Now it is late, and Liz and I are standing in the middle of the room, snifters in hand, bellowing along to “Ces Gens Là,” the most mordant of Brel’s songs, an aria of disdain for the rural petite bourgeoisie of his youth—the provincial matron with her “apostle’s face,” the drunk at Sunday Mass “as pale as an Easter candle,” the burgher’s family joylessly slurping their cold soup, “flchss! flchss!” Liz and I mimic Brel’s every syllable and tic, straining to roll our r’s gutturally like the master. Michele and Dom have laid their heads on the table in an exaggerated display of annoyance. A couple more songs, and I am ready for sleep, steeped in good memories.
The next day, we had time for one more meal before Liz and Dom caught the train. I chose a place we liked in Marciac that had the rare distinction of being open on Sundays. Despite the indulgences of the night before, Liz and Dom showed no signs of flagging. Indeed, a certain jusqu’au-boutisme—literally “all-the-way-ness” but maybe better translated as brinksmanship—had taken hold, and so, at lunch, we did not hold back: pâté, oysters, pig’s foot braised with garlic, a salad of haricots Tarbais, handmade saucisses de Toulouse, a soft round of boudin on a nest of frisée, all of it washed down with crisp beer from the Quercy.
Halfway through, I realized nobody had ordered foie gras. I was about to do something about that, but decided not to push it.
23
Confit
My culinary education in Gascony would draw to a close in much the same way it began: with a baptism by duck fat. The moment had finally come to make confit.
Foie gras and magret may have more widespread cachet, but confit is the true coin of the realm in Gascony, the mother ingredient, the foundation on which the entire cuisine has been built. Confit has survived the rise and fall of monarchies and empires and the vicissitudes of French gastronomy, from Escoffier to Cuisine Minceur. Confit is the purest embodiment of agrarian resourcefulness, a conduit to the foodways of antiquity. It is the soul of Gascon cookery.
Paula Wolfert, who was seduced by confit during her five-year vision quest in the Southwest of France, surmises that the practice of preserving lightly cured meat in rendered fat may have come from North Africa, where dried beef and lamb are given a similar treatment, but she acknowledges that it was in Gascony where the technique was perfected. Wolfert devotes lots of superlatives to the subject in her writing. Calling Gascons “the most extreme devotees of this splendid food,” she goes on to declare: “So clearly has it left its stamp on great reaches of the South-West that one could construct an accurate map of culinary boundaries simply by the presence or absence of confit.”
Duck confit is not deep-fried but, like a good braise, simmered slow and low for hours—usually just in duck fat, but sometimes with the addition of goose and pork fat—and allowed to cool gently before being transferred with its graisse to jars or crocks. Many visitors to Gascony who try duck confit have trouble believing that it was cooked and preserved in deep fat. A nicely aged and properly reheated confit duck leg, with its dark, moist flesh and carapace of crisp skin, is rich but not nearly as fatty and salty as lots of other kinds of preserved meat. Confit has a clean, nutty taste all its own.
Confire means simply “to preserve.” For a long time in Gascony, the preserving was done by laying the simmered pieces of meat along with their cooled cooking fat in an earthenware vessel called a toupin, topping off the meat with more rendered fat, and then tucking the toupin away in a cool, dark place. In a testament to the miraculous preserving qualities of waterfowl fat, duck and goose put up in this manner have been known to keep for as long as a year. Toupins are still in use here and there: André Dubosc and I had lunch at the home of a winegrower whose mother-in-law responded to our impromptu visit by hauling a crock from her cellar, retrieving a couple of duck legs from the soft off-white fat, and crisping them in a skillet for our lunch. Nowadays, though, most home cooks transfer the cooked meat and its fat to jars, which they then seal and sterilize.
Duck confit is not the kind of dish a typical suburban cook might make for a weekend dinner party. For one thing, you have to have lots of rendered fat around. This is no problem in a land inhabited by 25 million ducks, most of them fattened on grain, but it’s a considerably taller order in America, where cooking in animal fat has largely fallen out of favor and you can’t just pop over to the neighbor’s farm for a few jars of the stuff. For another, confit is meant to be made in large quantities—part of the age-old seasonal ritual of provisioning cellars and pantries for the winter.
Indeed, when I witnessed Gascon large-scale confit-making for the first time—at Nadine’s house (where else?) on a frigid morning not long before we left Gascony—I felt I’d slipped out of the modern era altogether. And I couldn’t escape the sense that all the grilling, searing, and braising I’d been doing for the better part of the past year had been building up to this moment.
Nadine was all business when Michele and I showed up at her house. There was a lot of confit to make, and little time for pleasantries. Aprons were donned, and we got straight to work. On the long table in her canning room—so cold we could see our breath—the following items had been laid out: an enormous aluminum bowl filled with duck legs, maybe twenty in all; another large aluminum bowl filled with duck wings and necks; one slightly smaller bowl filled with several dozen pinkish-brown goose gizzards, each resembling two ravioli fused together at the edges; and, finally, a couple of three-quart plastic tubs filled to the brim with duck fat that Nadine had accumulated during the year. The gizzards and duck parts had been salted and seasoned with black pepper and thyme the night before. They were ready for their long dip in hot fat.
To that end, an immense flat-bottomed kettle, three feet wide at the top, had been set over a propane burner. Nadine lit it, then raised an index finger and delivered her confit-making preamble: “Confit,” she said, “must be built from the bottom up. It must cook gently and slowly. If it cooks too fast, it’s ruined.”
Nadine issued our marching orders. I was to add the wings and necks to the kettle and let some of the fat render out from the skin. This, she reiterated, had to be done slowly, over gentle heat. Next I was to tip in a few heaping scoopfuls of the reserved duck fat, enough to nearly cover the duck parts once it melted. Then I was to stir the contents of the kettle gently to keep the meat from sticking to the bottom. The legs would go in a short while later, with more fat. The gizzards would go in last.
Michele was given the tedious job of scraping tiny stray feathers from the crook of some of the duck legs—a task that, to Nadine’s chagrin, the duck farmer had failed to perform. Michele, who had a lifelong aversion to handling raw fowl, looked unnerved by her assignment.
After the wings and necks had cooked for twenty minutes or so, I added the legs, along with a baseball-size dollop of reserved fat.
Nadine took the spoon from me and added a slab twice the size of the one I’d just dropped in, scolding me for being too timid. The truth was, I found the sheer quantity of fat Nadine was using to be intimidating. For better or worse, fat was an ingredient that I, like many Americans of my generation, had been taught to use sparingly if at all, and even to regard as something bad or dangerous. So pervasive was the anti-fat dogma in contemporary American food culture that, despite my knowing full well that fat gives flavor and richness, and despite the gustatory rewiring that had resulted from my Gascony experience, I had apparently not extinguished a reflexive squeamishness when faced with cooking with many pounds of fat.
What’s more, making confit is not pretty.
As the fat in Nadine’s kettle liquefied, it became turbid, taking on a soupy brown tint. The skin and flesh of the duck pieces poking out at the top were covered in a gelatinous sheen. After a while, the thick liquid in the kettle became animated, percolating like a witches’ brew. Enormous bubbles swelled and popped with a wet blorp.
Nadine came over to me while I was stirring. “Beautiful music, isn’t it?”
She told me it was
time to add the gizzards. I did so, and then put in a few more slabs of fat, which melted faster than the first ones. I stirred and listened as the music returned: blorp, blorp, blorp.
Just past noon, Jenny came in wearing a pin-striped apron and carrying a bowl of peeled onions and garlic cloves. She gave the bowl to Nadine and shook hands with me and Michele, smiling—we were familiar faces now. Nadine added the garlic and onions to the kettle, asked me to transfer custody of the wooden spoon to Jenny, and announced that it was time for lunch.
We ate roasted chicken stuffed with baguette ends, rosemary, and garlic. The bread had soaked up the chicken fat and the flavor of the garlic and turned spongy. This humble stuffing—one of the oldest paysan preparations in the book—was as delicious as the bird itself. It felt good to be out of the cold canning cellar, appetites awakened by our morning’s work. We emptied a bottle of Madiran, and Michele and I listened to Nadine talk about the past in her fond and melancholic way.
When we returned to the arrière cuisine, Jenny was seated dutifully next to the burbling kettle, the wooden spoon held upright on her knee. A fine haze hung in the air, which was infused with the scent of cooked fat. It felt like a scene from another age—and yet one could find a similar picture in homes and on farms all over the Gers at this time of year.
It was nearly dark outside by the time we’d removed all the meat from the kettle, strained the cooking fat, and scraped out the gelatinous fond from the bottom of the duck-fat tubs—this Nadine would use to make her beloved graisserons. The duck parts would keep fine in the chilly canning room overnight, and Nadine would start putting them in jars tomorrow. Now she had the makings of months’ worth of meals: The necks would be used for soups and stews, the gizzards for salmis and salads, the wings for garbures, the legs for unexpected company. As for the fat, she could use it again the next time she made confit. Duck fat was the ultimate reusable asset.
Nadine gave us a few duck legs, wrapped in foil, to take home. She expressed frustration that we wouldn’t be sticking around Gascony long enough to wait until the duck’s flavor deepened—confit, she said, doesn’t really come into its own until it’s mellowed for two or three months. Our imminent departure, in fact, seemed to cause Nadine more annoyance than sadness: Before we said good-bye, she rattled off a list of old-time Gascon foods she hadn’t yet taught me how to make: sanguette, alicot, graisserons, rillettes d’oie. In Nadine’s mind, Gascon cuisine was a gospel to be spread for the good of humanity, and she was clearly worried that her chosen emissary was going out into the world less than fully prepared.
That night I crisped three of the duck legs in the oven for dinner. I’m sure Nadine had been right about them getting better with age, but I can say without reservation it was the best confit I’ve ever had.
24
Apéro
I don’t know if there’s a meaningful irony in this, but it wasn’t until the end of our time in Plaisance that I had the following epiphany: The most ingenious part of mealtime in Gascony is the beginning.
The Gascons have taken the quaint French tradition of the pre-meal apéritif and Gasconized it. Their heures de l’apéro—especially during the holidays—are long, extravagantly provisioned, and enlivened with ceremonial flair: decanters, serving trays, ice bowls, toothpick holders, cocktail napkins—all of it meant to convey that, upon taking possession of your glass of floc or pastis or whiskey, you have agreed to leave mundane cares behind and give yourself over fully to the sacramental rites of imbibing and feasting. It is not unusual in Gascony to be invited to a cocktail gathering—I use the word cocktail loosely, as the drinks are usually not strong—that’s supplied with more food than a typical American family’s dinner. Pâté, saucisson, homemade cheese puffs, crudités, nuts, crackers, cheese-stuffed olives, brandade-stuffed peppers, foie gras–stuffed duck hearts—these are a bare sampling of the vast panoply of Gascon cocktail snacks. A proper Gascon apéro (the word denotes both the ritual and the drink) can feel like a meal unto itself, and even when it’s a simpler affair, an enveloping feeling of détente and good cheer prevails.
Our final week in the Gers was filled with a dizzying succession of holiday-season apéros—some more elaborate than others—to which our fast-approaching departure imparted a certain emotional charge.
The longest, and probably the most Gascon, apéro we attended was at Alphonse’s. He lived in a renovated eighteenth-century farmhouse on the edge of town, just past Plaisance’s retirement home. He and Lorette put out the biggest snack spread I’d ever seen outside a catered event: homemade pâté-en-croûte canapés, toasts topped with more homemade pâté, baked cheese tartlets drizzled with chile oil, sliced chorizo, sliced saucisson, pimiento olives, slices of smoked duck breast, cornichons and some other pickled things that escape my recollection, several kinds of nuts, and, in the center of the immense glass coffee table, resting on a length of cheesecloth, one of Alphonse’s home-cured hams, its surface covered in a fine flowering of white mold, a knife lying next to it.
There would be no need for dinner.
Alphonse kicked off the evening by carving slabs of the ham, which he was quite proud of, for all of us to taste. With equal pride, he showed me his well-stocked bar. I studied the collection of spirits and liqueurs, then glanced over at the coffee table, my gaze falling on the bowl of pimiento olives.
I asked Alphonse to slide the ice bucket my way.
Borrowing a glass pitcher and a slotted spoon from the kitchen, I made two straight-up gin martinis. Alphonse took a sip of his, raised his eyebrows, and looked admiringly at the drink.
“Strong!” he said. “But sophisticated.”
He’d summed it up nicely.
That evening’s cocktail hour lasted three. Alphonse liked his martini so much that he asked for a second. I obliged him. Then he brought out the wine. By ten o’clock, the coffee table was covered with crumbs and balled-up napkins, and Charlotte was asleep in my lap. Michele, who’d been soldiering through a long conversation with Lorette and her visiting sister about baking, was looking ready for bed, too.
When we got up to leave, Alphonse boozily draped an arm over my shoulder. “We’ve gotten pretty used to having you in Plaisance,” he said.
I told him we’d gotten pretty used to being there.
I exited before things could get mushy.
A few days later Alain Lagors invited us to join him for drinks at the home of Jacqueline Sanvert, the Anglophobic nonagenarian we’d met at the cookout in Préchac back in the summer. This apéro was the most elegant one I’d ever been to, in Gascony or anywhere in France.
Jacqueline lived by herself in a wide row house near Plaisance’s town hall. She remembered all of us by name, and crouched down to plant a long, wet kiss on Charlotte’s cheek.
“Entrez,” she said, favoring the formal mode of address, in the accepted manner of the haute bourgeoisie. “The others are already here.”
Jacqueline, short and sprightly and sporting a flame-orange cravat, led us into a spacious sitting room with an urbane, old-money vibe: pristine wainscoting, discreetly positioned reading lamps, contemporary furniture in taupes and beiges. Lagors was ensconced on a couch beneath a moody oil painting of a Spanish maiden playing a lyre. In an armchair opposite him sat a friend of theirs named Aline, who, when we approached, popped a cracker into her mouth, rubbed her fingers together to release some crumbs onto a napkin, and shook our hands with a deferential tilt of the head.
We took our seats around a marble-topped coffee table laid with a porcelain platter of homemade Parmesan tuiles and tapenade toasts. Next to this sat a gleaming two-handled silver serving tray that held a few heavy-bottomed drinking glasses, a bottle of Spanish gin, a bottle of tonic, a bottle of Banyuls wine, and a glazed ceramic decanter in the shape of a goose.
Jacqueline invited Charlotte to sit on the rug and gave her a game of pick-up sticks and an enormous candy shish kebab. These would keep her happily occupied for the remainder of the evening, which wou
ld go on nearly as long as Alphonse’s soirée. Despite a few attempts by Lagors to steer the conversation toward subjects of a historical bent, the talk that night centered entirely, and without the least digression, on la gastronomie.
Jacqueline, a native of Pau, had traveled widely in her day, and now she spoke rapturously of dinners at the Carlyle and platters of fruits de mer at Le Procope, occasionally tilting her head back, eyes closed, and uttering a respectful “Mm, dé-li-cieux.” Aline rhapsodized in a similar vein about the bonnes tables she’d dined at in the region: Les Puits Saint Jacques, La Table des Cordeliers, La Bonne Auberge. When I mentioned that Michele and I had recently had lunch at Les Prés d’Eugénie, Aline moaned and rolled her eyes ecstatically, and Jacqueline gasped, leaned back in her chair, and began fanning herself with her hand.
Infused with the holiday-cocktails spirit—not to mention the spirits of holiday cocktails—I ended the evening by inviting all of them to the moulin for drinks the next night. Michele looked a little startled by my impromptu proposal. But it seemed like the friendly thing to do. We had bought a small Christmas tree and had decorated it with festive lights, and (I’d nearly forgotten) I was in possession of a salt-cured duck breast that, if I’d marked my calendar correctly, was finally ready to eat. I decided I’d invite Henri and Monique, too, to liven the mix.
The next evening, I cut into the duck breast, which had been buried in coarse salt in the bottom of our fridge for weeks—I had been afraid to hang it, given the house’s dampness and its resident population of spiders and mice. The duck had undergone a magical transformation in its salt sarcophagus. The red flesh had become firm, like prosciutto, and darkened to a deep garnet hue. The fat had become smooth and pearly. The magret had the salty, funky tang that all good dry-cured meats possess, but with an extra richness. I sliced the breast thinly, fanned out the pieces on a plate, and smiled upon my creation.
Duck Season Page 22