Henri was a member of the noblesse? Our retired schoolmaster with a flair for weed-wacking? This was news to me. I made a mental note to ask Henri about it. Or did one not inquire about such things?
Madame Pinon suggested briskly that Charlotte take her dog, named Petite Fleur, for a walk. I got the feeling that this was more to be rid of both the dog and the child than to please either of them. Then she began to gossip with Agnès and Alan about various doings in the village. After a few minutes, I spied a man I recognized as the father of one of Charlotte’s schoolmates walking across the esplanade toward the bridge. Madame Pinon leaned in toward us, discreetly pointing a finger in his direction. “And that one?” she said under her breath. “His marriage is in shambles. Haven’t you heard? The mother is threatening to run away with the children. C’est affreux.”
Agnès and Alan remained mostly quiet, and as Madame Pinon chattered on, I began to contemplate an exit plan. It was getting late.
Petite Fleur led Charlotte back to the table and was now begging for a cracker. Charlotte popped one into the dog’s mouth, and Agnès’s mother snapped at her. “Ah, non, ça va pas! You mustn’t feed her!”
Charlotte looked like she’d just been slapped. I decided that was our cue. We said our good-byes and followed the Rue des Peupliers back home.
“That old lady was kind of mean,” said Charlotte as we walked up to the house.
We saw Agnès and Alan only a few times after that—they decamped to Australia for half of each year, and we’d arrived in Plaisance toward the end of their stay. We had them over for drinks a few days before they left. As we were seeing them out, Agnès handed me a hand-stapled booklet the size of a Playbill. It had a grainy Xeroxed photo of a château on the cover.
“My humble autobiography,” she said, smiling girlishly. “I’d be most eager to hear your thoughts one day.”
I read the homespun memoir before bed that night. Written in the third person—on a typewriter, from what I could tell—it chronicled Agnès’s travails and triumphs in soaring, dime store–romance style. The tale culminated in the heroine’s return to “her old place, the Gers.”
MANY FASCINATING LIVES AND STORIES, in fact, played out behind the façades of Plaisance’s drab centre ville.
For example, our friend Patrick, who lived on the Rue de l’Adour above an old cinema. You could walk right by his place and not notice it, but inside was a creepily magnificent Art Deco treasure: a vast, tenebrous room littered with torn-out theater seats and dominated by an enormous stage flanked by blood-red curtains.
Like Alan, Patrick had simply appeared at our door unannounced one morning. I’d been out at the time, but I’d been alerted to the arrival of our unexpected visitor by a phone call from Michele. “There’s a very good-looking man at our house,” she’d said, sounding as if she were muffling the phone. “He’s invited us for dinner tonight.”
By the time I got home, Michele was on the balcony, a glass of wine in her hand, laughing and chatting in English with a youngish fellow in jeans and Timberland boots. He was a head taller than me and had an urbane, simpatico air that seemed to have been cultivated a thousand miles from the Gers.
“I hope you don’t mind me springing an invitation on you like this,” he said, breaking into a luminous smile that was more eyes than teeth. “I figured you might like to meet some people your own age.”
We were the first to arrive at Patrick’s that night. He served us drinks at a long bar that ran along the edge of the high-ceilinged room, which was lit from above by red spotlights, giving the space a lurid, night-clubby feel.
Patrick noticed me gawking at the surroundings. “The place hasn’t shown a movie in years,” he said, sliding a pastis to me across the bar, “but I’ve thrown some great parties here.”
I asked him about the photographs hanging on the walls: dozens of stark black-and-white nudes, both male and female, in various athletic poses.
“I took those,” Patrick said. He poured himself a drink and then, with a disarming candor that I was beginning to think was a congenital Gascon trait, told us about himself. As he recounted it, his life was lighter on melodrama than Agnès’s but, to me at least, no less interesting.
Patrick explained how his grandfather, who sounded like a paysan version of Agnès’s icy mother, had, through much sweat and toil, lifted his family from peasant roots into Plaisance’s petite bourgeoisie. Patrick’s father became a prosperous entrepreneur, running a building-supply business. Like virtually every father in this part of Gascony, he expected his son to play rugby. Patrick didn’t like rugby. He took up photography instead. He didn’t fit in. He got picked on. In a gesture of adolescent indignation, he started calling himself Tripak, which is what a lot of friends call him still. When his schooling was done, he decided he wanted to see the world. He became a flight attendant for Air France. Soon he was traveling to New York, San Francisco, Tokyo, West Africa, South America, taking pictures everywhere he went. But Plaisance never stopped being home. He met a guy named Arnaud. Patrick, by way of coming out to his parents, brought Arnaud home for dinner one night.
Patrick took a gulp of his drink. “Instead of telling them, ‘Hey, I’m gay!’” he said, “I told them, ‘Hey, I’m in love!’”
Michele, who had been hanging on Patrick’s every word, asked, “What did they say?”
“They were okay with that.”
Patrick’s friends showed up with dishes of food and bottles of wine and beer. They were an artsy, international, and good-looking bunch, and they all knew one another. I felt as if I’d tapped into an undiscovered vein of hipness buried deep beneath Gascony’s hills and valleys.
A sudden shyness came over me, but it soon abated—everyone seemed genuinely happy to meet us.
Michele and I started chatting with a chic Englishwoman in red-and-white cowboy boots who restored antique furniture and sold it at her brocante shop in a nearby village. She introduced us to a skinny, shaggy-haired rocker named Tim—another Aussie, as it happened—who’d married a Gersoise, lived in a converted Armagnac distillery, and played in a band. Michele looked ecstatic to be conversing with a native English speaker about music, and before long she and Tim were talking about groups I’d never heard of. I migrated down the bar and found myself in conversation with a tall, garrulous Belgian in a bright yellow tie. His name was Fred. He said he and his wife, Lut, made meticulous reproductions of medieval and Renaissance leatherwork and sold their pieces to museums, château owners, “and occasionally to rich people with yachts.” Fred seemed to take a twisted pleasure in warning me how cold we’d be in the old mill come winter. “I’ve seen that place. You will suffer, my friend,” he said with a ghoulish shudder. “But don’t worry, our house has central heat and satellite TV. You can take refuge there.”
Glasses were filled, emptied, and filled again. Charlotte had made friends with Tim’s daughter, a cute, gap-toothed girl named Charlie. The two of them retreated to a corner of the room with Charlotte’s markers and drawing pad. Finally, sometime around nine thirty, we sat down to eat. Patrick had made, of all things, baby back ribs, which we ate with our fingers in the American fashion. This pleased Charlotte immensely. Other dishes got passed around: a saffron-tinged chicken tagine, a tortilla española, an herb-flecked tomato tart, a huge salad. More wine was opened. There was nothing particularly Gascon about the food, except that it was delicious, and offered in ridiculous abundance.
By the end of the meal, after the cheese and pastries had come and gone, the table was a cluttered mess of dishes and empty bottles. Charlotte and Charlie had joined a couple of other kids in a noisy game that involved jumping off the stage onto an old trampoline, which squeaked gratingly with each landing. Most everyone had broken off into pairs, each deep in conversation. A couple of joints were making their way around the table. Michele had her back to me and was speaking French—amazingly well, from what I could hear, considering the hour and all the wine we’d drunk—with Arnaud, Patrick’s part
ner.
I ended up in a tête-à-tête with Tim’s wife, Chloé.
“Dave,” she said, taking a drag on a cigarette. “How in the world did you end up in the Gers?”
“I wanted to ask everyone else here the same question,” I said.
Chloé smiled and gave this some thought. “I suppose some of us sort of crash-landed here,” she said, “maybe hoping to find something, or maybe hoping to get away from something.”
The trampoline springs squeaked loudly; Charlotte had just made another stage dive. I did my best to ignore the racket and started off on a tangent about my family genealogy. Chloé smoked and listened, smiling beatifically.
Eventually Charlotte and Charlie fell asleep on a threadbare couch at the far end of the room, in an alcove that had once housed the cinema’s ticket kiosk. As the evening drew to a close, Patrick sat down between me and Michele and showed us one of his recent photographic projects: a beefcake calendar featuring players from Plaisance’s rugby team. The team members were going to sell copies of the calendar around town to raise money. The photos looked pretty racy for a publication that would be sold to local grandmas and displayed in the window of the hair salon. May’s page showed the backside of a naked rugby player diving into a lake. Mr. August was a naked rugby player on a Jet Ski, his private parts obscured by the handlebars. December was a group of naked rugby players in a hot tub popping champagne.
When I pointed out that Patrick had developed an interest in rugby after all, he practically fell over laughing.
We saw a lot of Patrick after that, and not just at his expat gatherings. It was unusual for me to go into town and not run into him. More often than not, he was on a photographic mission of one kind or another: scouting locations for next year’s rugby calendar, say, or taking aerial photos of the village using a drone (which eventually ended up in the river). Other villagers, young and old, would frequently stroll over to say hello to Plaisance’s resident artiste and social impresario, inquiring about his latest travels.
9
Garbure
Writing in Le Nouveau Cuisinier Gascon, André Daguin had this to say on the subject of soup: “Soup is primordial cooking, born of ancient times. True soup is food for those of strong heart and good stomach, those with a clear conscience.”
In La Cuisine du Pays, Simin Palay makes an equally sonorous if less koan-like pronouncement: “In our land,” he intones, “there is no such thing as a good meal without a hearty soup.”
Paula Wolfert, Northern Californian that she is, strikes a lighter tone: “If France is a country of soup-eaters,” she writes, “the South-West is the land of soup-lovers.”
Indeed, the kinds of soup to be found in the greater Southwest are legion. Palay’s book contains recipes for no fewer than three dozen: bean soups, bouillons, Basque saldas, cheese soup, pot-au-feu, plus many potages even most French people have never heard of—panturoun (made with lamb), jerbilhoû (thickened with corn flour), cousinette (flavored with sorrel), and more.
In the very heart of Gascony, though, when one is offered soup, it is, almost without fail, a garbure. That beloved dish of simmered cabbage, beans, and salt pork (and usually many other things) is the soup that trumps all others. It is sustenance and comfort in equal measure. It is the ne plus ultra of Gascon peasant dishes. Often, it arrives at the table unbidden, as essential and commonplace as a basket of bread.
None of this is to say that garbure—a specialty generally thought to have originated in the Béarn but now firmly entrenched all over Gascony—does not have its myriad regional and even microregional variations.
In fact, so disparate were the recipes that I’d rounded up in preparation for cooking my first garbure that when I sat down to make my shopping list, I soon fell into a state of confused paralysis.
At one end of the spectrum lay Paula Wolfert’s multipage epic, which called for two pounds of pork shoulder, one pound of unsmoked pork belly, one pound of garlic sausage, a ham hock, smoked bacon, six confit duck legs, one pound of white beans, five kinds of vegetables, and an aerobic-sounding workout of mincing, sweating, puréeing, straining, simmering, and skimming, as well as the dunking of whole confit duck legs into the broth, the transferring of the meats to warming plates, the rubbing of pieces of stale bread with garlic, and the placing of those pieces of bread in the bottom of the soup tureen before serving the soup and meats separately with various pickled and spicy condiments.
At the opposite extreme was a recipe that Nadine (who would have been disappointed by my continuing reliance on cookbooks) had given me:
Put six liters of water, a dozen cut-up potatoes, and a ham hock in a pot. Bring to a boil. Add two sliced turnips and a bunch of blanched and sliced kale, plus whatever bits of duck confit you have handy (wings, necks, etc.). Add eight cloves of minced garlic and simmer for an hour and a half. Season to taste.
Unlike Wolfert’s mighty garbure, which was supposed to be so thick that a “wooden spoon stands up straight” in it, Nadine’s was clearly a soup of the more watery kind. They were two entirely different dishes.
I was also in possession of a brown envelope that Henri had dropped off. It contained a dozen recipes that a friend of his, a local historian, had collected several years back from—according to a handwritten note—“elderly housewives of the Val d’Adour.” Each recipe had a woman’s name attached to it: la Daube d’Odette, la Poule au Pot d’Adrienne, la Brandade de Marie-Amélie. The one for garbure, from a lady named Suzanne, was slightly more involved than Nadine’s, but still a masterpiece of brevity. The main difference was the suggestion, echoed by Wolfert, to lay pieces of stale bread in the bottom of the tureen.
As for Simin Palay’s book, the Béarnais poet proposed three garbure recipes. One suggested adding grilled chestnuts. Another called for spooning a layer of goose fat over the thick soup, flambéing the fat, and then covering the pot lid with hot coals to create a kind of gratin.
This wasn’t really clearing up my confusion.
Palay did, however, make one enlightening point. He said there was a long-accepted distinction between what he dubbed “classic” garbures, extravagantly meaty affairs typically eaten in the evening as a full meal—dishes like the one in Wolfert’s book—and simpler “everyday” garbures like Nadine’s, more often served as a starter or a light lunch.
In the end, ignoring the great chef Escoffier’s advice to “faites simple,” I decided on the former.
I WAS NOT THE TYPE of cook who makes a joyous mess in the kitchen. Before diving into a new recipe, I liked to have my chopping and mincing done ahead of time, my mise en place bowls at the ready, my counter freed of clutter, my utensils close at hand. I washed my dirty cookware as I went along. I set timers. I took a certain Midwestern pride in efficiency and order. In domestic matters in general I was a speedy multitasker. On a typical weeknight, in the time it took Michele to give Charlotte a bath and brush her hair, I could prepare a simple supper, take out the recycling, sort the mail, and empty the dishwasher. Then, after I’d rinsed the last pot and wiped down the countertops, I would pour myself a drink and power down. In fact, if I stopped to think about it, I really had only two operational gears, high and neutral, and two modes of waking activity: work and reward. This was perhaps not the healthiest way to live, but there you go.
Making a “classic” garbure required a certain retooling of my modus operandi.
The procuring of the ingredients stretched over several days. The undertaking began with a visit to Plaisance’s weekly market, for the various root vegetables and herbs. For the duck confit, I drove to Ferme Tomasella. Obtaining the pickled condiments and the dried white Tarbes beans, which had to be soaked overnight, necessitated a trip to a supermarket in another town.
On the morning of garbure day, after deciding that only the finest-quality pork products would do, I made the forty-five-minute drive to Éauze, a village that boasted what Henri had described to me as the best butcher shop in the Gers. Boucherie Cugini faced
a busy ring road encircling the medieval centre ville. I entered the crowded shop, took a number, and waited my turn behind a scrum of middle-aged women engaged in lengthy negotiations with the apron-clad countermen. I ordered the items I needed, with the exception of the garlic sausages, which they were out of. I figured I could get by.
Henri had warned me that Cugini was très cher, but I hadn’t lent much credence to his remark, since a warning about high prices was a standard local refrain, Gascons being a frugal bunch. In any event, Henri had been right. Now, driving home in possession of a small fortune in meat, I felt added pressure not to mess things up.
Never had the kitchen of the old mill felt smaller than it did that day. With the ingredients for my garbure spread out over every square inch of free counter space, I set to work. I pulled out our pear-shaped (and barely bigger than pear-size) cutting board and began trimming the turnips and cutting up the potatoes. I drained the white beans. I blanched the cabbage. I tied the bouquet garni. I sliced the leeks and sweated them in duck fat. I removed the skin from the confit duck legs and chopped it up to make cracklings. I pierced an onion with cloves and finely sliced another. Charlotte came into the kitchen to ask me something. I brusquely shooed her away. I plugged in our Moulinex food processor and puréed the parsley, garlic, and bacon for the hachis that would augment the stock, making a greasy mess of the superannuated appliance. Finally, I started simmering the beans, the ham hock, the pork belly, and the pork shoulder, realizing as I did so that I should have started that step before everything else.
Feeling spent—though I was far from finished—I rinsed my hands and looked at the counter. It was littered with onion skins, turnip tops, flecks of parsley and thyme, globules of duck fat, and lengths of wet butcher’s twine. I picked up a dishcloth, then put it back down. No. Instead of cleaning up, I sloshed a little wine into a glass and stared out the kitchen window for a while, observing the comings and goings on the bridge.
Duck Season Page 8