Duck Season

by David McAninch

  I was comfortably ensconced at a corner table, a basket of bread and a half bottle of wine in front of me, and had a nice view of the room. Two Dutch couples occupied a nearby table. I pegged them as international spa-hoppers. Across from them were, to judge from the accent, a man and a woman of more-local provenance, both middle-aged, out for a nice dinner. I could hear no one’s chewing but my own.

  As for the food, it achieved the rare feat, at least for a restaurant in the Gers, of treading the line between stuffy and rusticated. The demitasse of cold white bean purée, which, in an admittedly silly flourish, arrived on a slab of rough-hewn slate, was a kind of homage to the garbure, and was appropriately rich and fortifying, even though there wasn’t much of it. The cumin-spiced octopus salad with pearls of couscous was urbane, but also pleasingly simple. So was the roasted guinea fowl with lacquered skin and wild rice. So was the miniature croustade, a perfectly shrink-rayed version of the ubiquitous Gascon apple tart. Overall, I realized with some amazement, it was a meal one might have been served in a bistro in a hip neighborhood in Paris, except it was much cheaper.

  When I returned to the Hôtel des Thermes, the lobby was dark and empty, save for a spectral-looking Marc, who was placing a cover over the birdcage for the night. I offered a bonsoir, and he responded unsmilingly with another deep nod of the head.

  I was the only guest at breakfast the next morning. My muscles were stiff and my shoulders felt raw where the pack’s straps had rubbed at them, but I was eager to get back on the trail. I brushed crumbs from my TopoGuide and traced the day’s route with my finger. More strange place names: Jamon, Bidet, Bomit, l’Inquiétude—ancient lieu-dits for even more-ancient settlements—and, at journey’s end, Condom!

  When I got outside, the streetlamps were still on. A soupy fog had descended overnight. After twenty minutes of walking, Castéra and its outskirts had completely disappeared behind me. I was alone again, on a ribbon of pebbly asphalt curving through a mist-shrouded tableau of oak groves and more stubbly fields. My muscles started to loosen up. The trail dipped between hedgerows of broom and honeysuckle. I noticed a perfectly symmetrical spiderweb stretched between two stalks of a thistle-like plant, each strand of silk glistening with dewdrops.

  Soon the path diverged from the road and edged a vast vineyard. I’d entered an Armagnac-making zone known as the Ténarèze. Beyond the vineyard, arching prettily over a low hilltop, was a plum orchard—the fruit destined to become prunes, which Gascons like to soak in Armagnac mixed with sugar syrup and vanilla. Beyond that, more sunflowers, these ones still on the stalk, their heads black and drooping morosely, their seeds waiting to be hulled and pressed. A farmstead came into view on my left. In a garden some distance from the house stood dozens of staked tomato vines, all of them taller than me.

  I was nearing Valence-sur-Baïse, a village that had once been protected by thick stone ramparts. Small sections of the fortifications remained. I realized I’d driven through Valence on an earlier visit to the Gers, on my way to somewhere else, but the village looked completely different to me now as I approached it on foot. I entered the medieval centre ville via a narrow lane that passed underneath a lancet-arched portal known, according to a plaque nearby, as the Hedgehog Gate. The plaque didn’t say why it was called that.

  I had a bite to eat and rejoined the trail. The sun had come out, and soon I was sweating through my shirt. As I pushed on toward Condom, I stopped to snap a photo here and there—a lichen-covered postbox in a deserted hamlet, another chapel with a clocher-mur, a quartet of enormous and very old cypress trees that had outgrown a tiny, walled cemetery. Not far outside Condom, the path took me past a grass airstrip—just a meadow, a wind sock, a mothballed two-seater, and a small building that had been locked up for the season. I peeked inside and could see a couple of café tables and a short counter with a coffee machine and a few bottles on it. Nearby, where the trail crossed a road, a weather-beaten sign was being swallowed by greenery. It had been lovingly hand-lettered—and, to judge from the outdated phone number, not recently:

  AÉRODROME

  tél: 28-09-06

  ÉCOLE DE PILOTAGE

  il est Formellement Interdit de Pénétrer sur la PISTE

  pour les VOLS et visites des AVIONS

  Ser au BAR

  I was mesmerized by this for some reason. I loved the sign’s calligraphic panache, its quirky lettering and abbreviations, its arbitrary italicization and capitalization, its obliviousness to France’s mania for standardized signage. I loved the way its huffy warning—“it is Strictly Prohibited to Set Foot on the RUNWAY”—gave way in the next breath to an invitation: Inquire about flights at the bar.

  CONDOM, A BOURG OF 7,000 souls, is an unlovely place at first glance, long on auto body shops and cheap eateries and short on cozy medieval charm. Its limited offerings to the leisure traveler include a somewhat high-end restaurant (which accounts for one of the Gers’s three Michelin stars), the vestiges of an old bishopric, a larger-than-life bronze statue of Dumas’s musketeers touching sword tips, and a mid-size cathedral, which has the not-inconsiderable distinction of serving as the venue for the most, and to my knowledge the only, glamorous social event of the year in the Gers: an annual black-tie gala called—yes—the Dîner des Mousquetaires. (It bears mentioning that this gala is thrown by a Gascon fraternal organization whose capitaine is the Duc Aymeri de Montesquiou; readers may recognize the last name as that of D’Artagnan’s mother, whom the duke has claimed, not without controversy, as an ancestor. I had occasion to meet this dignitary at one of the galas; he was very tan and wore a blue sash affixed to his tuxedo with a pin in the shape of a musketeer’s sword.)

  If people outside of Gascony know the humble sous-préfecture of Condom at all, it’s probably because they’ve seen Le Bonheur est Dans le Pré, a hit movie from the ’90s about a middle-aged Parisian who leaves his wife for a beautiful goose farmer from the town. (The erstwhile soccer star Eric Cantona played the girl’s brother, his native Marseille accent passing for a Gascon one.)

  Wander around Condom for a few hours, though, with no particular destination in mind, and a curious kind of beauty reveals itself. It’s not the beauty of very old things restored to grandeur, like that of France’s celebrated churches and châteaux. It is the beauty of moderately old things unaltered from how they’ve always been.

  After arriving in Condom in the middle of the afternoon and checking into a cheap hotel, I explored the streets for a while, filled with a pleasant wistfulness. Here was the very kind of faded provincial bourg I used to stumble on in rural France back in the day. Here was the grubby bar with its foosball table and brown-tobacco smells, the rusty security gate being noisily cranked down for the night, the narrow commercial streets with their slightly gone-to-seed ’70s vibe and plastic shingle signs advertising mundane services and amenities: COIFFURE MESSIEURS, PHILDAR LAINES ET TEXTILES, CHAMBRES TOUT CONFORT.

  I strolled by the locks of the canal at the edge of town, past an abattoir and a lumberyard, then circled back to the center and ascended the Rue Gambetta. Down a side street, in the window of the local chamber of commerce, someone had installed a display of black-and-white photos of a Dîner des Mousquetaires gala from the 1960s: men with shellacked hair and skinny ties squeezed in at banquet tables crowded with bottles and ashtrays. The last names of certain of the grands hommes in attendance had been written in grease pencil next to their likenesses—“Lapeyre,” “Abeillé,” “Serres,” “Gerbaud,” and, near the image of a young, be-sashed man, “de Montesquiou.”

  Michele picked me up the next morning. I had considered asking her for another day, so I could hang around Condom some more and explore its environs. But when I phoned, she sounded eager for me to come home; there was a mouse problem that needed to be dealt with, and Charlotte had caught a cold.

  Being in a car again felt strange. The countryside hurtling by outside the window was like a sped-up movie of my two-day walk: hill-valley-hill-valley-hill-valley. I c
ould see bits of old-looking structures peeking up from indentations in the landscape, and longed to know what those structures were. But they went by too fast. Before I knew it, we were back in Plaisance.

  In a little over an hour, we’d crossed half the Gers.

  14

  Dessert

  Sweets in Gascony tend to be of two varieties: the kind the average home cook might make on a whim on a Tuesday night, and the kind the average home cook would never attempt in a million years.

  In the former camp dwell a multitude of simple, rustic cakes, tarts, and sweets. Take the gâteau millasson, for example: A flan of humble origins, it’s made with nothing more than corn flour, sugar, eggs, milk, and, sometimes, orange-flower water. Or consider the gâteau de noix, a similarly round, low-slung confection, this one made with ground walnuts. Then there’s the gâteau Basque, only slightly more complex, made with almond flour and containing a middle layer of pastry cream.

  Even the gâteau Basque is so easy, in fact, that when I complimented the version Henri had served at his dinner, he insisted on coming to our house a few days later to show us how to make one. He arrived carrying all the ingredients in one of his many wicker baskets. After fifteen minutes of sifting and stirring, he popped the cake into the oven, told us to take it out in twenty-five minutes, gathered his belongings, and bid us au revoir.

  Some time after that, Henri gave us another lesson, appearing at our door, again with his wicker basket, to demonstrate the making of an even simpler treat: sucettes au caramel. His basket contained the following items: an apple, some wood skewers, a box of sugar cubes, and a roll of aluminum foil. While Charlotte looked on, transfixed, Henri liquefied twenty-five sugar cubes in a saucepan until the syrup turned golden. Next he spread out a length of aluminum foil, halved the apple he’d brought, and placed each half, cut side down, on opposite ends of the foil to hold it in place. He dipped the ends of the wood skewers into the syrup, then laid each skewer onto the foil to let the caramel harden a bit. When he’d dipped ten skewers, he started over again with the first one, dipping it back into the caramel so that the deposit would build. After repeating this routine four or five times, he had ten half-dollar-size lollipops of translucent, sparkling amber. He stuck the suckers into the two apple halves, making a smart little candy-shop display.

  Gascons have a deep fondness for easy-to-make sweets like Henri’s sucettes, and so it is all the more baffling to outsiders that the most beloved of all Gascon desserts—the strudel-pastry-topped tart known as a croustade—is not remotely easy to make. In fact, during our time in Gascony I was unable to find a single home cook who was willing to show me how to prepare one. When I asked Nadine, she said, “Ouf, I’ve only made two in my life, and that’s enough.”

  The croustade—sometimes, confusingly, called a pastis—was once the bailiwick of grandmothers, but even in a land that resists change as fiercely as Gascony, times have done just that. Today the making of croustades is mostly left to pâtisseries or, often, small-time artisans. The best croustades where we lived, it was widely agreed, came from a lady in the nearby village of Goux; she worked out of her home and, with the help of her daughter, produced six croustades per day. She occasionally did croustade-making demos at village fêtes, and, having seen one such exhibition, I can say that six croustades per day is a heroic output.

  The vexing challenges of making a proper croustade lie, in roughly equal measure, in the correct fabrication of the building material—that is, the strudel-pastry dough—and in the construction of the tart itself. The most famously tricky part is the rolling out of the dough: A grapefruit-size ball of it must be transformed into a translucently thin sheet that’s large enough to cover a large card table—a process that demands constant but gentle tugging around the edges until the dough sheet is hanging slightly off all four sides of the table, upon which it is carefully trimmed. For the dough to withstand such extreme stretching, it has to be made with a special kind of unbleached flour, and it must be worked over like a punching bag. All the while, accommodations must be made for fluctuations in humidity, temperature, and, when working in certain environments, breezes.

  Assuming one succeeds in stretching the dough, having taken care to avoid creating holes or other irregularities, the building of the tart itself can begin. This task requires of the baker an origami artist’s precision. The dough sheet must be cut into strips and very quickly—time being of the essence, on account of how quickly a see-through dough sheet dries out—brushed with clarified butter and laid into the bottom of a greased tart pan in an overlapping radial pattern. This done, the tart can be filled, usually with a mixture of cooked apples, sugar, and sometimes Armagnac-prune syrup (which must be made no fewer than two weeks in advance, to allow the prunes and sugar to properly meld). Now the baker may begin pulling the overhanging ends of the dough strips up over the filling, twisting each strip’s end in such a way as to create a shape reminiscent of a rose. Once this step has been repeated with all the dough strips, the croustade gets dusted with confectioners’ sugar (and, if desired, spritzed with Armagnac) and baked until its coiffure of strudel flower petals is crisp and golden.

  If it all comes off, the result, it has to be said, is sublime. A true Gascon croustade is a textural masterpiece: The crackly outer layers of the petals shatter at the touch of the fork, which then travels through the strudel’s slightly softer, more caramelized precincts, into the just-barely-firm filling, and finally through the crunchy-chewy crust. An optional dollop of sweetened crème fraîche or a scoop of ice cream will introduce an unctuous medium in which the sugar-crusted pastry shards can swim and mingle. That is a beautiful sight indeed.

  There is, as far as I know, only one country-style dessert known to the denizens of Southwest France that requires more patience in the making—if slightly less fine-motor dexterity—than the croustade. The tall, conical, hearth-baked confection known as gâteau à la broche, “cake on a spit,” resided at one time, like the croustade, in the culinary repertoire of many a Gascon grandmother. Believed by most locals to have originated somewhere deep in the Pyrenees—though versions of the cake show up in other parts of Europe where there are mountains—the gâteau à la broche is a relic of the open-hearth-cooking epoch. But these days, owing to a decline in old women willing to spend an entire afternoon drizzling cake batter onto a hand-turned spit in front of a very hot fire, the fabrication of this dessert has fallen almost entirely to professional bakers, who generally rely on electric or gas rotisserie ovens to do the job. Even so, store-bought cakes are very expensive, as each one requires uninterrupted tending over several hours and, thus, a generous allocation of paid labor.

  All that being said, a few tradition-bound holdouts making gâteau à la broche in front of la cheminée can still be found.

  HERE ARE THE INGREDIENTS FOR Marinette Lagors’s gâteau à la broche: thirty-six eggs, three pounds of butter, three pounds of flour, three pounds of sugar, ten packets of vanilla-sugar, one cup of dark rum, one handful of pulverized roasted hazelnuts (preferably from your own hazelnut tree), a generous pinch of salt (preferably from an ancient tin salt cellar nailed to the kitchen wall), and six egg whites for the icing. All these supplies had been laid out on Madame Lagors’s kitchen table, suggesting a baking project of industrial proportions.

  Marinette Lagors—no relation to Alain, the local historian—was the stepmother of Alphonse, my pal from the Esbouhats. She was ninety-four years old and lived with Alphonse’s stepbrother in Vic-en-Bigorre, a town on the main route between Plaisance and the mountains. Alphonse referred to her simply as Mamie. At one of the Esbouhats dinners, Alphonse had shown me cell-phone photos of Mamie’s homemade gâteau and had promised that he would take me to see her one day so that we could make one. What I didn’t realize until that day came was that Mamie no longer did the baking. Too frail to crack an egg, she had passed the torch to her son and stepson.

  This gâteau à la broche—in a departure from centuries of tradition—woul
d be an all-male undertaking.

  When Alphonse and I arrived at Mamie’s house, his stepbrother, whose name was Michel, was out back splitting wood. He sunk the ax into a stump and came over to shake my hand. Bald and stocky, with two-day stubble and hands like catcher’s mitts, Michel was Alphonse’s coarser alter ego.

  Alphonse looked at the pile of split logs and told Michel that we’d need a lot more. The two men argued about this for several minutes. Then Alphonse took me inside to meet Mamie.

  He led me into a chintz-wallpapered living room. Mamie was asleep in an enormous recliner in front of the fireplace, her lap covered by an afghan, her toes by crocheted foot-warmers. She looked elfin and tiny.

  Before waking her, Alphonse warned me that her hearing was poor, as was her eyesight, and that one had to shout to be heard.

  Alphonse squeezed Mamie’s arm and shook it gently. A pair of bright, bead-like eyes blinked open. He leaned in close and announced that she had a guest.

  Mamie smiled at me and reached for my hand.

  “What a handsome young man,” she whispered.

  I took the compliment for what it was worth.

  Alphonse’s wife, Lorette, had just arrived and was in the kitchen, unpacking an enormous picnic basket containing the makings of lunch. The amount of food she was taking out augured well for the meal.

  Michel came in, and we got started on the cake batter. It was a relatively simple one, notable mainly for how much of it there was.

  Michel and I started cracking the eggs into an immense earthenware bowl. This took quite some time. Alphonse melted the bricks of butter in a pan and then set the pan in a cold-water bath to cool. Alphonse and Michel bickered ceaselessly—about just how cool the butter had to be before being added to the bowl, about how much sugar they had or hadn’t already used, about whether to pour in the rum before or after the hazelnuts, and, most histrionically, about how fast to add the flour. The flour-sifting, I surmised, was a long-standing source of friction between the stepbrothers. Michel, who was stirring the batter with a long wooden spoon in the same way one might tend to a bubbling cauldron, was urging Alphonse to dispense with the sifting altogether and just pour in the flour.