Duck Season

by David McAninch

  “You have to watch out for ones like this,” Eric said. “It’s not tannat.”

  “What is it?”

  “Who knows. This plot was planted eighty-five years ago.”

  Eric explained that old indigenous grape varietals were still insinuated amid the tannat vines, a harkening back to the bad old days when paysans got paid by the hectoliter, no matter what went into the press.

  “Back then,” Eric said, “they just wanted to faire pisser les vignes.”

  That literally meant “make the vines piss,” which called to mind the expression Dubosc had used for bad wine: vin à faire pisser.

  None of it sounded very thirst-quenching.

  At twelve o’clock sharp, we broke for lunch. While the other workers unpacked picnics, Eric and I drove the mile or so to his parents’ house on his tractor, with me hanging off the side, feet planted on the running board.

  A PROPER VIGNERON LUNCH IS a wonderful thing, especially during the vendanges, and especially in Gascony. The homemade confit comes out, the vin maison is opened, and the feasting is set to. The Fitan family’s meal was true to this tradition, and extra-special in my opinion because the confit in question wasn’t duck but goose: two enormous magrets—each nearly twice the size of a duck breast—sliced into thick slabs that looked like corned beef but tasted much better. At that moment it struck me as sad that the raising of geese, once the preeminent waterfowl in southwestern France, has been relegated to something of a niche pursuit, the realm of nostalgists and stubborn holdouts, since geese are harder to breed and require much more time and finesse to fatten than the modern moulard crossbreed.

  In Gascony, at any given domestic meal, it is common to be in the presence of several generations of family, including, not infrequently, great-grandparents. The Fitans’ particular contribution to the Gers’s longevity ranking was Eric’s papi, a diminutive nonagenarian in bedroom slippers and a buttoned-to-the-top plaid shirt.

  When Eric mentioned that I was American, his grandfather laid a hand on my forearm and squeezed.

  “We have much to thank you for,” he said, looking at me with an earnestness that set me back on my heels.

  “Papi was in the Résistance,” Eric said.

  “You Americans saved our hides,” said Papi. “Was your grandfather in the war?”

  I said he wasn’t.

  Papi gave a blasé chin-thrust and reached for his glass.

  Eric’s father, a lean, cowboy-like fellow in jeans and work boots who looked not all that much older than Eric, had poured a ceremonial round of juice from the previous day’s harvest. After a morning in the sun-broiled vines, it tasted like the most sublime nectar.

  Now a tureen of garbure was being passed around. This was followed by a piperade, then a sculptural salad worthy of a ’50s-era Better Homes cookbook, consisting of an elongated mound of tuna covered in homemade mayonnaise and garnished around the edges with crumbled hard-boiled eggs. It looked questionable but tasted very good. And, finally, the goose confit.

  I ate and drank, then ate and drank some more, pausing occasionally to observe the customary, quietly awesome display of Gascon voracity, Eric’s granddad showing himself to be the most dedicated gourmand of the family.

  Lunch concluded with rice pudding and glasses of cold Pacherenc, and straightaway I found myself in the familiar post–Gascon-lunch dilemma of wanting very badly to go to sleep just as everyone else was preparing to get back to work. I have yet to figure out what metabolic quirk allows Gascons to avoid this problem.

  Making my pace look even more glacial than before, Eric and his field hands fell to their afternoon tasks with renewed verve, mowing through the vine rows even faster than they had in the morning, the effervescence of their banter undiminished.

  Eric had mentioned that six o’clock was quitting time, and as the hour approached, the pickers’ pace—though I didn’t think this was possible—accelerated further. It seemed we were getting close to finishing the entire vineyard parcel, and esprit de corps dictated that we buckle down.

  And so it was that we finished picking the last row of vines at the stroke of six. Afterward, the whole crew repaired to Eric’s parents’ house for a round of floc. I was crushingly tired. If any of the others were too, none showed it. Everyone was talking with great enthusiasm about what they were going to have for dinner.

  Before I went home, Eric showed me around the half-finished house he was building for his family just a few hundred yards from the one he grew up in. We walked through empty rooms coated in plaster dust and smelling of caulk.

  Eric showed me the kitchen cupboards he’d installed the night before, and then pointed to some Sheetrock he was going to hang tonight.

  I asked if he’d be back in the vines tomorrow.

  “As soon as it’s light.”

  There were two more plots to be picked, he said, and the harvest had to be completed by week’s end, as rain was forecast for the weekend.

  I asked, not the least bit sarcastically, when he found time to sleep.

  Eric smiled, looking unsure of what to say, as if I’d posed a trick question.

  As we walked back to my car, a couple of Eric’s dogs at our heels, Eric casually related to me how, in addition to working full-time as a vigneron, he raised corn and livestock, served as the president of a local growers’ association, and led a bandas orchestra called Les Dandys d’Armagnac.

  Eric shook my hand and promised to send me a bottle of the year’s milléssime as soon as it was ready. (I have since had a chance to taste the wine made from the grapes we harvested on the Fitan property, and though there is a petty side of me that would rather not say so, given everything else Eric has clearly got going for him, it was excellent.)

  That night, after putting Charlotte to bed, I recounted my experience to Michele, emphasizing, with only slight exaggeration, that Eric Fitan probably got more done in a day than I did in a week. I also confessed to her that Gascons, as much as I loved them, sometimes had a way of making me feel like a wimp and, on occasion, a less than fully actualized paterfamilias.

  Michele, who didn’t typically indulge self-pity, generously offered that, grape-picking aside, she thought I’d been doing a pretty good impression of a Gascon overall.

  16

  Slow and Low

  At some point over the past century, Americans decided that, when it came to cooking meats, they were in a hurry. The result is that today, stewing, simmering, and braising have taken a backseat to searing, roasting, and grilling. Beef stew, pot roast, and other venerable dishes of the slow-cooked variety have come to be regarded as old-timey comfort foods, edged out by the more-fashionable steak, tenderloin, and fillet. This is probably because Americans in the postwar era suddenly had quite a bit more money and quite a bit less time than their forebears and thus developed a taste for costlier, more tender cuts of meat, the kind that taste good after just a brief encounter with a hot oven, grill top, or skillet.

  Gascons have never fully made that shift. Though they’ll toss meat on the grill in the summertime, and roast a chicken at almost any time of year, in a Gascon kitchen no implement is more cherished than the cast-iron Dutch oven, known in France as a cocotte—that magical, heat-trapping vessel in which even the most sinewy cuts can be gentled into tender submission over time, their well-worked muscle fibers softening, the collagen in their connective tissue breaking down to thicken the cooking liquid, which, in Gascony, is usually wine.

  Gascons are some of the world’s most committed practitioners of slow-and-low cooking, with an emphasis on slow. I’ve come across recipes that call for two-, three-, even four-day regimens of simmering, skimming, cooling, and reheating. Gascons favor different kinds of braises for different kinds of foods. For game birds, there’s the salmis, which calls for oven-browning the birds and then napping them in a wickedly dark red-wine sauce fortified with the animal’s giblets. For game of the mammalian variety—namely hare and wild boar—there is the civet, a stew traditio
nally thickened with the animal’s blood. For beef (and more specifically, during the season of le corrida, bull meat) there is the daube, which in my book is the mother of all stews: a red-wine braise, popular across much of France’s southern tier, that’s rich enough to conquer the most wretchedly raw winter nights.

  Most people tend to associate hearty braises with a particular kind of weather, but it must be noted that in Gascony the weather is, to use a phrase favored by a friend of mine in Auch, pas certain. By which he means, you can’t count on it. In general it is cool and wet in spring, except when it’s not. Summers are hot and dry—usually—with the rains typically ending no later than July 1, though sometimes it can be as late as August 1 or, as was the case during our stay, September 1. Fall will often start off with several weeks of California-like sunshine—a localized Indian summer known in some years as l’été Gascon—but by November, or sometimes as early as October, the warm weather gives way to low skies and daylong drizzles. December is extremely cloudy and dark, though when we were there, I recall walking in shirtsleeves under a sparkling sky on the solstice. January and February are, as a rule, the rainiest months; this is when many rivers in the Gers, including the Arros, routinely overflow their banks. (Henri showed me a photo, taken the previous year, of our beloved moulin inundated up to the windowsills.) Very rarely, it snows.

  This is all to say, Gascons make stews and braises in virtually any kind of weather, even during the sultry days of summer, when daube de taureau is a menu-du-jour staple. For my part, I could not bring myself to inaugurate our Le Creuset cocotte until it got properly cold out—which it ultimately did, and quite suddenly, too, at which point our friend Fred’s dark prophecy about how chilly we’d be in the moulin quickly proved true.

  During our first cold week—which began with a delivery of fresh firewood from Henri, who’d arrived in our driveway in the company of a farmer towing a trailer-load of knotty logs behind a De Gaulle–era tractor—I decided to embark on the making of wine-braised duck legs. I’d come across a recipe that suggested an interesting twist to the browning of the meat, which is the first step in almost any braise. For this version, the browning process began with a flourish: I was to flambé the duck legs in Armagnac.

  Somehow, in all my years of cooking, I had never flambéed anything before. With the first batch of duck legs, I was too timid with the brandy, calling forth only the most ephemeral flicker of orange along the edge of the pan. With the second batch, though, I achieved a spectacular column of flames. Charlotte, viewing the spectacle from her usual perch behind the staircase railing, clapped.

  As with many Gascon soups and stews, the flavor base for this dish was a fine hash of aromatics and fatty pork—in this case shallots, garlic, and fatback. To make the hachis I again conscripted our Moulinex, which, despite its being exceedingly difficult to clean, had earned my respect; the appliance was small, but its tiny and stubbornly stuck blade delivered incredibly uniform results. Like the duck legs themselves, the hachis had to be browned in a pan—those caramelized flavors created by direct-heat cooking being essential to the character of the braise. Then I added a little flour and began to pour in the red wine ever so slowly, stirring all the while. At length the sauce became smooth, shiny, and as thick as porridge. I put the browned duck legs into the cocotte along with a bundle of herbs and some salt and pepper, and poured the sauce over the top. Then I set the covered cocotte over low heat to cook for an hour, just until the sauce started to percolate. Finally, I took the cocotte off the heat, let it cool down, and slid it into the fridge.

  Two more days of mothering lay ahead.

  The benefits of a multiday braise are simple enough: The overnight chilling allows the fat to rise and congeal so that it can be popped off the surface of the cooking liquid effortlessly, like a layer of candle wax, making for a more refined sauce, while the gentle and repeated reheating of the tightly covered cocotte at a relatively low temperature causes the meat’s muscle fibers to relax and soften to an exceptional sumptuousness—that is, provided the simmer is never allowed to accelerate to a boil, at which point those muscle fibers may shrink and tighten like banjo strings, making for much desultory chewing at the dinner table. Meanwhile, during all that simmering, the moisture and mild acidity from the cooking liquid—in this case the wine—causes the collagen in the meat to turn into gelatin, which is what thickens the braise and gives the sauce its luscious, enrobing qualities.

  To rush any part of this process—by heating or chilling too quickly, by applying too much heat, by shortening the cooking time—is to risk ending up with a pot full of stringy meat and hot wine.

  So, bear all that in mind when I say this about my wine-braised duck legs: I tried. I really did. Overcoming my hard-wired predilection for rushing things, for blasting the heat to finish the job in time for dinner, for boiling when simmering would do, I followed the slow-and-low precepts as faithfully as I could for two days. But on the third day, with the dinner hour upon us, I found myself caught short—I’d forgotten to take the duck out of the fridge earlier in the afternoon to let it warm up gently before reheating, and so I cheated on the final step, placing the still-cold duck into the oven and bumping up the heat to compensate, not wanting to delay the meal.

  We had Patrick and Arnaud over that night. Like Henri and Monique, they heaped praise upon my creation. But though the braise was full of flavor, I couldn’t help but think the whole dish felt more like duck pieces with a tasty sauce around them rather than a truly harmonious union. Also, the duck was still a little tough. It should have fallen apart at the sight of a knife, but instead I had to saw at it a bit. This didn’t seem possible after three days of cooking, but such is the nature of muscular moulard duck legs.

  The next morning I put the leftovers into a low oven and warmed them for an hour and a half so that we could have them for lunch. And wouldn’t you know it: On the fourth day, the duck was perfect.

  MICHELE AND I DECIDED TO throw a party for Charlotte’s seventh birthday. To date, our entertaining at the moulin had consisted of having couples over for quiet meals or drinks. It was time to break out the champagne flutes and invite a crowd—a small one, at least.

  For dinner, it was decided: I would make a beef daube. In light of the shortcomings of my earlier braise, I considered my methodology carefully, studying at great length the recipes for daube de boeuf à la Gasconne and daube de boeuf à la Béarnaise—both versions of roughly the same dish—that I had on hand.

  The longest one, no surprise, appeared in Wolfert’s book. She attributed her daube recipe to none other than Plaisance’s own Maurice Coscuella, who in his early days had apparently built much of Le Ripa Alta’s reputation on the strength of this dish. The recipe was baroque in its complexity. It called for three days of marinating and four kinds of beef—short rib, bottom round, chuck, and a piece of shin with its marrow—plus a pig’s foot, which had to be cooked on its own, deboned, and diced. It also suggested lining the cast-iron cocotte with pork rind; separating out the marinating liquid and reducing it; sprinkling the meat and vegetables with Armagnac halfway through cooking; sealing the lid of the cocotte with a paste of flour, water, and oil; puréeing a third of the cooked vegetables and a third of the cooked meat with the beef marrow; and straining the marrow mixture over the remaining, unpuréed meat and vegetables. This was an ostentatiously chef-y daube.

  By contrast, “La Daube d’Odette”—one of the recipes that Alain Lagors had collected from Gascon housewives—instructed the cook to do nothing more than brown chunks of brisket and some carrots in duck fat and simmer it all in red wine for an afternoon, with no marinating or reducing or puréeing. Falling somewhere in between those two was Simin Palay, who suggested, curiously, adding lemon juice and veal cheeks, and also lining the pot with greased butcher paper and nestling the vessel in a bed of hot coals. Always with the hot coals, this guy.

  To muddle things further, I happened to run into Coscuella in town later that day. I made a qu
ip about curling up next to the fire to read his epic daube recipe. The joke fell flat.

  “You’re going to make a daube?” he asked.

  I told him I was.

  The chef leaned toward me in that I’m-about-to-lay-some-wisdom-on-you Gascon way. “There’s nothing to it,” he said. “You cut up some carrots and leeks”—he made chopping motions with a stubby hand—“and throw them in the cocotte with the chunks of beef. Then you cover it all with red wine and cook it over low heat for a few hours.”

  “That’s it?”

  “You can throw in a veal knuckle if you want.”

  I asked him about the puréeing and the reducing and the pig’s foot.

  “No need for it.”

  Somehow, with the passage of years, Coscuella’s recipe had shrunk from three pages to three sentences.

  After thinking it over for a while, I decided to follow a middle road. I took the simplest recipe—La Daube d’Odette—and then appended to it those ingredients and techniques that I deemed worthy of cherry-picking from the others. Did I really need four kinds of beef? Having admired the gorgeous, fat-streaked slabs of poitrine de boeuf behind the glass case at Boucherie Cugini, I figured that in my case brisket alone would probably do just fine. And was it really necessary to marinate the meat and vegetables for three whole days? I decided that with good-quality brisket twenty-four hours would suffice. On the other hand, did I really want to skip browning the meat, as Coscuella had so breezily suggested? That seemed like one shortcut too many. Finally, I figured that if I cooked the wine-marinated meat a day ahead, gave it an overnight rest in the fridge, skimmed the fat, and reacquainted it with heat in the slowest and gentlest possible manner over the course of a second afternoon, I would get more than satisfactory results.

  And so I arrived at a happy medium. Nadine would have been proud: I hadn’t dispensed with cookbooks altogether, but for all intents and purposes I was cooking—to borrow a favorite expression of hers—au bout du nez: “From the tip of the nose,” which is to say (to give a more idiomatic translation) “from the gut.”