Duck Season

by David McAninch

  When the flow had slowed to a trickle, Jean-Pierre stuck his hand into the bucket, the contents of which looked for all the world like raspberry purée, and swished the froth around vigorously to prevent the blood from coagulating. When his hand emerged, it was painted crimson to the wrist.

  “That’s going to make some fine boudin,” he said.

  Olivier maneuvered the deceased pig into the wood trough. Then the men poured buckets of scalding water, retrieved from the cauldron, over the carcass, filling the air with the scent of boiled pig. With impressive speed and vigor, they scraped off the animal’s hair using wallet-size squares of metal that, according to Lagors, had once belonged to the blade of a scythe. The hair came off in wet tufts.

  Jean-Pierre had one rubber-booted foot inside the trough, the other on the ground. “The Basques use old sardine cans,” he said, smiling at me and Lagors over his shoulder, his hands flying back and forth across the carcass. “But we Gascons are more high-tech.”

  Now Olivier raised the pig again, and Jean-Pierre removed the hard-to-reach pockets of hair using a propane torch, adding an acrid edge to the air’s perfume.

  The gutting began. With the pig hanging upside down in front of him, Jean-Pierre made an incision down the center of the belly from tail to head. The abdomen opened like a curtain, the sow’s bulging, pinkish-gray entrails flopping out and releasing tendrils of steam into the cold air. Jean-Pierre removed the intestines to a bucket. Then out came the stomach, the liver, the heart, and the lungs. Each went into its own bucket. The older man, toothpick still in his teeth, carried the entrails and stomach over to the plastic-covered table and began cleaning them—a fragrant task I preferred to witness from afar.

  The innards removed, Jean-Pierre used a bow saw to halve the pig lengthwise right down the spinal column, finishing the job by splitting the skull and hard palate with three tremendous whacks from an enormous cleaver. Now the two sides of the animal hung from the forklift tines, rib cage exposed to the air, each half a picture of the pork cuts to be.

  After inserting an iron hook between the bones of each hind leg, right above the hoof, Jean-Pierre wrapped his arms around one of the carcass halves and shouted at Olivier to unloop the rope from the forklift tine. Then Jean-Pierre performed a two-part maneuver that could only be described as balletic: As the 130-pound side of pig was released from the forklift, the brawny butcher did a plié while gripping the bottom third of the carcass, and then pirouetted deftly so that it flopped, skin side down and perfectly centered, onto his shoulder.

  Lagors shouted “Bravo!” and clapped loudly. The pharmacist and I clapped, too. It was an unexpectedly delicate culmination to the day’s bloody work—though, in fact, there’d been just as much grace and precision to everything Jean-Pierre had done.

  Now the carcass halves were hanging from the ceiling of the garage, where they’d rest for a spell before Jean-Pierre began breaking down the animal and making his chops and charcuterie. The boudin would get done straightaway, as would the andouille, that most fragrant of French encased meats, made from the animal’s stomach and intestines. The tender, little-worked muscles of the loin would be frozen and, later, sectioned into chops. The tougher but tastier shoulder and butt would be transformed into roasts that would eventually be larded with strips of the pig’s back fat and then smartly tied in the prim French manner. More fat, from the cheeks and neck, would go into various pâtés, terrines, and rillettes. The feet would probably get cooked, pickled, and, possibly, encased in aspic. The immense upper part of the hind legs—future hams—would be salted and then hung for many months to cure. The legs’ knobby jarrets, or hocks, would almost surely find their way into the family’s garbures, where they would in all likelihood keep good company with pieces of the pig’s fatty belly.

  Finally, his work done, Jean-Pierre washed his hands and opened a bottle of rosé. His cheeks were red and his eyes glimmered. He poured us all a round and raised his glass.

  “To Mimi,” he said.

  “To Mimi!” we shouted.

  22

  Foie Gras

  Residents of the Gers eat foie gras, on average, twice a week. If this seems excessive, consider that fattened duck or goose liver, a foodstuff regarded by much of the world as an indulgence—even a sinful one at that—is as widely available in Gascony as cold cuts. It’s produced in the late fall and early winter on family farms all over the Gers—year-round on bigger ones—and eaten in every season. At home, Gascons mostly consume foie gras en conserve, which means “preserved in sterilized jars.” Sometimes they spread it on pieces of baguette or toast; sometimes they eat it on its own, sliced into medallions or squares, possibly with some coarse salt or pink peppercorns sprinkled over the top. Gascons also eat foie gras in the form of terrines and pâtés and, at its most elemental and delicious, pan-seared. Occasionally they eat it raw. To the fullest extent of my knowledge, they do not eat foie gras on lollipop sticks, freeze-dried and broken into shards, or encrusted with Pop Rocks—a few of the many ends to which American chefs have employed the ingredient in recent years.

  Gascons react with confused dismay when the subject of banning foie gras comes up. During the time I resided in Gascony, Californians were living under such an embargo, since lifted. My hometown of Chicago, too, had enacted its own short-lived ban. Both had the vociferous support of animal rights activists, who, I suspect, viewed the force-feeding of ducks and geese as something akin to a giant bull’s-eye. The fact that most people in the United States consider foie gras to be something rich people buy—like mink coats or Rolexes—certainly didn’t hurt the activists’ cause.

  No one is certain who first had the idea to force-feed waterfowl, but the ancient Egyptians were the earliest enthusiastic adopters of the practice. The watershed of the Nile was a popular wintering ground for geese, and the Egyptians figured out that if you handfed the birds moistened grain, a little more every day, they got fat very quickly. This is because geese, like ducks, are predisposed to do exactly that in preparation for their long migrations, storing the valuable fat in their skin and in their hepatic tissue. The Egyptians force-fed geese in order to generate lots of fat, which they used for cooking, medicinal purposes, lamp fuel, and the like. The engorged livers were most likely considered a happy by-product. The Romans, who fed geese figs instead of grain, were the first to document the delectation of the fatty liver, which they preferred to cook whole.

  In his book Foie Gras: A Passion, the American foie gras expert Michael Ginor probably irked a few Gascons by diverging from the French party line, which has long held that the practice of gavage took root in Western Europe thanks to resourceful Gallic farmers, who’d learned the practice from the Romans and kept it alive through the Dark Ages, in what is now southwestern France. “A more likely guardian of the foie gras–making arts,” Ginor writes, “were the Ashkenazi Jews of Western and Central Europe. . . . A long trail of literary evidence linking the Jews to foie gras begins in the eleventh century with the earliest reference to fattened geese in medieval Europe.”

  Whatever the history, today the Southwest of France is to foie gras what Wisconsin is to cheese. This owes partly to the fact that the Gers, the Landes, and especially the valley of the Adour River constitute France’s corn belt, and corn is the present-day feed of choice for gavage. (Not long after arriving in Gascony, while driving down a farm road outside Plaisance, I was stunned to see a sign for DeKalb seed stock, named for a town in northeastern Illinois just west of where I grew up.) In the postwar years, after an easier-to-breed variety of the moulard was developed, and after André Daguin wowed the world with the splendors of rare-cooked duck breast, ducks overtook geese as the preferred source of foie gras in France and throughout the world. Though large-scale duck farms have cropped up in other parts of southwestern France in order to meet global demand for canned foie gras products, in the Gers gavage remains for the most part a farmhouse chore like any other—though one that requires extra finesse.

 
The task has traditionally fallen to women. The first time I witnessed gavage was on a farm in the northeastern Gers, my host a winsome fermière sporting designer jeans and blond highlights. I’d watched as Christine poured a cupful of white corn into a feeding funnel, corralled one of her white-feathered ducks, placed the duck between her knees, tilted back its head, and lowered the funnel’s tapered spout into the animal’s throat. As she did this, she explained that a duck’s esophagus is keratinized—lined with fingernail-like bristles—and does not have sensation, though I can’t say the procedure looked particularly pleasurable. Quickly, she activated the funnel’s electric auger in order to send the corn down the tube and into the duck’s crop, which filled like a beanbag. The funnel slid out, and the duck waddled over to a trough and took a drink. The other birds waited their turn without any noticeable excitement.

  The force-feeding lasts several weeks, Christine had told me, at the end of the ducks’ four-month-long life, which is spent mostly outdoors. Proper gavage must be performed by the same person each day—usually once in the morning and once at night—as the ducks are very sensitive to changes in routine. Christine proved an articulate defender of gavage, pointing out that a duck’s entire anatomy is designed for gorging and that a fattened liver is not diseased—as is sometimes claimed in anti–foie gras circles—just fat. She became defensive only at the end of my visit, when I’d asked about the origins of the technique. She admitted reluctantly that while Gascons frequently liked to assert that they’d been the sole guardians of the practice in Europe for centuries, and even went so far as to say they’d invented it, neither claim was true.

  That first encounter with gavage had taken place outdoors on a sunny morning. My second one—at the home of my Esbouhats hunting buddy Henri Michel—fell on a black December night, in weather so foul that I considered staying home. In the end, I bucked up and drove to his house in the Madiranais through gusty, pelting sheets of rain, windshield wipers thwacking on their fastest setting. After a couple of wrong turns in the dark, down muddy lanes, I pulled into a rutted, steeply sloped gravel driveway. I opened the car door, and a large dog with mud-caked paws leaped halfway into my lap. I could hardly blame it for seeking shelter. The dog led me up the drive to a farmhouse with a light in the window. Through a sliding door, I could see Henri Michel sitting at a table with his wife, sipping floc and eating nuts. I tapped on the glass hesitantly, fearing I might be mistaken for an intruder.

  “Ah, good, you’re here,” Henri Michel said, letting me in. “It’s almost feeding time.”

  He handed me a dainty stemmed glass. “Drink that down and we’ll go out to the shed.”

  The shed in question was really more of a lean-to, lit by a couple of bare bulbs. Rain hammered on the corrugated-metal roof. A dozen moulards were milling about on a raised platform covered with straw. Henri Michel, his glasses glazed with rain, climbed onto the riser, sat down on an overturned bucket next to a vat of corn, reached for the funnel, and began his work. With wind blowing in through gaps in the shed’s wood-plank walls, the scene felt slightly macabre. But Henri Michel performed his task with good cheer, recounting how he’d taken up gavage after retiring from his job with the railroad a few years back.

  “The old-timers called it a woman’s chore,” he said. “But I got the hang of it right away.”

  I told him it seemed like a lot of work: dawn and dusk feedings every day for weeks, no matter the weather. I asked him why he didn’t just cure ham as a hobby, like Alphonse.

  “I cure ham, too,” he said.

  Henri Michel explained that in a few days he would take the fattened ducks up to his garage, kill them, pluck them, and, over the course of an afternoon, with the help of his neighbors, perform the découpage: removing the livers, the breasts, the legs, the wings, the necks, and all the rest—some of it destined for canning, some of it for the freezer, and some of it for immediate enjoyment.

  “When we’re done,” he said, “we have a big feast.”

  Naturally.

  ON BEHOLDING A WHOLE FOIE gras for the first time, a person unfamiliar with the delicacy could be forgiven for refusing to believe that the organ had resided inside a duck. A fattened moulard liver, which consists of two elongated, putty-colored lobes and can weigh as much as three pounds, is an immense and formidable repository of lipids, iron, and protein. Foie gras is creamy, smooth, and dense in much the same way frozen custard is, and it’s almost as quick to melt on the tongue. Fresh foie gras that’s browned in a pan is often said to taste like the caramelized fat on the edge of a grilled steak—except that seared foie gras is much finer than seared steak fat in both flavor and texture, with an even more concentrated and extravagant richness. Devotees have described foie gras as voluptuous, silken, satiny, and sumptuous. I would not contest any of those words.

  Throughout our stay in Plaisance, we almost always had a jar of foie gras in the house. Nadine was a reliable source, to be sure; she had more foie gras than she knew what to do with. But as the season of gavage got under way, other people started giving it to us, too. Everyone we knew seemed to have an aunt or a mamie who raised ducks or preserved foie gras or both. A teacher from Charlotte’s school sent her home with a jar, tied with a bow and accompanied by a note: “A homemade Gascon treat. Enjoy!” We added it to the jars we’d just gotten from Henri, Alphonse, and Diane.

  And yet being able to eat foie gras with, say, a Monday lunch never stopped being a novelty. On the rare occasions when visitors made the long and somewhat taxing journey to Plaisance from abroad, I had a tendency to go overboard, as if to say, “Yes, we live off the beaten path, but we eat foie gras whenever we like!”

  One weekend, our friends Liz and Dom came to visit from London. Liz and I went way back. We’d met as students in Aix-en-Provence and had bonded over a shared love of food, hitchhiking, the Herald Tribune crossword puzzle, and boozy sing-alongs, most often to the tunes of Jacques Brel. We had reunited while living in Paris two years later and had stayed close ever since. Liz and Dom were remorselessly dedicated eaters, so I wanted to fete them by packing as much foie gras and duck as possible into their short visit.

  The day before they arrived, I went to Ferme Tomasella and bought a very large piece of fresh foie gras. I set aside part of it for pan-searing and used the rest to make a mi-cuit, which is a gently cooked terrine. I had never made a mi-cuit before. Nadine, who’d given me her recipe and even loaned me a ceramic terrine mold, had, as usual, made it sound easy. But as with the wood pigeons, I found myself stumbling over the first step: in this case, deveining the liver. This proved to be an unseemly business that required plunging my fingers deep into the pale, soft tissue to extract a slippery, y-shaped blood vessel. When I was finished, half the liver looked like mush. Dispirited, I called Nadine. She said not to worry—no one would notice once the foie gras was pressed into the terrine and cooked. Not for the first time, I wanted to bottle her reassuring voice. After that, I sliced the liver, seasoned it, and laid the pieces into the mold, then cooked it in the oven in a bain-marie before putting it in the fridge to chill overnight. For the pan-seared foie gras, I wouldn’t have to do anything except slice it, season it, and try not to overcook it. The high heat would render the veins unnoticeable.

  I’d decided that for the main course of our Saturday-night feast I’d try my hand at seared magret again. I’d been taking a break from it, consumed by the pleasures of braising and roasting, but we had only so much time left in Plaisance, and I wanted one more chance to get the dish right.

  AS WE DROVE TO THE train station in Tarbes the next morning to pick up Liz and Dom, I tried to calculate how long it had been since Michele and I had seen them. Charlotte, I realized, hadn’t even been born. I touched my incipient bald spot and wondered how different we’d seem to one another.

  Dom was, like me, a little softer under the chin, and Liz had cut her hair short, but by the time we’d gotten to the moulin and started lunch, I felt as if we’d picked up a conversation fr
om the day before. We devoured the mi-cuit, which had turned out perfectly, as Nadine had promised, and polished off a few confit duck legs, a round of Époisses, and two bottles of Gaillac while we were at it. It was pleasantly strange to see these two faces from an earlier chapter in our lives in this old mill on the Arros.

  After lunch, I showed our friends around Plaisance: the bakery, the school, the bullring, the Esbouhats clubhouse, the war memorial where Charlotte sang “La Marseillaise,” word for disturbing word. I went on for too long about the history of Plaisance’s two bastides, pointing out where the tanneries and workshops had once lined the river, where the medieval church had once stood, where the remains of an old dungeon tower rose from the courtyard of a block of houses. We stopped for a coffee at Le Plaisantin. The usual cast of men in paint-spattered jeans was there, sipping Stellas. So was Bernd, cigarillo in hand. When we returned to the house, our family of river rats made an appearance, as did the striped cat who’d absconded with one of my wood pigeons.

  We napped. I got a fire going. Michele put on some music. I set out foie gras preserves on black bread, a plate of cut radishes with coarse salt, some olives, a bowl of fritons. I uncorked a bottle of floc. We made a toast. Charlotte and Michele sat in front of the fire and showed Liz pictures of our life in Chicago. Dom kept me company in the kitchen while I got dinner ready, taking care not to rush the magrets. I made a pan sauce with blackberry jelly, homemade stock, and Armagnac. Dom and I talked about aging parents and friends’ divorces. Night had fallen, and soon our cozy moulin felt pleasingly cut off from the world outside.

  After a time, we sat down to eat.

  The rest of the long, wine-fueled evening comes back to me in a kind of jump-cut montage: Dom smacking his lips in a very British way as I bring out the seared foie gras, the medallions just shy of blackened on the outside, pale pink and lusciously smooth within; the platter of sliced magret, the skin crisp and melting, exactly as I hoped; Michele and Charlotte devouring every morsel, skin and all; Michele coming out of the kitchen with a homemade chocolate cake; me hauling in more firewood; Dom fetching the Armagnac.