“Hurry up, bordel!” he snapped.
Alphonse ignored him and continued his sifting, the flour swirling into the thickening mixture in a cyclone pattern.
Bad enough to see two grown men argue over cake batter, but when it came time to prepare the cake mold—a conical length of blackened pear wood with an iron handle inserted in the blunt end—they literally came to blows, whacking each other’s hands away as they secured parchment paper around the mold with kitchen twine.
“Putain,” I heard Alphonse say, “you have to tie it like a roast, not a Christmas present!”
Now Michel started hauling in firewood. I have to say, it was some of the most expertly split wood I’d ever seen: dozens and dozens of near-identical pieces, each no wider than a baseball bat. Meanwhile, I helped Alphonse set up the spit assembly—two iron posts with cradles like upside-down coat hooks, for resting the cake mold in—over by the fireplace.
Lorette announced it was time to eat. The spread she had put out—in the same room where Mamie was sleeping—was a fine one indeed: sausage-and-puff-pastry canapés (which, I explained, to everyone’s amusement, were known in America as pigs in a blanket), slices of ham that Alphonse had cured himself, blinis topped with crème fraîche and smoked salmon, steamed potatoes, and rouleaux of beef tripe in tomato sauce.
The prospect of lunch seemed to cool the internecine flames. Michel and Alphonse went over to Mamie and gently woke her up. Alphonse pressed a button at the base of the recliner, and its back rose with an electric whir. Then he and Michel slid Mamie to the head of the table. Dwarfed by her enormous chair, she took on a strangely imperial air.
Alphonse served apéros: a finger of Long John whiskey for the men, a glass of white wine for Lorette, and, for Mamie, a healthy dose of Suze with crème de cassis, served in a cordial glass. Then some wine was opened, and we started in on lunch.
At the risk of overstating the matter, I would like to pause for a moment to marvel, once again, at the Gascon appetite. It is one thing to witness thick-necked rugby men devour great amounts of food in a short amount of time. It is quite another to see a ninety-four-year-old woman do so. The quick work Mamie made of her lunch—two helpings of everything, each portion as big as my own, though consumed in smaller pieces—constituted one of the most amazing food-vanishing acts I’d ever seen. This feat, though, was merely an example of a broader phenomenon, which is this: When it comes to eating, Gascon women are no less valiant than the men. In my experience, they do not ever order appetizers as a main course or consider a salad—even a salade Gersoise—a full dinner. They eat with the same delight and stealthy alacrity as their husbands, brothers, fathers, and sons.
We spent a good hour and a half at the table that afternoon, though Mamie had to have a catnap before dessert and coffee. During the meal, I learned that Alphonse and Lorette had run a funeral parlor near Paris for many years before coming back to their native Gascony to retire. This revelation was unexpected for two reasons. First, Alphonse and Lorette were the least undertaker-like people I’d ever met. Second, it is unusual to hear a Gascon mention his work. What one does for a living is, at best, a fifth- or sixth-rung conversation topic, something to fall back on after the subjects of food, wine, rugby, bullfighting, and weather have been exhausted, and usually in that order. I was flattered that Alphonse had decided to share.
ALPHONSE DESCRIBED THE MAKING OF gâteau à la broche as a three-person job: one to turn the spit, one to drizzle the batter, one to feed the fire. Michel, he said, was going to be on fire detail. Alphonse would drizzle. I’d be the spit-turner.
Foretelling the nature of the toil that lay ahead, Alphonse had stripped to his undershirt. I did the same. Michel was adding more wood to the fire, banking the freshly split pieces against the back of the hearth to create a wall of heat. Mamie was snoring away, having been returned to her usual spot. A nap sounded extremely appealing.
Alphonse told me to set the parchment-covered mold into its cradle to let it heat up. After a minute or two, greasy splotches spread across the paper. Alphonse explained that this was melted butterfat from gâteaux of yore, seeping out from deep within the wood’s grain. The mold, he said, was more than one hundred years old.
Michel set two chairs in front of the fireplace, one for me and one for Alphonse. The hearth was small, maybe two feet wide at its opening, but Michel had turned it into a furnace. Within seconds of sitting down, I felt as if my face and kneecaps were being scorched.
Lorette brought Alphonse and me each a bottle of water and urged me to keep drinking while we worked.
I asked Alphonse how long the process would take, but he didn’t seem to hear me. He was already in the zone, carefully placing a metal drip tray underneath the mold and then situating the bowl of batter between his feet. The batter was the color and consistency of puréed bananas.
Alphonse turned to me now. In his right hand, scepterlike, was a spoon affixed to a long wooden dowel. “Do an eighth of a turn at a time,” he said. “And very slowly. Once we start, we have to keep going. If we stop, the batter will burn or fall off the mold.”
And so our work began.
Alphonse dipped the spoon into the batter and started depositing a thick layer of it across the top of the mold. I gave the spit an eighth of a turn. Alphonse added more batter. By the time the spit had made a full rotation, the first layer had turned golden, a little like a waffle, and the points where the batter had started to drip off the mold had become firm, like stalactites. Alphonse referred to these drippy protrusions as pics.
“Beautiful pics,” he said, “are the sign of a real gâteau à la broche.”
We worked without a break, pausing only long enough for Michel to lay more wood on the fire. Slowly, as more layers of batter were applied, the cake got thicker. I finished my water in short order. Lorette brought me and Alphonse small bottles of beer. I don’t recall what kind it was, but it was the most refreshing beer I’ve ever had.
After a while, I asked Alphonse if we could switch roles. Turning the spit was getting boring, and Mamie’s snoring had me on the verge of dozing off. I’d been studying Alphonse’s technique and had determined that the proper application of the batter required jiggling the spoon almost imperceptibly while tilting it toward the vertical in the tiniest increments as it moved from left to right along the length of the mold.
Alphonse handed me the spoon. “Vas-y.”
I dipped the spoon in the batter and tipped it ever so gently over the top of the mold. The entire gooey mass fell off in an ugly glop. The batter was like liquid concrete.
Alphonse motioned for me to hand back the spoon. “It takes practice,” he said.
This cake was too far along to risk letting an amateur screw it up.
Alphonse grew reflective after a while. “In Mamie’s day,” he said, tipping the spoon over the cake for the umpteenth time, “the women would spend a whole Sunday afternoon working like this in front of the fire while the men played cards. I can still remember that.”
I suggested that the men had it pretty good.
“Not even grandmas have time to make gâteau à la broche anymore,” he said. Then he gave a mirthless laugh. “Just retirees.”
It was nearly five o’clock by the time the batter was gone. We’d been working in front of the fireplace for two and a half hours. I touched my eyebrows to make sure they were still there. The cake had grown to the size of a small Christmas tree. Alphonse wrapped his hands in dish towels and lifted the mold off its supports. He removed the handle from the base, and set the mold upright in the middle of the dining table. It was a thing to see: a three-foot-tall vertical cake, bristling with pics that had turned deep golden at the tip.
Alphonse and I stood there for a few moments, admiring our creation, then he yelled into the kitchen for Lorette to bring out the egg whites, which she’d whipped until they were very fluffy.
While Michel held up a bed sheet to protect Mamie, who hadn’t stirred since lunchtime, Alphonse an
d I whipped handfuls of the egg whites at the cake. They landed with a splat and, as the cake was still hot, cooked on contact, creating lacy patterns that looked like hoarfrost, enhancing the Christmas-tree effect.
Getting the gâteau home was a delicate operation. The cake couldn’t be covered or wrapped, as the airy pics broke off very easily. We carried the confection, naked to the elements, to Alphonse’s car, and I held it carefully between my knees in the passenger seat, the base of the mold planted on the floor, the tip gripped in my hands. It was the most nervous car ride I’d had since driving Charlotte home from the hospital after she was born.
A proper gâteau à la broche has to set for at least a couple of days before being removed from the mold. So Alphonse and I decided to unveil our dessert two days later, at the Esbouhats’ Friday night dinner. At the end of the meal, I helped him lift the cake gently from the mold and peel the parchment paper from the cavity. We sliced the cake crosswise into rings, which we doled out on paper plates. Every cross-section of cake revealed a fine pattern of concentric inner rings, each one representing a single full turn of the spit. The pieces looked a little like a finely marbled pound cake.
How did it taste? Improvidently rich, which is an attribute one might reasonably expect in a dessert made with thirty-six eggs and three pounds of butter. But the cake had a surprisingly light, melt-away quality, too, and it was only mildly sweet. In fact, it could have used a dusting of confectioners’ sugar or a drizzle of honey. But I didn’t mention it.
The gâteau was a crowd-pleaser. Alphonse and I got quite a few compliments. At one point Basso, crumbs in his mustache, shouted to me across the table, “Eh oh! You and your boyfriend should open a bakery!”
15
A Day in the Vines
Like a lot of outsiders stunned by the richness of the food in Southwest France, I initially dismissed as apocryphal the claim that Gascons live considerably longer than their countrymen. But when I did the research, the numbers held up. According to the Institut National de la Statistique et des Études Économiques—a.k.a. Insée, France’s all-seeing census bureau—the residents of Midi-Pyrénées, which encompasses most of Gascony, enjoy the longest lifespan of all of France’s regional populations, living a full ten years more, on average, than the natives of France’s choucroute-loving Northeast. If you drill down on the numbers a little further, the Gers in particular starts to look like an anomaly within that happy anomaly. According to Roger Corder, the British researcher and red wine enthusiast, when you control for regional migration men in the Gers have the highest relative longevity of any département in France.
It’s also worth noting that the Southwest is where the French scientist Serge Renaud decided to focus his field work for his 1992 study on French cardiovascular health. Renaud had become globally famous the year before, after appearing in the TV series 60 Minutes to discuss his earlier research on what had come to be called the French Paradox. (The segment, which included a sociable interview by Morley Safer over what by all appearances was a magnificent French lunch, became a minor television event that sent thousands of Americans rushing out to buy cases of red wine and wheels of Brie.) What Renaud discovered in his follow-up study was, effectively, that the Southwest is the statistical epicenter of the French Paradox, with the lowest incidence of heart attacks in the country, and one of the lowest in the Western world—on the whole, residents of Midi-Pyrénées had four times fewer heart attacks than their counterparts in the United States and Britain, despite a diet rich in fats. Suddenly a lot of attention was being paid to the life habits of Gascons, particularly what they ate and drank. Was it the polyphenols in tannat wine grapes? Was it the lipid profile of duck fat, which is high in good HDL cholesterol? Was it the iron content of foie gras? The winegrowers favored one argument, the duck farmers another. Meanwhile, the Gascons kept on eating and drinking as they always had.
The hype about longevity and health in the Southwest has died down since then, though local newspapers still run an obligatory article on the subject when the Insée numbers come out every few years, confirming anew the Midi-Pyrénées’ hold on the longevity title.
I hadn’t come to Gascony to conduct a study, but I did have quite a bit of time to collect anecdotal evidence, and the more I got to know the Gascons, the more I came to believe that, as is the case with so many things in life, their secret lies not in any single choice or habit but in a whole bunch of converging factors. Certainly, inhabiting a rural place, with much fresh air and little urban stress, has something to do with Gascons’ well-being. As does, without a doubt, having lots of family and friends close by. And diet can’t be discounted—though, to my mind, what Gascons eat and drink counts for less than how they eat and drink. Gascons aren’t excessive imbibers, village fêtes notwithstanding, and they seldom drink or snack between meals. When they do sit down for lunch or supper, they tend to eat what they like, and as much as they like, and they don’t hurry things.
And yet, over time, I couldn’t help but think there was something intrinsically different about the Gascons, something in their physical and emotional makeup that set them apart from their compatriots. I could see it in their even-tempered demeanor, in their generosity, in their work ethic, in their attitude toward life—especially the equable way they dealt with its vexations and hardships, whether a broken sewer pump or the death of a spouse. As different as they were from one another, the Gascons I knew—Henri, Nadine, Patrick, Dubosc, Alphonse, and the rest—all seemed equally comfortable in their skin.
ERIC FITAN, A VIGNERON INTRODUCED to me by André Dubosc, did not at first glance appear to possess a Gascon’s robust constitution. He was quiet and self-effacing, verging on obsequious. At Dubosc’s suggestion, Eric had invited me to take part in the wine harvest, a rite of passage I’d somehow missed out on in my younger expat days. Dubosc had described Eric in heroic terms. “He is one of our best, a true passioné,” he told me. “The Gers needs more men like him.”
When I arrived at Eric’s vineyard, a few pickers, stirring amid the greenery, were already at work. I approached one of them, a heavyset Gascon in a stained T-shirt, and asked where I could find Eric Fitan. He pointed down a vine row to a tall, ungainly figure dumping a bucket of grapes into a steel hopper attached to a tractor.
Dubosc had mentioned that Eric had been a doctoral student in engineering at a prestigious university in Toulouse but had returned to the Gers to take over his family’s farm and vineyard. And indeed the young winegrower, who wore wire-rim glasses and had schoolboy bangs, looked the part of a nerd more than that of a paysan. When I introduced myself, he shook my hand in a gentle and seemingly un-Gascon way.
Handing me a pair of pruning shears and a bucket, Eric informed me, with a slightly pained expression, that by law he wasn’t allowed to pay me for my work but that I was cordially invited to have lunch with him and his parents at the family homestead. I considered this more than fair remuneration.
Eric led me into the vines and showed me how to snip the grape clusters at the base of the stem, where it joined the vine branch, explaining that I had to take care not to damage the fruit.
“Otherwise it will begin macerating too soon,” he said, and then laughed nervously. “And we don’t want that.”
Picking grapes, though it has inspired much romantic imagery in movies and wine-marketing campaigns, is devilishly hard work. To reach the fruit, one has the choice of either squatting or bending over. For a while I squatted, but my knees did not take well to that at all. So I switched to bending, which, after a vine row’s worth of toil, caused my lower back to twitch painfully. I observed the other pickers, most of whom, to my surprise, were a good deal older and, I dare say, less fit-looking than me. Some were squatting, others were bending. None of them looked remotely uncomfortable.
On the contrary, they were quite spry. Every minute or so, one of them would shout seau!—which means “bucket”—and Eric would jog over to replace the full receptacle with an empty one. The fre
quency with which that word was being shouted was astonishing. Each of the other pickers was filling three or four buckets for every one of mine. What’s more, in true Gascon fashion, they talked nonstop while they worked, tossing free-form aperçus across the vines in buoyant patois.
“Word is, the Chinese are making wine in Mongolia . . .”
“They say the wood pigeons are passing late this year . . .”
“Our grandkids can kiss social security good-bye . . .”
“Used to see more kinds of insects in the vines . . .”
“Global warming . . .”
“Yep.”
Before long, my neck and forehead were sticky with sweat, and my hands were black with dried grape juice—snipping the fruit without breaking the skins was harder than it looked, as the grapes were ripe to bursting.
“Pas très beau ça,” remarked one of the pickers on seeing the mushy mess in my bucket. Not a pretty sight.
At one point late in the morning, Eric came rushing over to me. “Ah non!” he said as I was about to snip off a cluster of grapes. “Not those, not those!”
He plucked a leaf from the vine in front of me and tried to show me how it was subtly different from the five-lobed leaves of the vine next to it, but I was having trouble seeing the distinction.
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