Duck Season

by David McAninch

  Personally, I didn’t have much interest in eating at Les Prés d’Eugénie. For one thing, it was way out of our price range. For another, though Gascons welcomed the cachet it had brought to the region, the restaurant didn’t seem to have an organic connection to Gascony. And anyhow, high-end dining didn’t really agree with me. I almost always seemed to get seated next to someone unpleasant, and there’s something about fancy restaurants that makes me self-conscious.

  But sometimes one is called upon to put aside one’s prejudices.

  ANDRÉ DUBOSC LAUGHED AWKWARDLY WHEN, under the totally legitimate pretext of not being able to afford it, I declined his invitation to have lunch with him and a colleague at Les Prés d’Eugénie.

  “Ah, but you misunderstand,” he said over the phone. “Je vous invite. You will be our guests.”

  I said I couldn’t allow it.

  Dubosc took a conspiratorial tone, explaining that Guérard was an old friend, and that the wine cooperative was seeking new business with him.

  “It will look more sociable,” he said, “if we go à quatre.” Of course, he added, it was expected that I’d bring Michele.

  He went so far as to offer his wife’s babysitting services. She had already dined chez Guérard, he said, and had volunteered to watch Charlotte before he’d even asked.

  “You see,” said Dubosc, “all of our grandchildren are boys.”

  I told him I’d check with Michele. When I did, she stared at me with an expression of flabbergasted disbelief that I’d hesitated to accept.

  And so, that Saturday, she and I put on our nicest clothes and dropped Charlotte off at Dubosc’s house. His wife, Françoise, wrapped Charlotte in her arms as if the two were already fast friends. Then she gave Charlotte a chocolate and stroked her hair appraisingly, in a sign that some serious braiding might be in their future. When it comes to spoiling other people’s children, Gascons are not to be outdone.

  We arrived at the restaurant at half past eleven and were waved past a gatehouse by a uniformed guard. We parked at the edge of an expanse of topiary-hemmed gardens laced with trim, bowered paths. The restaurant’s lobby, which doubled as the reception area of the adjoining hotel-spa, was a placid sanctuary of white plaster moldings and classical statuary. As we waited for Dubosc’s colleague, a couple of svelte women in flowy outfits swished past us, heading toward the spa and trailing a scent of roses. A telephone trilled softly somewhere down the hall. We’d entered a distant, un-Gascon universe.

  Our fourth arrived. Olivier Bourdet-Pées was Dubosc’s young successor at the co-op. The new directeur had a tennis-player’s build, a receding hairline, black-rimmed glasses, a French-guy scarf—Dubosc a quarter-century ago. If I hadn’t known otherwise, I’d have pegged him for Dubosc’s own son. This impression was enhanced by the fact that Dubosc’s body language around Olivier was that of a jocular mentor. In lieu of the gentle arm touches Dubosc reserved for me and Michele, it was shoulder-drapings and back slaps for Olivier—to which the younger man reacted like someone listening politely to a stale joke.

  Dubosc had arranged to meet with Guérard before lunch to discuss a few matters of business, so after announcing our arrival to a willowy hostess in a chic black dress, we installed ourselves on two Empire-style settees beneath an immense crystal chandelier in an extra-tranquil corner of the lobby. A black-tied server, unbidden, brought coffee and candied fruit on a silver tray.

  Dubosc, holding his demitasse decorously over its saucer, glanced behind him and then leaned forward slightly so that he might speak to Michele and me in confidence. “Guérard’s wife designed every inch of this place,” he said. “She treats it like the Louvre—you’re not even allowed to take photos.”

  This made me very badly want to pull out my phone and start doing just that.

  Before I could act on the impulse, Guérard appeared. I hadn’t noticed him walking over, but now suddenly here he was, standing before us.

  We stood up to shake his hand. Guérard was close to a foot shorter than me. Dubosc introduced us and mentioned that my wife and I were from Chicago.

  Guérard beamed. It was the unflappable smile of someone who’s been photographed a lot. “Ah, the Obamas’ hometown,” he said. “I’ve extended an invitation to the First Lady to come visit the institut. She and I share much the same mission.”

  We retook our seats, and Guérard went on to lament, albeit in the most diplomatic language, the global spread of McDonald’s and its offspring, le fast food being a perennially popular punching bag of French chefs. In my experience, when the topic came up, the American in the room was cast, willingly or no, in the role of fast-food apologist so that the Frenchmen in the room might have a ready target to assail. But Guérard made the gentlemanly gesture of changing the subject.

  For a short while, he reminisced about being a child in northern France during the war. “I have lived through hunger and fear,” he said. “I am grateful for this.”

  Then he changed the subject again, speaking nostalgically of the decline in the hallowed tradition of culinary apprentissage. “Today,” he said, “young chefs seek celebrity before they seek wisdom.”

  Guérard spoke a mannered Parisian French, his talk devoid of rugby and bullfighting metaphors. He closed his eyes as if trying to remember something, then quoted several verses from a Paul Valéry poem. They had something to do with a master and his protégé.

  Conversation turned to more pressing affairs. The three men discussed hectoliters and wholesale prices for a while, Olivier doing most of the talking, leaving Dubosc to contribute the occasional droll remark.

  Finally, business having been concluded, Guérard brushed a bit of lint from his trousers and rose from his chair. He extended his hand to each of us. “Now I must leave you,” he said. “I’m needed at the stoves.”

  As suddenly as he’d appeared, he was gone.

  We were led by the willowy hostess to the restaurant’s salon: a baroque fantasia of a sitting room with three crackling fireplaces, deep leather couches, and gilt-framed oil paintings, including a softly lit and nearly life-size portrait of Eugénie herself. We were seated at a burnished-wood coffee table and served pre-lunch snacks of tiny house-made white boudins skewered on toothpicks. For an aperitif, we drank a copper-colored 1973 Jurançon that Olivier had brought from his own cellar. It was decanted and poured by a bird-faced sommelier in a waistcoat and lavender tie, and tasted of chestnuts and candied fruit.

  At twelve forty-five, we sat down to lunch. The dining room was airy and flooded with light. Our table, covered in fresh white linen, could have comfortably accommodated eight people. With the exception of a few well-polished silver serving carts, no functional elements of a working restaurant, right down to electrical outlets, were anywhere to be seen.

  We placed our order with a young captain who evinced a carefully calibrated mixture of warmth and fawning and, like Henri, never once during the meal gave the appearance of haste or exertion. The sommelier returned and engaged Olivier, who had been half hidden for some time behind a thick, hardbound wine list, in negotiations. Moments later, a Chablis Grand Cru was brought to the table. It was crisp and vivacious and spurred the appetite. A silky, dried-blood–colored Saumur Champigny soon followed.

  What did we eat? A staggering amount of food, even by Gascon standards. And it couldn’t have been remotely slimming. I remember black Périgord truffle—that most coveted and expensive of fungi—shaved onto a vichyssoise; more slices of that truffle, delicately white-veined and tasting of damp earth, strewn over the top of some kind of blini; morels in an ethereal emulsion that tasted like the essence of a million freshly foraged mushrooms concentrated into a small pillow of foam; a soft-cooked egg with a top hat of caviar, each spoonful a surge of salty, creamy richness; oysters concealed under different-colored citrus foams; tender pieces of some cosseted breed of chicken served in a ragoût made with cockscomb and rognons de coq, which, Dubosc explained with a mischievous smile, were rooster testicles; and a
square of crisp-skinned sea bass, alone on the plate in nothing but its own cooking juices. There were scallops, too—grilled, as I recall—served on a slick of melted sea salt butter. After that: a halved lobster tail smoked in a stone hearth with candied onions, then a rare-cooked medallion of beef wrapped in a leaf. I know there were cheeses, but I regret to say I can’t call to mind what they were. By the time they’d shown up, we’d been at the table for a couple of hours, and I was nearly overcome with the urge to dash out for air. But I resisted it and held on through dessert—mille-feuille, rhubarb ice cream, peach melba—and then through coffee and digestifs.

  By four thirty or so, it was done. Dusk was preparing its advance across the sky. Guérard came to the table and basked in our praise for a minute or two. My faculties dulled by the excesses of the meal, I found myself unable to summon anything more poetic than “C’était très, très, très bon.” Guérard smiled his practiced smile, shook our hands, and took his leave.

  The meal had indeed been very, very, very good, and an interesting hybrid, too. Many of the hallmarks of Nouvelle Cuisine—none of them nouvelle anymore—had been in evidence: the hearth-cooked dishes, the spare presentations, the elegant sauces. Showy flourishes of more recent vintage had found their way into the lineup, too—the foams, the leaf—as had luxe touches from the classical era: the caviar, the black truffle, the blini. There’d even been a nod to rustic Gascon food: namely the ragoût with its rooster testicles.

  Overall my memory of the lunch is a fine one, not least of all because Dubosc seemed so pleased to have exposed me and Michele to the glow of Gascony’s beacon of three-star luxury. Oddly enough, though, what I remember most vividly about the day is the funny sensation of returning to the mill after all that fancy treatment. The living room was damp and dark and smelled of cold ashes. I built a fire and recall sitting with our backs to it, eating leftover soup for dinner, and, in spite of it all, feeling happy to be home.

  21

  Le Saint Cochon

  Champion of duck that I am, I don’t take great pleasure in saying this, but for much of history, the animal that played the most vital role in the day-to-day sustenance of the Gascon paysan was the pig. For corroboration I will turn to my three sages.

  Weber: “If bread stood for plenty, bacon or lard was a symbol of wealth. The hog was the real patron saint of the countryside—Sent Pourquî in Gascony—a miraculous animal, every bit of which was good for something . . . and which almost everybody could afford to raise.”

  Wolfert (echoing the bread comparison): “There is a mystical feeling about these beasts on the farms of the South-West, similar to the way bread is regarded in some other parts of France.”

  Palay (cue the fanfare): “It is the pig, in our land, that constitutes the carnal portion of our diet. Every household feeds and fattens a pig or two that will, with few days excepted, provide the bacon, the ham, the sausages, the confit, the meat that appears regularly on our tables.”

  For generations, pigs were slaughtered on the family farm, sometimes by the farmer, sometimes by an itinerant butcher. The season’s first tue-cochons, as the killings were called, awaited the arrival of cold weather, as the slaughtered animal was usually left to hang outdoors overnight before the découpage, the salting, and the sausage-making began.

  Gascons’ love of charcuterie runs deep. At any worthy Gascon market, one will find a chorus line of air-cured and salted pleasures: hams, saucissons, chorizos, and more, alongside pâtés, coppas, terrines, and, most prominently, boudins, made with pig’s blood. I can remember Nadine, during one of her sentimental journeys into the past, going on at great length about the making of boudin when she was growing up. The day after the slaughter, she said—and sometimes the day of—women from several families gathered to make the wine-colored sausages, toiling over a mixture of blood, lard, and trimmings, adjusting the seasonings just so and then inviting the menfolk to taste the raw filling before it got stuffed into the casings. Gascons make incredibly good boudin.

  While it’s not uncommon even among bourgeois Gascons to buy a whole pig from a farm—or go in on one with a neighbor—and have it brought to a charcutier-traiteur to be cut up and made into various delicacies, not many families in Gascony kill their own pig anymore.

  That said, there are still a few butchers roving the Gascon countryside who will do the job.

  I found this out when I ran into my historian friend, Alain Lagors, in town one day. He informed me excitedly that a hard freeze had been forecast.

  “What’s the bad news?” I said.

  Lagors gave a puzzled laugh. “As you may know, the weather must be cold for a pig slaughter.”

  In light of the weather, Lagors said, his neighbor, a traveling butcher named Jean-Pierre, had scheduled the season’s first tue-cochon for two days hence.

  “Jean-Pierre is a piece of living history,” Lagors said. “Hélas, most people nowadays buy their chops and boudins from the Intermarché.”

  The inaugural killing would take place at Jean-Pierre’s home, outside Plaisance. The pig had already been chosen. Her name was Mimi.

  JEAN-PIERRE’S HOUSE AND THOSE AROUND it were of recent construction, located in one of several small tracts that had sprouted from the flat expanse of farmland between Plaisance and Préchac. The neighborhood had a vaguely suburban feel that seemed unsuited to the business of pig slaughtering, and I said so to Lagors as we pulled into Jean-Pierre’s driveway.

  Lagors said that the neighbors complained only rarely. “Usually when it’s a squealer.”

  Jean-Pierre hadn’t returned yet from collecting the condemned animal from a nearby farm, so Lagors and I loitered in the house’s small yard, which was enclosed by hedges. A cauldron of water had been set over a wood fire. On the grass next to that sat a crudely fashioned wood trough that reminded me of a pauper’s coffin. A folding table covered with a plastic sheet stood against one of the hedges.

  Lagors, who’d never met a silence he couldn’t fill with a history lesson, began talking—prompted by what, I don’t know—about how officers of Lord Wellington were said to have begun the tradition of fox hunting outside Pau, the capital of the Béarn, after passing through the region during the Napoleonic Wars.

  Before Lagors could delve too deeply into the subject, a mud-spattered hatchback pulled into the driveway and came to a stop a few feet from us. It was hauling an open-topped, metal-sided trailer. In it sat an enormous pink sow, also mud-spattered. A bald, ruddy-faced man got out of the driver’s seat. He had the potbelly of a bon vivant. This was Jean-Pierre.

  He bounded toward me and squeezed my hand hard. Like Basso, he had the permanent half-smile and deep crow’s-feet of an inveterate joke-cracker.

  Jean-Pierre led me over to the trailer. “Meet Mimi!”

  He leaned over and gave the pig a slap. “Sorry, girl! We couldn’t find a priest for the last rites!”

  Two more men arrived in a second car. One was young and skinny and the other was old and round; the latter had a toothpick in the corner of his mouth.

  On the way over, Lagors had explained that a traditional tue-cochon was at minimum a five-man operation: four men to hold each of the pig’s legs, and a fifth to wield the knife. Today’s killing, however, would be done the “modern” way, with four men and a tractor. Presently, said tractor rumbled up the drive. It was an old John Deere with a forklift attachment on the front and a buzz-cut Gascon named Olivier at the wheel.

  Mimi’s executioners were now assembled.

  The men got to work with barely a word. They had obviously performed this ritual together many times before. Jean-Pierre flipped down the gate of the trailer and tied a rope around each of the sow’s front hooves while the skinny fellow tied another around its snout. Mimi obstinately laid herself down. Jean-Pierre and his two helpers began pulling mightily on the ropes while Olivier shoved the animal from behind. There was much grunting from the men but not a sound from Mimi. She refused to budge.

  At that moment, I n
oticed a man in city clothes walking up the driveway. I guessed it was a neighbor coming to complain preemptively. But the man strode up and shook Jean-Pierre’s hand—I recognized the newcomer as the village pharmacist. “I was afraid I’d missed it!” he said.

  “You’re cutting it close!” said Jean-Pierre.

  Eventually, the men cajoled Mimi out of the trailer and with continued yanking and shoving moved her into the yard. The tractor’s front wheel had been positioned over a thick wood plank. The men situated the sow in front of the plank, and Jean-Pierre tied ropes around her hind legs and secured the other end of the ropes to the tines of the tractor’s forklift. He gave Olivier a thumbs-up, and, with the two other men holding her front legs steady, Mimi was slowly hoisted into the air, hind end first, until her head was a foot above the ground. Jean-Pierre took the rope attached to the animal’s snout, looped it through an eyelet screwed into the plank, and pulled it taut. Mimi was fixed in her death pose—a pig in mid–swan dive.

  Something compelled me to study Mimi’s face. I suppose it’s the mark of a city dweller to seek signs of emotion in a farm animal’s countenance, but that being so, I could find none. Her eyes were unblinking and blank. I couldn’t tell if she was frozen in fear or merely indifferent.

  Jean-Pierre noticed me gazing at the sow. “Don’t worry,” he said, “this one won’t squeal.”

  He got down on one knee and placed a plastic bucket in front of the pig. “You’re a brave one, aren’t you, Mimi?”

  In his right hand Jean-Pierre held a thin-bladed, wood-handled knife, the kind my mom uses for slicing cucumbers and carrots. Without further ado, he plunged the blade into the middle of the pig’s throat and made a swift upward cut. Blood thundered into the bucket with shocking force. Mimi jerked faintly and emitted a gurgling sound.