Then, borne by Nadine on an enormous platter, came the main attraction. Dubosc closed his eyes and inhaled deeply as it passed in front of his face on its way to the center of the table. Danielle, seated across from him, did the same, causing her glasses to steam up.
Like a number of dishes beloved by Gascons, poule au pot is defiantly unphotogenic. There is no crisp, burnished skin, no oven-caramelized vegetables, just pieces of boiled chicken and mounds of khaki-colored stuffing on a bed of limp-looking turnips, leeks, potatoes, cabbage, and carrots. But it is a thing of beauty nonetheless. It is beautiful because it is delicious. A real poule au pot is the product not so much of cooking as of alchemy. In the crucible of the stewpot, the humblest ingredients are rendered sublime, infused with flavors of stupendous depth and intensity.
I took a bite of each thing on my plate. Each ingredient tasted a hundred times better than it ever could have if it had been cooked and seasoned on its own.
I told Nadine, without exaggerating, that it was the best chicken dish I’d ever had.
She gave an oh you! wave of the hand.
“Don’t be silly,” she said. “It’s simple peasant food.”
13
Hills and Valleys
The Gers has just one city: Auch, with 23,000 residents, a nice cathedral, one fancy-ish hotel, and a bunch of shops selling foie gras gift boxes. Beyond that, you’ll find around a dozen gritty rural hubs known colloquially as bourgs, with populations in the vicinity of 5,000, and also a couple of dozen bourgades, which are villages like Plaisance: big enough to have, say, their own post office and at least a few of the standard-issue commerces—pharmacy, tobacconist, newsstand, butcher shop, bakery, and so on. Finally, scattered more or less evenly across the Gers like grains of rice are hundreds of somnolent hamlets possessed of a church and maybe a tiny mairie. With no big urban centers to connect to, the Gers has just a handful of rail lines and only a couple of stretches of four-lane highway. Both of those are on the route between Auch and Toulouse, and both are very short—no sooner have you set the cruise control than the highway peters out again, as if its builders had knocked off early for a round of floc and never bothered to finish the job.
The deeply rural character of the Gascon heartland owes in part to its distinctive terrain, which is, geologically speaking, runoff from the Pyrenees deposited over millennia in a fantail formation, creating a vast bed of fluvial sedimentary deposits known to geologists as molasse. The Gers is also one big collecting basin for the Garonne and Adour rivers, which enclose the département like a pair of cupped hands. The hundreds of rain-fed brooks, riffles, streams, and small rivers that empty into those two great waterways have, over a great deal of time, carved the molasse into a dense mosaic of arable hills and rich-soiled valleys ideal for sustaining small farms and villages but not particularly conducive to building cities.
The Gers is, more than anything else, a place where edible things grow. Plums, walnuts, hazelnuts, apples, tomatoes, pears, melons, berries, peaches, legumes, oil-seed plants, cereal grains: All are commercially farmed in the département. Quite a few of those things are raised by non-farmers, too. Gascons are consummate gardeners, and their jardins potager tend to be bigger and more professional-looking than the kitchen gardens to be found in American backyards—sprawling, neatly furrowed beds bursting forth riotously with fruits and vegetables in summer, often flanked by fruit trees, sometimes with a few rows of grapevines added to the mix, for the vin maison.
Ducks, of course, are raised in abundance—some 18,500 tons’ worth per year, nearly half the production of the entire Midi-Pyrénées region—as are, to a lesser extent, geese. The Gers has its own heritage-breed cows, called vaches mirandaises, and heritage-breed chickens, called poules Gasconnes. There’s also a local race of pig, the free-foraging porc noir de Bigorre, which, as its name suggests, is black, and has what must be one of the more eclectic porcine diets in all of France: It includes chestnuts, acorns, earthworms, snails, white truffles, apples, and wild grasses, among other delicacies. During our strolls in the hills outside Plaisance, it was not unusual for Michele and me to surprise a few porcs noirs nosing around the woods.
Intensive farming has made inroads in the Gers, in the form of monoculture crops like corn, soybeans, rapeseed, and sunflowers. The rapeseed and sunflowers turn whole swaths of the countryside bright yellow in summer. Big agricultural operations have altered the landscape here and there—trees cleared away, the land flattened or graded. But to a surprising extent, old-fashioned polyculture still thrives: small farms raising a few different kinds of crops and livestock, often of the web-footed variety. This has gone a long way toward preserving the variegated, patchwork feel of the Gascon countryside.
The particular brand of beauty proffered by the Gers is neither grandiose nor stark. The Gers lacks cliffs, waterfalls, deserts, canyons, dramatic rock formations, and most other kinds of natural assets that attract photographers and generate coffee-table books. The fertile core of Gascony is inviting but unimposing: a hodgepodge of oddly shaped farm plots, forest remnants, vineyards, oak and hawthorne groves, shrubby hedgerows, irrigation ponds, orchards, grazing pastures, and miles and miles of paved and unpaved farm roads—some 7,000 kilometers of them in all—extending across the Gers like fine capillaries, plus many more miles of foot paths, including a segment of the Chemin de Saint Jacques pilgrimage route.
And yet, the undulant landscape has a way of getting under your skin. In Les Paysages du Gers—by far the most informative book I’ve found on the département, and one of the most lavishly detailed volumes I’ve read on any subregion of France—the French geographer Bruno Sirven allows that the Gers often inspires its chroniclers to rhetorical excess (a tendency to which he himself falls prey):
Many an author has praised the qualities exuded by the countryside of this beguiling and convivial province, whose aesthetic raptures are numerous . . . and where the sensuality of the land’s contours inflames erotic metaphors, attributing to this carnal terrain an unconditionally feminine soul: rumps, buttocks, breasts, friendly hillocks, intimate valleys.
Such associations are strictly in the eye of the beholder, but I’d agree that there is something decidedly sensual about the topography of the Gers. It’s the kind of landscape you want to wrap your arms around.
The heart of Gascony is one of the finest places I know of for a long walk, especially if you’re of the ilk who enjoy hot running water and a bed after a day of lugging a pack across hill and dale. The Gers may not be very populous, but its villages are spaced close together, and strolling from one to another along the region’s back-roads and hiking trails doesn’t require traversing busy highways or ugly exurbs, as the département is largely devoid of both.
A couple of millennia of continuous human habitation have seeded the countryside with all manner of interesting man-made things that a car traveler might easily miss: crumbling stone windmills with trees growing out of their foundations; dovecotes that once belonged to grand feudal estates; Roman-era footbridges; moss-covered mission crosses and Virgin Mary shrines, which are remnants of the various religious revivals that came on the heels of the Revolution; grass-covered earthen mounds, called mottes castrales, that served as village fortifications at the dawn of modern times; medieval wash basins; abandoned railroad tracks; wells; hunting blinds; cemeteries—the eye seldom wants for something to gaze at.
Modernity hasn’t completely passed over the rural reaches of the Gers, but a traveler who happens onto even a substantial village or bourg is likely to encounter a quaint datedness. In the hotels and restaurants catering to the Gers’s seasonal influx of mostly domestic—and occasionally English and Dutch—tourists, you might find a few Spanish dishes, but generally the specialties are Gascon, served in an ambiance that ranges from frumpy to fussy.
Because of—and, on occasion, in spite of—that, hiking through the Gers can be a very enjoyable kind of time-travel.
IT HAD BEEN QUITE A WHILE—twenty years
, at least—since I’d backpacked the rural byways of France on my own. As I embarked on a two-day walk from Auch to Condom—a span of thirty-odd miles extending north from the geographical center of Gascony—I fell briefly under the spell of nostalgia. Images from my youthful travels spooled forth like flickering home movies: empty train platforms, cheap hotels, hitched rides, seedy roadside cafés, cigarettes and cheap wine, sore feet and damp clothes.
At first these recollections were like gauze draped over my eyes, filtering everything through the distorting welter of memory. After a while, though, I started to find my rhythm and tune in to my surroundings. I began to undergo the rejuvenating mental cleansing that comes from putting one foot in front of the other thousands of times. Also, I got reacquainted with the pleasures of solitude—I wouldn’t cross another person on the trail for the entirety of my walk.
Michele had dropped me off in Castin, a village just outside of Auch, and I had set off in a northerly direction, following the directions in my TopoGuide, which had surely been written by a Gascon: “Follow the lanes that snake. . . . Skew to the right and take the em-pebbled path that traverses a wooded zone. . . . At the place of the lone oak, cleave leftward to a grove of trees and a patch of fallow land.”
It was fall, and the bright hues of summer had given way to gradations of ocher, beige, and brown, colors rendered more subdued by the weather, which was drizzly. The vistas that unfolded around me were stygian and lovely. Sunflowers that had been flanking the trail—which at present overlapped with a stretch of dirt road—had been recently harvested, leaving behind a strange, stippled landscape. Near the top of a gentle rise, a rain-streaked water tower, probably from the 1950s, came into view, a dour concrete monolith set against bruised clouds. It had four buttresses at the top that looked like fins on the upturned tail of a rocket. A little ways beyond, half-hidden in a grove of trees, sat the rusted hulk of a Peugeot 405. I passed the remains of what might have been a stone farm building, or maybe an old cabane de vigneron. For a stretch, the path descended into a tunnel of dripping bramble, then emerged into a field of tall grass, which was quite pleasurable to walk through, since someone had mowed a wide corridor so that hikers wouldn’t lose their way.
The village of Lavardens, which rose from a spur of bedrock and boasted what passed in the Gers for a very large château, had been shifting, mirage-like, on the horizon for some time. And now suddenly I was upon it. At the foot of the promontory, I passed an ancient stone lavoir, where, I imagined, peasant women had once washed doublets and pantaloons.
I ate a picnic lunch in Lavardens, on a bench next to the town hall, and resumed my walk. I needed to get to Castéra-Verduzan, the nearest village down-trail with lodging, before dark. About halfway there, I veered off the path to inspect a crude stone chapel that I’d seen rising from a crinkle in the hillside. It was nothing more than four stone walls and a clocher-mur—the humblest kind of belfry there is, a chevron-shaped extension of the façade with an aperture punched through it, for the church bell. There was no village around the chapel, and, in fact, no other work of man at all, just trees. According to Bruno Sirven—he of the friendly hillocks and intimate valleys—at least 700 isolated chapelles Gasconnes are thought to still exist in the Gers. Many of them were built on the site of an even older place of worship from early-Christian times or before, often where an underground spring—apparently a sign of divine intent—bubbled forth. A soggy laminated printout tacked to the church door by the Fondation du Patrimoine said the edifice had been built in the twelfth century and had doubled as a defensive outpost during times of siege.
I took off my pack and sat on it, resting my feet for a spell and soaking up the quiet.
The rain had stopped. I followed a gravel road—no wider than a car’s axle—over a ridge. The ceiling of clouds had risen enough to bring the farther-flung reaches of the landscape into relief. From this vantage, I could see what Sirven had described as the Gers’s “sea of hills,” extending into the beyond.
THE HÔTEL DES THERMES, THE only of Castéra-Verduzan’s meager lodging options that appeared to be open, was, like a lot of two-star establishments in the Gers, prim and clean but showing its age. It sat at the southern end of the village’s main street, next to a natural-hot-springs spa, for which the town was locally famed. The hotel’s décor was a palimpsest of styles that seemed to start in the 1890s and end in the 1980s. The reception desk was fronted with wainscoted wood panels that had flowers painted on them. The adjacent restaurant was adorned with neon-hued, Leroy Neiman–type prints depicting bullfighters in balletic poses. A Victorian birdcage stood at the dining room’s entrance, two lovebirds flitting about inside. And across from a small bar—which lacked stools, in the eternally vexing French tradition—a lounge area had been furnished with colorful upholstered cubes that were presumably meant to be sat on. When I checked in, tired and sore from the hike, the disheveled proprietor—perhaps because I was an American and would thus know a little something about the invisible hand of the market—complained at great length and with no prompting about the pay-to-play business of getting listed in France’s major travel and dining guides. He applauded my savvy decision to stay in a place, like his, that wasn’t listed in those publications.
After getting settled, I walked across the street to the spa. I paid a small fee to a white-clad receptionist in return for a locker key and a very small bathing suit, then spent forty minutes beneath a sparkling glass-topped rotunda in a warm soaking pool, my feet positioned in front of soothing water jets. After that, I returned to the hotel, put on fresh clothes, and proceeded to the lounge. The entirety of my evening plan consisted of a drink followed by dinner at Castéra’s only other notable attraction: Le Florida, the venerated restaurant of Bernard Ramounéda, one of the Ronde des Mousquetaires chefs. I’d read that Ramounéda was rarely at the stoves anymore and that his son, Baptiste, was doing most of the day-to-day running of the place, which Bernard’s grandmother, Angèle, had founded after the war, but I was still curious to try it.
Presenting myself at the Hôtel des Thermes’s bar, and feeling I had earned something stronger than a watered-down pastis, I ordered a martini. It’s a drink that’s well known in most parts of France, if not well loved—the French generally preferring their strong spirits in the form of a digestif.
My request caused confusion.
Receiving silence and a furrowed brow from the shy young woman behind the bar, I described the making of the cocktail, pointing to the gin and dry vermouth that were plainly displayed on a shelf just over her left shoulder.
She chewed her lip.
I told her she could make it on the rocks and simply charge me for a double gin.
She went over to consult with a colleague who was exiting the dining room. I overheard her say, “Go find Marc.” The second woman sped off.
A minute later, a pale, thin man in a black vest and bow tie strode into the room and took the girl’s place behind the bar. He tamed a rogue lock of his comb-over and asked, in the most deferential possible tone, what I was having.
I explained my order again.
Marc blinked rapidly a few times and sucked his teeth. Then he tapped both hands on the bar in a decisive gesture. He put a few cubes of ice in a tall glass and added a slice of lemon. On top of that he poured just enough gin to wet the ice. I made a twirly “keep going” gesture with my forefinger. He did so, then stopped again. I twirled my finger some more. He poured some more. Now I pointed to the bottle of vermouth and held my thumb and forefinger a hair apart. He followed my instructions and slid the drink over. I took a sip and nodded.
Marc looked immensely pleased. Tapping the bar again as if he’d just made another bold decision, he pulled down a second glass and made himself a martini, too.
He produced a bowl of snack crackers and rested an elbow on the bar. “We don’t get too many Americans,” he said. “Mostly Dutch and English, here to take the waters.”
I told him I’d just enjoyed a d
étente thermale at the spa.
“And don’t you feel renewed? Rejuvenated?”
I did, as a matter of fact.
“They are quite miraculous, the waters,” he said. “Famous since Roman times.”
I ate a cracker.
“I do hope you’ll spread the word,” said Marc.
“Of course.”
He topped off the snack bowl. “Will you be dining with us this evening?” he asked.
I told him that I was thinking of trying Le Florida.
His face darkened.
“It’s not good?” I asked.
“You’ll eat quite well there,” Marc said. “But . . .” He slid the bowl aside so he could lean across the bar unimpeded. “Monsieur Ramounéda isn’t well-liked around here.”
I reached around him for another cracker.
“He’s an excellent chef,” Marc continued, “but he cut the grass from under our feet.”
I said I didn’t quite get his meaning.
Marc elaborated. “He started letting rooms above his restaurant to tourists, stealing our clientele. It was a dishonorable thing to do. We’d had an arrangement for many years.”
I reflected on this for a moment, then asked whether Ramounéda minded that the Hôtel des Thermes had a restaurant that might attract his clientele.
Nettled, Marc stood up straight. “It’s not the same! He’s a well-known chef gastronomique. He already has all the customers he needs.”
I gazed over at the hotel’s still-empty dining room and decided to stick with my original plan. I thanked Marc for the martini.
“Avec plaisir,” he said with what I think would qualify as a bow.
Le Florida, though it was only slightly more crowded than the hotel’s restaurant, was a pleasant surprise. The typical restaurant gastronomique in rural southwestern France is a fusty sanctum with starchy napkins that match the drapes, the kind of place where you can inevitably hear other patrons’ chewing. Le Florida was quiet, certainly, and the napkins were a little scratchy, but the dining room was inviting, with thick roof beams, exposed stone, plenty of windows, and mirrors framed in blond wood. (Michele would have approved.) Jazz emanated from a pair of tiny speakers suspended discreetly from the ceiling.
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