I burrowed into my cocoon and tried to fall sleep. I could hear Marcel snoring downstairs, the sound wafting up through the floorboards.
LET’S PUT TO REST ANY misperceptions: The seasonal culmination of transhumance isn’t peaceful. It’s a dirty, smelly, exhausting business. This stands to reason, if you think about what it takes to escort a thousand less-than-intelligent grazing-and-pooping machines down a steep, narrow forest trail, across a vast upland meadow and several rushing streams, and into a fenced enclosure at the bottom of a mountain.
Actually, though, the whole thing kicked off in a pretty civilized way. Marcel’s friends showed up as promised the next morning, having started up the trail at dawn, and they’d brought with them the makings of a fine picnic lunch—boiled chestnuts, hard-cooked eggs, fresh cherries, a bottle of Bourgueuil—to which Amandine and I contributed the rest of our pâté and ham. A family of three, the newcomers weren’t the types I expected to see fraternizing with a temperamental and reclusive Basque shepherd. It turned out that the wife, as cheerful as Marcel was cantankerous, was herself a former shepherd who’d moved to the town of Orthez to assume the life of a bourgeoise.
We ate at around eleven thirty, just as the sun got high enough to surmount the spires and bathe the clearing in glorious warmth. At one o’clock, after a ceremonial round of Armagnac-spiked coffees, Marcel finished locking down the cabin, everyone shouldered their packs, and the procession got under way.
At first the sheep seemed to herd themselves. The dogs had rounded them up into a big circle, and the clanking and maaaing beasts moved as a single, fluid mass across the clearing and right into the mouth of the trail.
Marcel, I’d noticed with a twinge of uneasiness, had sped off ahead in the 4x4.
As we fell in behind the flock, I asked the ex-shepherd woman where Marcel was going.
“To the bottom, to set up the fence,” she said.
“Shouldn’t he be back up here with the sheep?”
“I think we can handle it.”
She seemed to know what she was doing, so Amandine and I followed her suggestion to bring up the rear while she and the others worked the middle of the column and the dogs kept things orderly near the front.
Amandine and I followed the hoofed, woolly river into the forest. At first we tried to avoid stepping in the droppings the animals were leaving behind in terrific abundance, but eventually we gave up. Soon, the ex-shepherd’s family and the dogs were far ahead of us.
“I take it you’ve never done this before either?” I asked Amandine as my shoe sank into a fresh crotte.
“I’m more of a horse person,” she said, wiping her brow with a shirtsleeve.
It had gotten warm, and Amandine had taken off her army jacket and was carrying it under her arm. Just as I was about to offer to help secure it to her pack, I noticed something: The sheep river was developing tributaries. The more independent-minded members of the flock were straying into the woods, lured by the sight of a green shoot or tuft. Amandine and I started bushwhacking through the foliage to outflank the animals, whooping and waving our arms in order to get them back on the trail. Every time I got one errant sheep back in line, though, another two would saunter back up the mountain. I was finding out the hard way the most basic principle of shepherding: A flock can be pursued but not led—get out in front of some sheep, and they will turn and start ambling in the opposite direction. Amandine appeared to be learning the same lesson with some rogue ewes of her own on the other side of the trail. Before long, both of us were darting back and forth through the woods as if possessed by some Wiccan spirit.
Eventually, somehow, we reached the great pasture we had gawked at the day before. The sheep in the rear of the column now joined the rest of the flock, which had already spread out across the clearing to feast on the grassy banquet. We all rested for a while, and then the dogs rounded up the flock again and the sheep surged en masse toward the trail, just as they’d done before.
After that, the going got easier, as the path was flanked by rocky embankments that offered fewer tasty distractions. We reached the trailhead in the late afternoon. Amandine and I sat in the shade, completely spent, and watched as Marcel and his friends goaded the flock into the temporary corral, where the sheep would spend the night before being transported to their winter quarters in the Gers.
Marcel invited everyone for beers at Lescun’s lone café. He was in good spirits and insisted on paying for our drinks. The dark cloud that had been shadowing him the night before had lifted.
He gripped my hand as I was about to get into Amandine’s van. “Alors,” he said, “when are you coming back?”
AMANDINE AND I DIDN’T TALK much on the way home.
We listened to reggae as the mountains receded behind us. We skirted Pau again, passing an ugly strip of big-box stores—Bricomarché, Géant Casino, Leader Price—and got on the route toward Lembeye. Being back near sea level was filling me with a vague melancholy. Amandine was gnawing on a piece of saucisson and bobbing her head slightly to the music.
As we were crossing the Adour River, I decided to break the silence.
“That was fun,” I said for lack of anything better.
“Yep,” said Amandine.
“Quite a character, that Marcel.”
“He’s really got it made up there.”
“You mean cut off from everything like that?”
“Sure,” said Amandine. “En haut, you don’t need anyone. Just your dogs.”
It was well after dark when we finally pulled into Plaisance. Amandine stopped at the end of the moulin’s gravel drive and got out to open the back so I could grab my pack.
“See you at the market probably,” she said as she swung the door shut. We did the customary good-bye bises, but at the last second I went in for a bear hug.
“Sorry,” I said, “but that’s how we do it in Chicago.”
Michele and Charlotte were asleep. I found a couple of greengage plums and some skinny radishes in the fridge. There were eggs, too, so I made an omelet. I pulled out a wedge of Marcel’s cheese, wrapped in Amandine’s checkered waxed paper, and broke off a chunk from near the rind, where the cheese darkened and took on a near-ammoniac sharpness. I saved the rest—maybe the crazy fucking Basque would be more reliable now that he was back in the Gers, but I wasn’t going to make any assumptions.
12
Poule au Pot
Despite everything that the forward-thinking Henri IV accomplished in his lifetime—uniting Navarre with France, enacting the Edict of Nantes, becoming the first French monarch from the House of Bourbon—a remark about chicken remains the most famous thing the Gasco-Béarnais king ever said. Speaking to either the Duke of Sully or the Duke of Savoy, depending on which history book you’re reading, the monarch uttered some version of the following pronouncement: “As long as God keeps me, I shall make sure no laborer in my kingdom lacks the means to have a chicken in his pot.” Thanks to his words, the enduring peasant dish known as poule au pot is now forever associated with le Roi Henri.
As a rule, Americans don’t boil chicken. We prefer to fry it or grill it or sear it or roast it, occasionally with a beer can up its backside. We like our chickens young and white-fleshed. We like them mild-tasting and quick-cooking. Poule au pot is the opposite of all those things.
And it is so much better.
This truth was revealed to me when Nadine finally had us over for lunch.
We arrived at Nadine’s early in the morning. I was feeling wobbly. I’d gone to the Esbouhats the previous evening, intending to stay for one drink, but ended up making a night of it after Basso had chided me in front of everyone.
“Eh oh, once you walk in, you’re in till the end!” he’d shouted. To my protests that I’d already eaten, he countered, “A real Gascon eats two dinners!”
This was surely an exaggeration, but even so, some ninety minutes after the evening meal I’d shared with my family, I had a second one, working my way through a coup
le of roasted tomato halves, several thick slices of roast pork, a pile of egg noodles bathed in jus, a wedge of cheese, and a large piece of eau-de-vie–drenched tiramisu. I’d gone to sleep sitting up, hands on my belly, and awakened feeling less than sanguine about a garbure-esque session of toiling over a soup pot, followed by a big lunch. As we pulled up in front of Nadine’s maize-colored farmhouse, I was more in the mood for dry toast than boiled bird.
Nadine’s kitchen looked tinier than I remembered it. This may have been because of the staggering abundance of ingredients piled everywhere. The table was a Flemish Master still life: bunches of untrimmed turnips and carrots, a pile of fresh leeks, a riot of parsley and thyme and chervil, a whole cabbage, capers, shallots, heads of garlic, cooked and uncooked eggs, a bowl of uncooked sausage, a hunk of beef shank, four veal tails, and, at the center of it all, a very yellow plucked hen, its three-toed feet sticking into the air in a vaguely salacious way.
“Isn’t she a beauty?” Nadine said after we’d had a coffee and put on our aprons. She plucked a stray quill from the carcass. “You can hardly find old birds like her anymore. One has to know the right farmer.”
Nadine introduced us to Jenny, the live-in helper she’d told us about. Jenny looked away from us shyly when we said bonjour. She was asked to fetch something from the arrière-cuisine, and disappeared down a long, narrow hallway.
Nadine crossed her arms, exhaled with puffed cheeks, and took stock of the table.
“Bon, let’s get started.” She pulled out a chair for me. “Dah-veed, you can make the sauce gribiche for the chicken.”
I sat down. Tentatively, I reached for the hard-boiled eggs. There were definitely eggs in a sauce gribiche. And capers—that I was sure of.
“You do know how to make a sauce gribiche, yes?” Nadine said.
“I used to,” I said.
She refreshed me on the basics and plunked down the other ingredients—oil, vinegar, chervil, tarragon.
Now she gave Michele a roll of kitchen twine and asked her to make a few bouquets garnis for the broth.
Michele took a seat opposite me. Her hands hovered uncertainly over the piles of herbs.
I leaned across the table. “You do know how to make a bouquet garni, yes?”
Michele held my gaze coolly and extended her middle finger. She pulled out a few sprigs of each kind of herb and started tying them together.
“Oh, my,” said Nadine, coming over. “That won’t do at all.”
She sat down next to Michele and took the twine from her. “Regarde.”
Nadine grabbed three leeks, three stalks of celery, an entire bunch of parsley, a fistful of fresh thyme, and a dozen sprigs of rosemary, and bound them all up like cordwood. She placed the enormous bundle in front of Michele. “Two more like this should do the trick.”
Jenny had returned, and she and Nadine started making the forcemeat stuffing. This entailed mixing a few pounds of fresh sausage with the minced heart and liver of the hen, a minced onion, lots of parsley and thyme, a couple of raw eggs, and some bread that had been soaking in milk. Cook that all up with some fried eggs, I said to myself, and you’d have dinner for six. To all this Nadine made the superfluous addition of some rolled oats.
She winked at me. “They’re good for the colon.”
Now Jenny was holding the bird open by the legs while Nadine spooned in the stuffing. The two women worked together like well-meshed gears, exchanging barely a word. Nadine sewed the cavity shut using a long needle and some of the kitchen twine, and then used the excess twine to secure the legs snugly to the body. She brought the ends of the twine around the tail nubbin and snipped them. I’d never seen anyone truss a bird with more authority. It looked like a yellow football with limbs.
I was done with the sauce gribiche. Nadine looked in the bowl and frowned. She poked at the sauce. “Oh la, this should all be minced finer.” She sucked her finger and then assumed a chipper tone. “Pas grave.”
A brown enameled cookpot filled with water had been heating on the stove since our arrival. It was a very big cookpot. You could have bathed a medium-size dog in it. Nadine carried the trussed bird over to the stove. She lowered the hen into the bubbling water and then added the hunk of beef shin, the veal tails, the three gargantuan bouquets garnis, two chicken necks, and four chicken feet.
“Wow.” It was all I could think of to say.
Nadine flashed me one of her Why so surprised? looks. “I like a hearty broth.”
She gave the pot a stir, put down the spoon, and started rummaging through one of the kitchen drawers. She pulled out a box of surgical gauze.
I asked her if she’d cut herself.
Appearing to have taken this as a joke, she laughed and walked back over to the table, where she scissored off four lengths of the gauze. Then she and Jenny used them to make skinless boudin-like sausages with the rest of the forcemeat stuffing. Nadine tied off the end of one of the zeppelin-shaped packets. “We’ll drop these into the pot just before the bird is done,” she said. “Surgical gauze,” she added, “is a Gascon cook’s best friend.”
She took off her apron. “Now we let it simmer. Come, let’s find something to put out for apéro.”
While Jenny stayed behind to skim the broth, Michele and I followed Nadine down the hall and into a chilly, concrete-floored backroom. Cinder-block walls were lined with metal shelves stocked with hundreds of hand-labeled mason jars. On a long table covered in plastic were piles of canning equipment. This was Nadine’s arrière-cuisine.
Perusing the shelves and studying the labels, I realized I’d stumbled into the Alexandria Library of canning cellars. The room was a shrine to every imaginable Gascon farmhouse recipe—civets of hare and wild boar, daubes of beef and cèpe mushrooms, salmis of wood pigeon and squab, conserves of haricots Tarbais and tomatoes and green beans. Three shelves were devoted to foie gras alone—plain foie gras, foie gras with apples, foie gras with raisins, foie gras with Armagnac. Duck confit got an entire shelving unit: duck legs, duck necks, duck gizzards, duck wings, duck breasts.
“It’s a terrible mess in here,” said Nadine, raising a pair of glasses to her nose to examine a jar. She put it back and pulled down a different one. “Ah, here we are. I think foie gras with figs would be nice for today, no?”
It didn’t seem possible, but I was starting to feel a dull intimation of hunger.
There was plenty of sweet stuff on the shelves, too: grape jelly, red currant preserves, rhubarb preserves, strawberry, raspberry, mulberry, blackberry.
I picked up a jar labeled “gratte-cul”—literally, “ass-scratcher.” Nadine told me it was the nickname for rose hip. “Because of what the bristles do when you’re trying to pick it.” She scratched her haunch.
Then she took the jar and put it in an empty apple crate. “You can take it home for Charlotte.”
She started plucking more jars from the shelves and adding them to the crate—two, four, six, eight.
Now she was gazing with glistening eyes at a particularly tall one in her hand. “Goose neck stuffed with foie gras, my husband’s favorite.”
Into the crate it went.
“Nadine,” I said, “you don’t have to give us that.”
“Pff, please. It’s not like he’s going to eat it.”
Michele was inspecting a shelf of sauces and coulis. “Who is going to eat all this?”
Nadine shrugged. “Grandkids, friends. It was different when there were lots of hungry men around. I suppose I keep doing it out of habit.”
By the time we returned to the kitchen, it had filled with a bewitching aroma—a deep and chicken-y scent, a scent thick with promise.
We still had time to kill while the bird finished cooking, so Nadine made more coffee. Preparing the poule au pot had put her in a sentimental mood, and she reminisced for a while about the dishes she’d eaten growing up. One was called sanguette, which she described as a duck’s blood omelet. Another was alicot, a slow-simmered ragoût of unglamorous duck
parts—giblets, necks, wings, feet. The name, she said, came from the Occitan ale y cot, for aile et cou, which means “wing and neck.” She dwelled with particular relish on graisserons, a sort of scrapple made from the bits of meat and cartilage left over after making confit.
“You spread it on toast,” she said. “C’est magnifique.”
NADINE HAD INVITED HER FRIEND Danielle to join us for lunch, and also André Dubosc, who lived just up the road. He walked in with a carton of wine and a toothy grin. When I introduced him to Michele, he practically genuflected.
“You’re in for a rare treat,” he said, clasping Michele’s hands in his. “No one makes a finer poule au pot than Nadine.”
Jenny had cleaned off the kitchen table, and we all sat down. Dubosc poured glasses of Pacherenc, and Nadine served the foie gras on slices of toasted black bread. The fullness I’d been weighed down with earlier was now a memory.
Dubosc told a story about how, many decades ago, the town of Viella had been gerrymandered out of the Madiran appellation because of a local feud.
“In those days,” he said, “villagers seldom traveled outside their commune. People from Viella considered people from the other side of the Adour River outsiders. People from the Béarn considered the Gers a foreign country. This created misunderstandings.”
Dubosc said his father persuaded the quarreling parties to put aside their differences, resolving the dispute and bringing prosperity to the village.
“He was a true gentleman, your father,” Nadine said to him.
“So was your husband,” said Dubosc. “C’était un vrai monsieur.”
They clinked glasses.
Nadine went into the kitchen, prodded the contents of the cookpot with a wooden spoon, and took a taste. She pronounced the poule au pot ready.
First came bowls of the bouillon by itself, strained and then thickened with a little tapioca powder. It was a broth of fathomless richness, chicken soup’s platonic ideal.
Duck Season Page 11