to smile or chuckle at something he’d just recounted, evincing a genuine fascination with whatever topic he happened to be expounding upon.
When I called Dubosc after our arrival in Plaisance, he offered to take me out to lunch. I met Monsieur le Directeur in the parking lot of Plaimont’s retail stand outside of town.
We got into his car, and he asked if I’d like to take a tour of the vignobles of Madiran and Pacherenc before lunch. I said I’d be happy to, if it wasn’t an imposition.
H
e leaned toward me and put a hand gently on my arm. “Not to worry. I’ve been promoted to director emeritus. They’ve kicked me upstairs.”
He grinned. “I’m a freshly minted retiree.”
Dubosc, I realized, reminded me a little of a provincial French politician, someone whose job it was to please everyone. Except, with Dubosc, there was a hint of Gascon roguishness percolating under the surface. As we pulled out of the parking lot, I noticed a sticker on his dashboard, a cartoon drawing of a mischievous-looking, beret-wearing devil, complete with pointy beard and barbed tail, pilfering grapes from a vine.
“Ah!” said Dubosc, “my grandkids put that there. They say it reminded them of me.”
We drove west from Plaisance, crossed the Adour River, and zipped south for a couple of miles along the western bank of the river on the busy trunk road to Tarbes. Then we turned right onto a route that climbed sinuously through a patch of forest and into the dense range of hills on the far side of the Val d’Adour. We’d left the Gers and entered the slim northern panhandle of the Hautes-Pyrénées. The road brought us out of the trees and delivered us into a lush landscape similar to the one I was familiar with around Plaisance. But this terrain was defined by more-dramatic uplifts and declivities. And with the exception of a few grazing pastures here and there, the land was covered in vines. We were in the Madiranais.
Retirement had made Dubosc even more loquacious. Incapable of keeping both hands on the wheel for more than a few seconds at a time, he accompanied his flux of words with graceful hand gestures that reminded me of an orchestra conductor’s.
“Là bas,” he said, gesturing at a vine-covered hillside, “is some of the best soil for tannat grapes in the world. Those are Brumont’s slopes.”
Duck Season Page 5