Two days before the party I drove to Boucherie Cugini to buy the meat. The same young guy who had served me before took my order and cleavered a fine piece of brisket into handsome, uniform chunks.
I took the meat home, seasoned it, and put it into the cocotte. Then I chopped some leeks and garlic and threw those in, along with a few sprigs of thyme and parsley and a bay leaf.
Charlotte got home from school in time for the fun part. I opened a bottle of Madiran and told her to pour it in.
“The whole bottle?” she asked.
“The whole bottle.”
“Don’t you want to drink any?”
I took a ceremonial sip and handed the bottle back to her. She emptied it into the cocotte.
Charlotte stared for a moment at the hunks of meat swimming in wine. “Do all kids here have this for their birthday dinner?”
I told her no, but that she was probably not the first.
I BELIEVE THAT LIFE OFFERS a person only so many chances to whisk a hot piece of enameled cast iron to the table and remove the lid with a flourish. So when it came time to serve dinner on the night of the party, that’s what I did. Michele rolled her eyes, but in my defense, the beef daube was good. I’d even say it was great. The meat was tender but not mushy, bathed in a glistening sauce that had darkened to a color somewhere between burgundy and obsidian. I was happy with my middle road.
We were about a dozen at the table: Patrick and Arnaud; Tim, Chloé, and their daughter, Charlie; Fred and his wife, Lut; and our friends Nico and Diane, who lived up the road in Pouydraguin and had brought their eight-year-old son, Adam; plus me, Michele, and the birthday girl.
The daube did not outlast the first bottle of wine. Fortunately I had put out lots of steamed potatoes, a huge salad, and plenty of bread—a prime pleasure of any braise being the sopping of the sauce. When all the beef was gone and everyone had mopped their own plates clean, hands clutching bread began to reach for the cocotte in order to soak up whatever sauce remained inside it. This left a dozen drip trails between pot and plate. Henri, that paragon of dinner-party decorum, would have cringed.
I’d purchased a croustade from the lady in Goux. In short order, the only evidence of its existence was an empty pie plate surrounded by a blast zone of pastry shards. For the kids, Michele had made, of all things, Rice Krispies Treats, which is what Charlotte had requested as her birthday dessert, apparently in a moment of homesickness. We’d been able to locate the necessary ingredients at a nearby supermarket. So, I screwed seven candles into the confection, and we sang “Happy Birthday” in French. Charlotte seemed satisfied.
I’ve always thought that a reliable measure of a dinner party’s success is how long people stay on, drinking and talking, after the last plate has been cleared away. If people linger, it’s a sign that the meal and the company made them happy and that they don’t want the fun to end. Of course, old-school Gascons like Henri hedge their bets by keeping guests at the table so long that they simply don’t have the strength to do anything but go home after the last mignardise has been served. My daube dinner, by contrast, had been dispatched rather quickly, so I was happy when, after I’d brought out the Armagnac and Michele had turned up the music, everyone hung around in droves.
Before long, a half-dozen conversations were going on at once around the room. It was a scene reminiscent of Patrick’s soirée many months before, except now none of these people were strangers. I will say with a certain pride that while it is always gratifying to throw a winning dinner party, to do so in a far-flung place where you have moved with your family at considerable effort and expense, and with more than a little uncertainty as to how the whole thing is going to turn out, feels especially good.
17
To Bag a Bird
Omnivores that they are, Gascons at one time hunted virtually every kind of winged vertebrate that happened into their general vicinity: wood grouse, hazel grouse, woodcock, partridge, thrush, quail, pheasant, you name it. Most local game-bird populations have dwindled over the years, but one kind—the wood pigeon, a.k.a la palombe—still pays an annual visit to the Southwest of France in numbers sufficient to deprive many Gascon families of their adult males during the three-week hunting season.
There are two favored methods for killing the European migratory Columba palombus, a bird closely related to and, by my reckoning, almost indistinguishable from the feral rock dove, which is the kind of pigeon one sees in great profusion in New York City, pecking at trashed Chinese food and cigarette butts. One way is to hunker down on a low mountain ridge and try to shoot the birds as they fly overhead. This method is all about location, location, location, as there are only a few mountain passes the wood pigeons will use to cross the Pyrenees on their way from their Nordic nesting territories to their wintering grounds on the Iberian peninsula. The second method calls for building a camouflaged blind—known as a palombière—in the woods and connecting that blind to a Rube Goldberg system of wires, pulleys, and metal platforms extending hundreds of yards into the trees. Tethered to the metal platforms are domesticated lure pigeons, called appeaux. By tugging on wires connected to those platforms, hunters can induce the appeaux to flap their wings enticingly, so that their naturally sociable brethren might be attracted to earth, upon which the prey is either netted or shot. Hunters using nets tend to build their blinds on the forest floor. Hunters using guns tend to build their blinds in trees. To stumble on either kind of encampment while hiking through the woods can be unsettling, as if one has stepped into an elaborate snare set for a giant.
My personal interest in the hunt, truth be told, did not extend beyond wanting to learn how to make a wood pigeon salmis. I’d found a doable-looking recipe in Simin Palay’s book, and figured that it wouldn’t be hard to find a hunter willing to sell me a couple of palombes.
The Esbouhats had more ambitious plans for me.
A day after I’d casually mentioned my interest in wood pigeons to Basso, he phoned to inform me that he would be taking me hunting the following day. He’d gotten the okay from Francis, his preferred roastee at the Friday-night dinners and, as it happened, the Esbouhats’ preeminent pigeon hunter. Basso emphasized that Francis was a fanatique who had built his elaborate hunting blind by hand and set aside all his paid vacation days each year for the hunt.
I couldn’t resist asking what Francis’s wife got up to during all that time. Basso, who seemed to know no greater pleasure than getting on Francis’s nerves, had a good laugh at this.
We’d be accompanied on the hunt by Henri Michel, the retired train conductor, and by Francis’s son, Maxime. Basso asked me if I knew how to handle a firearm. I told him that my dad had taken me pheasant hunting a few times when I was in high school, but that I would prefer to come along strictly as an observer.
“Comme tu veux,” said Basso. “Get your beauty sleep. I’ll pick you up at five thirty.”
FRANCIS’S PALOMBIÈRE WAS OF THE tree house variety. It could more aptly be described as a man-cave in the sky—crude but surprisingly accommodating for a slapdash assemblage of cast-off lumber, chipboard, corrugated plastic, and cedar boughs nestled in the crown of a forty-foot oak tree. Accessed via a rickety ladder, it was furnished with a two-ring gas burner, some pots and pans, a ten-liter water jug, shelves crowded with foodstuffs and coffee tins, a plywood folding table, a wooden gun rack, and a few cheap upholstered barstools hemorrhaging stuffing. Extending from one wall, beneath a well-camouflaged roof hatch, was a shoulder-high platform with a swivel stool bolted to it. This was where the spotter sat, surveying the skies for passing prey. The palombière had flip-up windows on all sides that offered a spectacular view—coming into relief now as the first rays of sunlight prepared to laser over the horizon—of the forest canopy and the ridgelines of the Madiranais beyond.
At least I thought we were in the Madiranais. I didn’t fully have my bearings. Basso and I had arrived at the wooded compound in total darkness, having followed unfamiliar back roads out of Plaisanc
e and then a rutted dirt track that cut across a field and plunged into the trees. The track ended at a makeshift plywood carport covered in a green tarp and tree branches. Francis’s son, Maxime, a bearded guy in camo pants with a shotgun slung over his shoulder, emerged into the beam of Basso’s headlights, pulled back the tarp, and motioned for us to advance. The whole thing had a clandestine feel, as if we were being ushered into a forest hideout of the Maquis.
Basso, who was on cooking detail, had brought a cooler of food and wine, and also an oven. It was a grease-stained gas range that he’d gotten for free from an old lady he did odd jobs for. With lots of grunting and straining, and a crushing fear that I was going to reinjure the inguinal hernia I’d had repaired some years earlier, I helped Basso carry the appliance from his car, down a narrow footpath, and into a small shed near the foot of the big oak tree. All of this was done in the dark, save for the headlamps strapped to our skulls. As Basso hooked the range up to a propane tank, he echoed the claim he’d made the first time I met him: “We’re going to eat like kings!”
Meantime, Francis, Henri Michel, and Maxime had set the appeaux, affixing them to metal perches and then, using a pulley system, raising the perches into the treetops surrounding the blind. As the sky got lighter, I could just make out the vast network of wires and rigging all around us. There were about twenty lure pigeons in all. Francis and Maxime had force-fed each of them a slurry of grain and water from a plastic syringe—so that they wouldn’t need to be fed again all day—and fitted each with a hood that had realistic-looking eyes painted on it and resembled in miniature an old-time leather football helmet. Eight lure pigeons in a wire cage were brought directly into the blind and placed, untethered and unhooded, onto two wood poles that jutted into the void. These birds were the volants, domesticated pigeons that had been trained to fly around freely on command, as an added temptation to their migratory friends.
Now Basso, after hauling a few breakfast provisions up the ladder, picked up a broomstick with a shredded plastic shopping bag tied to its business end. He shook it, making a shushing, pompon noise. “If the spotter says volants!, then I shake this at the birds and they fly off.”
He picked up a rusty soup can filled with nails. “And this is how you call them back.” He rattled the can loudly. “That can be your job!”
Henri Michel brewed some coffee in a metal cafetière and distributed it in plastic cups. I handed a cup to Maxime, who was perched on the spotter’s stool, testing the appeaux. This entailed pulling on a series of rope-handled wires dangling over the edge of the roof hatch. I asked Francis, who was placing shotgun shells into slots sewn into his expensive-looking hunting jacket, if I could climb up to see how the appeaux worked.
I hoisted myself onto the spotter’s platform. Maxime pointed to the top branches of a scraggly ash tree thirty yards away. “You see it?” It took me a few seconds, but then I did: a lure pigeon, half hidden by foliage, perched on one of the raised platforms.
Maxime tapped one of the ropes and told me to pull it. I did, and the distant platform jerked, causing the pigeon to flap its wings rapidly before regaining its balance.
Maxime pointed to another pigeon a little farther away and then told me to flip what looked like a light switch. When I did, the bird and its platform slid along a wire from one treetop to another, the bird’s wings flapping all the while. Maxime said each appeau mimicked a different kind of pigeon behavior: hunting for acorns, preening for a mate, and so on.
It was the most fiendishly ingenious setup for killing your own dinner I’d ever seen.
At around seven thirty, as the sun popped up over the hills, we had breakfast—boudin, saucisson, ham, and red wine. The other men attacked the charcuterie with large Opinel switchblades. I pulled out my Swiss Army knife.
After breakfast, the morning proceeded something like this: Basso would crack jokes while Henri Michel sat and rolled cigarettes and Maxime and Francis scanned the sky from the spotter’s perch. Suddenly, Francis would hiss at Basso to shut up, Henri Michel would yank the blind’s window flaps shut, and guns would be taken in hand. Maxime would whisper a running commentary: “A good paquet of them coming from the east, just over the ridgeline.”
“I see ’em! I see ’em!” Henri Michel would say, peering through peepholes cut into the window flaps.
“Volants!” Francis would command.
Basso would shake the pompon thing, and the eight birds would take to the air.
Then one of two things would happen: Either our prey would change course and continue their Spain-ward journey unmolested, in which case the smoking and joke-cracking would resume, or else a few palombes would come into range and Maxime or Francis would start working the appeaux, hands flying like a busy switchboard operator’s, causing the others to dart around the blind frantically, peering through the peepholes to see where the birds were going to land. Then two of the men would poke their gun barrels through the holes, a third would count to three, and both guns would discharge deafeningly at once, filling the blind with the smell of cordite. After that, Henri Michel would climb down and retrieve the dead game from the forest floor.
Since only two men could fire at a time—one person being needed as a spotter, another having to do the count, and me, the unarmed can-rattler, not really figuring into the equation at all—the guys took turns. Henri Michel and Maxime were the best shots, bagging two birds each by late morning. Francis was having poorer luck; he missed twice.
As for Basso, the morning didn’t go well. On his second turn, he shot one of the appeaux.
“Oh putain,” he said, setting his gun down. “Putain, putain, putain.”
Francis shook his head and bit his lip. Henri Michel turned his attention to his rolling papers. Maxime took off his beret and ran a hand through his hair. Basso stood there for a few long beats, hands on his hips, gazing out at the dead pigeon hanging from its tether in the distance. Personally, I was surprised this kind of thing didn’t happen all the time; to me, a wild pigeon perched on a faraway tree branch looked not the least bit different from an appeau.
Basso wasn’t one to dwell on unpleasant matters. A minute later, he was his old self again.
“No harm done, Francis,” he said. “I’ll spring for a new one. And I promise to have nightmares about dead pigeons for a week!” Then he climbed down the ladder and made his way to the shed to start getting lunch ready.
After Basso was out of earshot, Francis started complaining to Henri Michel. “He’s a damn clown, that one. He’s never serious.”
Henri Michel just shrugged.
Francis sulked for a while, hands thrust into his jacket, but after a short time the friendly fire incident seemed to blow over. Francis bagged a pigeon on his next turn, and by lunchtime we had a handsome bouquet of eight dead birds, including the martyred appeau. Henri Michel bundled them together with twine and hung them from a nail—a rustic nature morte to serve as a backdrop for our midday meal.
At around one o’clock, Basso shouted from down below, “Send down the rope!”
Henri Michel got up from his stool and rubbed his hands together. “Lunchtime!”
He picked up a coil of green nylon rope and tossed an end out the door of the blind. I peered down. Basso was standing at the bottom of the ladder, an enormous black cast-iron cocotte at his feet. He took off his belt, looped the ends of it around the handles of the pot, and tightened the belt over the pot’s lid. Then he tied the rope to the belt and gave Henri Michel the thumbs-up. Henri Michel hoisted the pot into the blind.
“Give me my belt,” Basso said when he got to the top of the ladder, tugging at his jeans. “Unless you want to look at my ass while you’re eating!”
I can say with some confidence that I will never have a better meal in a tree. Whatever transgressions Basso had committed that morning were redeemed by the lunch he laid out for us. We dragged our barstools over to the folding table, poured ourselves some wine, and enjoyed a banquet any earthbound Gascon would h
ave been proud to serve: homemade foie gras, a squash-and-confit garbure, roasted potatoes, and—Basso’s pièce de résistance—a civet of wild boar, which he’d started braising in the cocotte at home a couple of days before. The meat melted off the bone. For dessert Basso served a homemade lemon tourte. We ate it with crème anglaise from a supermarket Tetra Pak and spooned up the leftover cream from our paper plates like soup.
Any migrating pigeons that flew overhead between the hours of one and three that afternoon got a pass. After lunch, Maxime sat down in a corner, pulled his beret over his eyes, and took a nap. Francis went up to the spotter’s perch and lazily repaired a piece of rigging. Henri Michel, looking supremely sated, a shaft of late-October sunlight falling on the side of his face, embarked on a philosophical disquisition about Gascon dishes cooked with blood: boudin, sanguette, chitterlings made with pig’s blood and cornmeal. This led to a far-ranging discussion with Basso about pork offal: how to season the pancreas, how to stuff the bladder, how to cook the lungs and spleen, how to use lard to shine your shoes.
As the sun continued its downward arc, Basso dictated to me his recipe for the civet, which called for a bottle and a half of Madiran (and knowing how to bag a wild boar). This prompted Henri Michel to divulge a family recipe for chicken fricassee and then, with no segue at all, to hold forth for a while about the cultivation and use of spring onions. For this he produced an actual specimen, a freshly sprouted bulb he had been carrying in his jacket pocket. He held it delicately between thumb and forefinger as he spoke lovingly of the flavors of the allium and described how best to plant and harvest it.
Basso concluded our impromptu cooking symposium with one final recipe, for a dish called boiled crow:
Take one crow. Add it to a pot of boiling water with a big rock. Simmer. When the rock is tender enough to pierce with a fork, the crow is done.
Duck Season Page 16