The water in the pot had grown cloudy, and the air in the kitchen was thick with the scent of boiling pork. Foam rose to the water’s surface. I skimmed it off. I added some of the hachis. More foam rose up. I skimmed it off. I added the bouquet garni. More foam. More skimming. This went on for some time. Now the kitchen was starting to smell good; the herbs and aromatics were doing their thing. I felt relaxed, and not particularly needful of distraction beyond the foam-skimming, bridge-gazing, and wine-sipping.
After a while it occurred to me to check the time. It was close to six. Henri and Monique, whom we’d invited for dinner, would be arriving in a couple of hours. I’d planned to devote part of the afternoon to washing the car and doing some spider-web removal in the living room, among other things, but the day was all but gone. There were no shortcuts with a classic garbure. Once you were in it, you were in it. I made peace with this circumstance, reconciling myself to the fact that today was no longer about doing lots of things, or even several things. It was about doing one thing: making garbure.
Before cleaning up, I performed one of the final steps: adding the duck legs. After that, I gave the pot a stir and let go of the wooden spoon. It stayed upright. Charlotte walked halfway down the stairs and peeked at me through the railing. I waved for her to come down. I handed her a jar of dried espelette pepper, lifted her up, and told her to give a few good shakes over the soup pot. Then I told her to add a few pinches of salt. At last, I stirred in a spoonful of duck fat, as one of Simin Palay’s recipes had advised, “for a touch of finesse.”
I took a taste.
“Is it good?” Charlotte asked.
The garbure had an oniony bite that an overnight rest in the fridge probably would have cured, but it was full of profound, meaty flavors.
“I’d say it’s just about right.”
WHILE HENRI AND MONIQUE WERE having apéro on the balcony with Michele and Charlotte, I followed Wolfert’s suggestion to remove the meats to a warmed platter so that they could be sliced and eaten with cornichons and pickled peppers. But the great hunks of pork and confit fell apart at the first touch of the knife. So at the last minute, I separated out the duck bones and slid the meats back into the pot. My garbure looked more like a deconstructed cassoulet than a soup.
This fact did not stop our guests from oohing and aahing when I brought the tureen to the table.
Henri took a bite. “Now this is a garbure,” he said.
Monique had a taste, and let her spoon hover respectfully over the bowl. “Formidable.”
“Not too heavy?” I asked.
“Not at all,” Henri replied.
“You’re spoiling us,” said Monique.
Michele leaned toward me and said sotto voce, “My God, it’s like eating with your parents.”
Henri, who had taken a keen interest in our daughter’s acquisition of French, asked Charlotte what she was planning to do over the weekend. Charlotte offered a short but, to my great pleasure, grammatically correct reply, and I noticed for the first time that she pronounced samedi—Saturday—“sa-muh-dee,” in the local way. Some Gascon-ness had rubbed off on one of us, at least.
We had leftover garbure for dinner the next night, and the night after that. Each time, I stretched out the soup with a little water and added some salt and pepper. And each time, it tasted better than the time before: mellower, softer, with deeper bass notes and more harmonious flavors. Thus concluded my first object lesson in the making of Gascon soups, stews, and braises: If made right, they improve with age.
10
Dinner at Henri’s
In Gascony, the past feels close and incandescent. Visible traces of it are everywhere: the churches and graveyards, the ancient place names, the châteaux and crumbling maisons féodales. When you ask locals of a certain age where they’re from, they’re as likely to answer with the name of a bygone comté or barony—Bigorre, Lomagne, Astarac—as they are to name a modern administrative district.
Some Gascons, it’s true, feel a deeper connection to the past than others.
Henri, for one, was besotted.
Certainly, living in his old moulin had given us some indication of Henri’s predilections, but it wasn’t until we attended a fancy meal at his house that I understood the full scope of his fixation.
The De Rességuiers lived just up the road, in a sleepy bastide village called Marciac. It was known for its summer jazz festival, which had revived the town’s fortunes in recent years, turning the arcaded central square into a more spruced-up version of Plaisance’s main bastide.
Michele and I arrived at eight fifteen and loitered hesitantly for a few moments in front of Henri’s three-story town house.
“Is there a doorbell?” Michele asked, scanning the plain façade.
“Literally,” I said. I tugged on a wood-handled chain hanging from a small hole in the wall, and a bell tinkled faintly somewhere inside the house. A half minute later, one of the enormous wood double doors yawned open, and there was Henri, beaming. He greeted us warmly, first cheek-pecking Michele and then grasping my hand with both of his. There was an extra touch of graciousness in his bearing, an extra flourish of gallantry. Tonight, we were his guests, his peers. “Entre, entre, je t’en prie,” he said to me, using the informal tu with us for the first time.
Henri led us down a dark, narrow front hall, the walls of which were decorated with framed botanical drawings and what appeared to be antique gardening implements. We passed a library whose towering shelves were crammed with clothbound books; more dusty-looking tomes were piled precariously atop a handsome old wood secretary.
“They’re calling for rain,” Henri said over his shoulder as he glided ahead of us toward a wide staircase at the end of the hall, “so we’re having drinks upstairs in the salon.”
The wooden steps of the staircase sagged in the middle and were worn shiny-smooth by many years of footfalls. Lining the stairs were dozens of wicker baskets like the one Monique was usually carrying when she popped by our house to give us a jar of jam or some picture books for Charlotte.
Turning left at the top of the stairs, we entered a room the likes of which I’d never seen outside of a museum. Henri’s salon could have passed for the stage set of a Molière comedy. Lit by antique wall sconces and furnished with needlepoint-upholstered fauteuils, marble-topped side tables, and gilt-edged mirrors, the salon was a period-perfect seventeenth-century drawing room, free of any signs of modernity. An oil painting of a stormy seascape hung above the fireplace mantle, on which sat a polished-stone fleur-de-lis.
A dozen guests were chatting politely, most of them clustered around a table set with silver platters of canapés and bowls of olives. Monique’s singsong voice could be heard above the others. She was talking to a gruff-looking, hirsute man about her new pastime, sport shooting.
Henri handed us flutes of champagne and started introducing us around the room. We met a deeply tanned widower who had been married to a department-store clothes model (he showed us her picture on his phone); a couple who owned a riding club nearby; and a shiny-headed veterinarian named Jacques, who had published an illustrated history of Marciac and was raising money now to open an “alimentary-themed” amusement park outside the village.
Henri introduced me to a genial fellow in a rumpled blazer. This was Alain Lagors, the historian who’d collected the housewives’ recipes. Monsieur Lagors worked as a professor at the local junior high school and, Henri added, was a member of the Société Archéologique et Historique du Gers.
Lagors shook my hand and hung on to it as he spoke. “As a recent transplant to Plaisance, you might be interested to read my monograph on the history of the village.”
He edged closer as if about to reveal a secret. “Did you know, Dah-veed, that Plaisance is one of only a handful of villages in France with two bastides?”
Jacques, the Marciac chronicler, had drifted over, and now chimed in. “One should point out,” he said, “that only one of them is a real medieval ba
stide. The other was—”
“A bastide is a bastide,” interrupted Lagors. “C’est une question d’architecture.”
At nine or so, Henri stepped to the doorway, clasped his hands in front of him, and announced, “Dinner, everyone! Bring your glasses if you like.”
Downstairs, he directed guests to their seats at an elaborately set table with a huge flower arrangement in the middle. As he did so, he consulted a slip of paper he’d pulled from his pocket.
Michele looked at me. “Is that a—?”
“My God, it is,” I whispered.
It was a seating chart.
I was placed between Henri and Monsieur Lagors. Michele was exiled to the far end, between the dark-haired man Monique had been talking to and the woman who ran the riding club. Neither of them appeared to speak English.
Michele’s questionable seat assignment aside, the meal that followed was one of the more impressive feats of social and culinary engineering I’d ever witnessed. For two hours, we were ushered seamlessly from one gustatory moment to another, without the least appearance of exertion on the part of our hosts. It was the kind of meticulously choreographed dinner party that I assumed had gone the way of silver-domed serving platters and butler’s pantries.
The proceedings began with glasses of very cold Sauternes, poured by Henri with practiced grace, and neat rectangles of foie gras rimmed with yellow fat. Each square was served on a fine-china plate adorned with a single parsley sprig. Monique, whose role appeared to be that of conversation facilitator, revealed that the foie gras had been made by Henri’s mother. After the first course was cleared away, six plump escargots en persillade appeared before me and my wineglass was refilled, this time with a bone-dry Jurançon Sec.
“The snails are from our garden,” Monique announced. I thought that was pretty cool, though none of the others seemed particularly stirred.
Next came a plate containing a trio of delicious small things: marinated sardine fillets, slices of cold stuffed baby artichoke hearts, and a scoopful of zucchini tian.
From where I was sitting, I could see into the kitchen. It was a cramped room, typical of old Gascon maisons bourgeoises, with a smoke-stained stone hearth, an enameled sink, and a well-used gas range. I was amazed by what Henri had been able to accomplish in such modest confines, and even more so by his nimble maneuverings in the dining room. Plates arrived and were whisked away with astonishing stealth. Before I’d even noticed his absence, Henri was back in his seat, chatting away, with nary a bead of sweat on his face—much less the armpit stains, knife cuts, and cheese-grater abrasions that often accompanied my own dinner-party hosting back home.
As we finished the second course, Monsieur Lagors topped off my glass. “The De Rességuiers have apprised you of the history of their moulin, I trust?”
I told him that Monique had filled me in on the basic details.
“Then perhaps you already know that upon the death of Dominiquette de Saint Pierre Lesperet in 1894 the mill was sold to a Monsieur Rosapelly and refitted with a Gramme magneto—a brand-new invention at the time, I might add—in order to supply the town with power.”
“You don’t say.”
“En effet, the village was one of the first in France with electric streetlights.”
The professor seemed pleased to have an ear to bend, and as we were about to start in on the main course—paupiettes de veau in an herbed chanterelle sauce—he took possession of a bottle of Saint-Emilion for the two of us and embarked on a (slightly) condensed oral history of Plaisance in the years leading up to the Third Republic.
“Plaisance,” Lagors began, “was a great crossroads at the time. It sat astride one of the main routes to the Pyrenees, right at the junction of the Béarn, the Bigorre, Bas Armagnac, and the Pays Landais—a meeting point for the old, feudal contrées of Gascony. This drew in people not only from the hills of the Gers, but also from the Madiranais, the Vic-Bilh, and beyond.”
The profusion of place names pleasantly lulled me. Content, I chewed and listened as Lagors described a nineteenth-century village bursting at the seams with commerce and industry. “Every trade thrived in Plaisance,” he said. “Carpenters, blacksmiths, leathersmiths, coopers, wagoners, wheelwrights. People had to stand outside during Sunday Mass at the old church. All the pews were filled.” Lagors went on to say that money flowed into the town coffers in those days. Improvements were made in sanitation. Streets were paved. Work began on the new bastide. It was the most ambitious rebuilding effort ever undertaken in any bastide town across all of Gascony, carried out in the forward-looking, urbanist spirit of the times.
Hearing about my adoptive village in its glory days, I felt a sudden, proprietary nostalgia.
Lagors took a piece of bread and mopped up the last of the sauce from his plate. For a moment, he seemed to be lost in thought. Finally, he wiped his mouth and said, “Those were heady times,” sounding as if he’d lived through them himself.
Now Henri was leaning between us to lower an enormous wooden cheese board onto the table. I served myself pieces of everything on it. Freed momentarily from conversation, as Lagors had been buttonholed by Monique, I paused to eavesdrop. The tan widower was talking to Henri about, if I understood correctly, lingerie. Monique was describing to Lagors an angry letter she’d written to Marciac’s mayor about a lack of parking during the jazz festival. Jacques was staring morosely at his plate. The riding-club wife was making energetic hand motions at a weary-looking Michele—something about dressage, or maybe ballet, I wasn’t quite sure. The woman’s husband was embroiled in a testy debate with the dark-haired guest, whose hairy arms were crossed tightly over his chest. I couldn’t quite get the gist of their argument, but it concluded with the dark-haired fellow waving his hand disdainfully and saying something loudly about “lazy foreigners.”
Monique frowned. “Ça suffit.”
Henri folded his napkin and stood up. “No politics at the table,” he said sternly, then went into the kitchen to fetch dessert. Henri told me later that the prickly guest was a family friend visiting from Provence—“not a Gascon, bien sûr.”
Henri brought out a homemade gâteau Basque, as well as a bowl of kumquats, a plate piled with squares of dark chocolate, and four bottles of Armagnac, two of which were older than me. Monique came around carrying a cut-crystal bowl of crème anglaise for the cakes. When she got to me, she pointed at the handle of the ladle sticking out of the bowl.
“The De Rességuier coat of arms,” she said.
Just as I was trying to imagine what would motivate a person to engrave a coat of arms on a soup ladle, it occurred to me that this might be an appropriate moment to ask Henri about his family’s aristocratic pedigree. When he’d finished pouring a round of Armagnac, I decided to broach the subject by complimenting him on his taste in art and antiques.
Henri leaned back in his chair, a glass of the caramel-colored brandy in his hand. “Ah, yes,” he said, “collecting is my maladie.”
“It seems like a fitting pastime for a member of the nobility,” I replied, then worried I’d been too forward. But Henri laughed.
“I’m a skilled bargain-hunter, not a nobleman,” he said. “As for my family’s background, yes, we inherited a title but—”
He rubbed his thumb and forefinger together and uttered the only English I would ever hear him speak.
“—no money.”
Monique and Henri sent us on our way at the end of the night with a bag of kumquats and a children’s book for Charlotte called Pouf et son cousin. It had a picture of two kittens in roller skates on the cover.
Michele and I stepped onto the cobblestones outside Henri’s house. The street was utterly still, soundless, washed in the yellow glow of a sodium lamp.
11
Into the Mountains
The most famous cheese in all of Southwest France is Roquefort. But most Gascons, while they wouldn’t turn up their noses at the stuff, would not consider Roquefort local. That creamy, blue-v
eined cheese comes from Roquefort-sur-Soulzon, in the Aveyron département, more than 100 miles east of Toulouse. That’s practically a foreign land. To a Gascon, a local cheese is, by and large, one that arrives from the opposite direction, namely the Pyrenees: usually either as rounds of pale-yellow cow’s milk or sheep’s milk cheese—known as Tomme des Pyrénées—or cylinders and pucks of chèvre.
The deep grooves of those ancient mountains—the Ossau Valley being the most famous, cheese making–wise—are populated by thousands of dairy farmers, sheep farmers, and goatherds. Some work on spreads with big milking sheds and shiny equipment. Others toil in cottage operations: a few goats or ewes in a pen out back, a cheese-making room off the kitchen, maybe a handmade-woolens business on the side. A few hardened traditionalists, especially in the Basque region—generally an excellent place to find hardened traditionalists—pasture their herds high in the mountains during the summer and bring them down to lower elevations for the colder months, in an age-old practice that goes by a mystical-sounding name: transhumance.
Of the various Pyrenees cheeses sold by Amandine, I had developed a fairly stubborn addiction to two: the downy-white fresh chèvre and a long-aged ewe’s milk cheese. This fromage de brébis—a brébis being a “ewe”—was a magnificent ogre, with a thick, discolored rind and a crumbly interior so sharp from fermentation that it burned the tongue. In the comparatively tame world of Tomme des Pyrénées, it was an outlier.
The problem with this cheese was that all too frequently Amandine was out of it. This was not the fault of Amandine but of the cheese maker, a solitary shepherd who, according to Amandine, seldom picked up his phone, often failed to show up at their meeting spot in a market town south of Pau to deliver his rounds of tomme, and, to hear Amandine tell it, was a generally unreliable character. His name was Marcel, she said, although she referred to him more often as “the crazy fucking Basque.”
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