by Camas Davis
That night at Robert’s, she spoke to me of a family of pig farmers and butchers in Gascony who “did pork the right way,” of a beekeeper who was teaching her how to produce honey, of a goat cheese maker and a foie gras duck-and-goose farmer whom she often took her paying students and visitors to meet.
I told her I was working on a story about bavette, a French cut of beef I’d just tried at a new local restaurant I was reviewing, and that it had been difficult for me to get anyone at the restaurant, or any butcher shops in town, for that matter, to tell me what part of the animal the cut had come from, or why bavette tasted so good. The steaks had come to the kitchen already cut, vacuum-sealed in plastic, sent from some processing facility two states over and delivered by a distributor, so the chef hadn’t really had to think much further than that.
“Whole-animal butchery is a lost art in America,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s all done in big processing facilities behind closed doors.”
I’d gotten some sense of this several years earlier, while helping Saveur’s food editor, Melissa Hamilton, work on a story about an old-school Italian American butcher shop in New Jersey that she’d grown up going to. The owners of the butcher shop, the Maresca brothers, Emil and Joe, sourced whole animals from local farms and did all the killing and cutting of those carcasses themselves, something very few “butcher” shops did anymore, opting instead to buy precut meat from distributors who bought from factory farms. When I spoke with Emil and Joe by phone, I sensed I was speaking to men who were mournful that their lifelong trade and knowledge would not be passed on. They were a dying breed who spoke defiantly of grocery chains, big-box stores, and confined animal-feeding operations as if they were meteorites falling from the sky, headed straight toward their well-oiled wooden butcher block. I knew little to nothing about butchery, but Melissa and I had talked, very briefly, about the idea of taking over the shop together when the brothers retired. “No one else is going to take it over,” I remember Melissa saying wistfully.
“On the other hand,” I said to Kate, “a few chefs in town are breaking down whole sides of pig on their kitchen counters.” I’d recently noticed that a growing number of chefs in Portland were teaching themselves butchery and putting things on the menu like pig-head pâté and sweetbread salad. Shortly before I was laid off, I’d helped produce a photo shoot for our annual “Best Restaurants” package, featuring an up-and-coming chef named Gabriel Rucker, who’d just opened Le Pigeon. For the shoot, he’d agreed to pose for us sitting next to a pig head at one of his dining room tables. Later, as the photographer and I sat sifting through the resulting shots, I’d stared at the pig head in those photos and thought, There’s something important there, without really knowing why I felt that way. We lost at least a few subscribers because of those photos.
“It’s funny how pigs’ heads and sweetbreads are considered novelty here,” Kate said. “In France, they’re a way of life.”
At the time, I didn’t really understand what she meant by that, but I wanted to find out. What would it mean to have pig heads and sweetbreads be a way of life, not just novelty? How would I eat differently? How would I think about meat differently?
And then I surprised myself by blurting, “I kind of secretly want to be a butcher.”
“You should come visit me in Gascony, then,” Kate said, and I thought, Yeah, maybe someday. Maybe in another lifetime.
After that, whenever I saw Robert, he’d nudge me. “So when are you going to go to France to become a butcher?” he’d ask.
“Just as soon as I quit my job,” I’d say, joking. “Any day now.”
Two years later, while watching robins hunt for worms in a backyard that was not my backyard, I called Robert.
“Hello, dear,” he said.
“I’m ready to go to France,” I told him.
“I’ll connect you with Kate,” Robert said. “You remember her, right? You met her in my kitchen. She’ll help you. Now, when are you coming to dinner?”
You met her in my kitchen. All the people I want to meet always end up in the kitchen.
“Of course I remember her,” I said. “She’s hard to forget.”
I wrote to Kate. I have no money, I said. But I want to come to Gascony and learn butchery. I’m a carpenter’s daughter. I’m willing to work. I’ll paint your fences.
Kate didn’t even flinch. Of course you want to come to France to learn butchery. Of course I will help you. Of course you can do manual labor for me. Of course I will put you to work. I will feed you, too. House you. Take you to markets. Teach you to make charcuterie. We can visit Armagnac makers, too, if you like. And goat cheese makers. And bread bakers. There’s a family of pig farmers and butchers, the Chapolards. They own a seed-to-sausage operation. They’ll teach you when I can’t. You’ll work in their cutting room. You’ll go to the abattoir and work the market with them. And there’s a duck-and-goose farmer named Jehanne. She wins gold medals for her rillettes and foie gras. You should meet her. We need to talk about resources, financial and otherwise. Ways to generate income to pay for pigs and pedicures. It’s doable. Let’s put our thinking caps on.
Pigs and pedicures. Was Kate even real? Had I imagined her?
She was very real. And she was serious about taking me in, in trade for work and a very small amount of money, Tom Sawyer style. A week later, I bought a plane ticket.
“I’m sorry,” I told Will. And I was sorry. Sorry to not be able to contribute much cash to our new household, but to have found an unused and not-yet-expired credit card in the back of my filing cabinet to pay for this trip. Sorry to have moved in, only to disappear a few short months later.
“I want you to be happy,” he said. “Just don’t come back from France and leave me.”
“I’d never do that,” I said. “I’d be a terrible person if I did that,” and I meant it.
He bought me a ring that said YOURS on the inside. And as a parting gift, he gave me a palm-size silver figurine of a fat pig. On the side of the pig he’d carved the crude lines of a butcher’s chart. On the belly he etched the words PORK DRUNK LOVE. It felt like a proposal of sorts, one I accepted without ever actually saying the word yes.
And then I was gone.
* * *
—
AT THE TRAIN STATION CAFÉ, Kate bought us two glasses of red wine and a plate of steak frites, à point—medium rare. In the States we’re often charged for this particular meal at restaurants as though it were fancy. Here it was fairly commonplace, like a burger or a ham sandwich, inexpensive and also delicious.
“This week,” she said, “I’ll take you to a few different markets so you can get the lay of the land. Maybe tonight we’ll make something with foie gras. And it’s already cherry season, so maybe we’ll make a cherry clafoutis.”
“Maybe tonight we’ll make something with foie gras” probably sounds fancy. I think maybe it did to me, at the time—I had always felt fancy going to Robert’s foie gras parties. What I didn’t realize was that while Gascons considered food like foie gras (fattened goose or duck liver) to be special enough that it should be eaten with reverence, they also considered it simple, good food. And simple, good food was in abundance here because people worked hard to produce it. Although various foie gras dishes, as well as many other traditional Gascon recipes, have been co-opted by sophisticated urban restaurants that charge hefty prices for them, these were born of the Gascon countryside. But I didn’t know this yet. And so, when I would describe these dishes to others back home, or send photos of them, I got a lot of “ohhhh, how fancy” comments from friends and family, and I did not question their judgment.
I devoured my steak—which I told Kate tasted a good bit more like actual meat than any steak I’d had in the States—and washed it down with the red wine, which captured the flavor of that dirty red ocher of Toulouse in all the right ways. Then we crammed my overstuffed suitcase in
to the tiny trunk of Kate’s Peugeot and crossed over the Garonne River once again, past the tiny town of Brax, over the invisible boundary that makes up the panhandle borders of the village called Sainte-Colombe-en-Bruilhois (pronounced Sawnta-Cohlome-on-Broolwah—oh, the glorious vowels!), down a narrow, potholed road lined with fields of sunflower stalks and apple orchards covered in gauzy netting, into a tiny hamlet—a speck of a dozen houses on a map, a Gascon version of the Fruitway Road I grew up on—known around these parts as Camont, to the sturdy stone pigeonnier, a beautifully haphazard structure whose ragged walls contained layers of broken brick, coarse mortar, smooth river rock, and jagged scraps of limestone, which Kate had converted into a rustic cooking school and guesthouse, set on the Canal du Midi. After years of living on a river barge and captaining it through the canals of Europe, this is the place where Kate had anchored her barge, the Julia Hoyt, for good in 1989. This same barge had brought her to Gascony, helping her find the friends and mentors who taught her how to cook the Gascon way, lessons she would now, I hoped, impart to me.
As we pulled into Kate’s gravel driveway, her gargantuan mutt of a dog, Bacon, greeted us by barking and jumping up and down. His bloodshot brown eyes expressed guilt and annoyance simultaneously. His big mouth, with a dog beard hanging from it, gaped open, panting. Large patches of black wiry hair interrupted the rest of his dusty white coat.
“Bacon. Sit. Couché. Couché. Sit. Lie down.” Bacon kept barking at us. “He’s such a big baby,” Kate said, turning to Bacon and scratching him behind the ears. Kate explained that he had come from the Chapolards’ pig farm. “The Chapolards say he’s half pig, half dog.” That seemed about right. He reminded me of photos I’d seen of old pig breeds.
Everywhere I turned, I encountered a different garden, each blooming with distinctive personalities. Bright-pink and purple hydrangeas. Climbing nectarine-orange roses. Bay laurel. Spirea. Sage. Rosemary. Thyme. Human hands had planted everything in front of me, but the entire place felt savage in its beauty. The mustard greens had already gone to seed. There were carrots to be picked, lettuce and nasturtiums that still needed to be planted.
“So,” she said to me after I entered, for the first time, her earthy yellow kitchen, with its red stone fireplace and matching stone floors, cracked and worn by the feet of her many guests, after she’d put on water to boil and poured us a special tisane made from dried mint and lavender from her garden, “you’ve got seven weeks in Gascony. What do you want to learn?”
And then, there I was cooking foie gras in the kitchen with Kate, buying duck prosciutto at Gascony’s markets, stomping around the Chapolards’ pig farm, negotiating whole sides of pig in their cutting room, wandering the stark corridors of the abattoir, face-to-face with the real, honest-to-God, genuine article.
PART II
SIX
Before I stepped onto the Chapolards’ farm, Dominique, one of the four Chapolard brothers, and his wife, Christiane, wanted to have me over for a proper dinner. Plus, Kate wanted to make sure I was well steeped in Gascony’s market stalls, butcher shops, and boulangeries. And so a week went by before I even picked up a knife or met a pig.
Getting oriented inside of Kate’s world meant, first and foremost, entering into her particular brand of well-cared-for, formalized wildness, acclimating to her fast-moving brain, her unpredictable rhythm, her complex social network. Kate was a passionate improviser whose boundaries between home and work were nearly nonexistent. Her kitchen served as her central office, but her work territory stretched from her kitchen to her outdoor dining table, then out farther to her potager, where we harvested fresh herbs, beans, tomatoes, radishes, carrots, and bitter greens, to the chicken shed, where we gathered eggs and occasionally harvested roosters and ducks, then to her neighbors’ down the road, the Sabadinis, who, nearly every winter since she had moved to Gascony, had invited her to help them kill a pig and turn it into pâté and sausage. And out, farther still, into the market stalls and farms and dining room tables of the neighboring villages, where she met people like the Chapolards, who first taught her that a good boudin noir should always be cooked and served with apples. All of these people were farmers and growers, cooks and gardeners, passionate eaters, too, carrying on the traditions that had been passed down to them. They were Kate’s extended French family, a family perpetually sitting down to an everlasting meal together. “It’s a life, not a lifestyle,” Kate often liked to say.
So how did Kate make a living, a life? With either money or time and skills, people from all over the world paid Kate for a seat at her endless feast. We paid Kate to introduce us to, as she liked to say, the butcher, the baker, the Armagnac maker. The goat cheese maker, too. The beekeeper, the winemaker, the bean grower, the strawberry farmer, the foie gras producer. Which meant that Kate’s house was filled with lost people like me, who had little money, a lot of time, and a willingness to work for food, as well as people not like me—people with plenty of money but little time. For some, a stay at Kate’s place was simply a break from their lives. There were plenty of high-maintenance empty nesters who simply wished to drink good wine and tell their friends about their first taste of true foie gras. For others, visiting Kate signaled the beginning of a life change. There were young women looking to open their own bakeries back home. Lawyers who had quit their jobs to start farms. Burned-out sous-chefs. Culinary school dropouts hungry to learn about food beyond hotel cuisine. Couples on honeymoons looking to bond over cassoulet. People searching for a way of life that felt, for whatever reason, impossible to find back home. Refugees from a land where the meat was bland and the bread had no nutrients. All of us in search of flavor, knowledge, connection.
Kate helped us find all of this. She was our foie gras whisperer, our jambon translator, our cassoulet queen. She schooled us in the Gascon way of happy hour by handing us a glass of sweet Floc de Gascogne, a vin de liqueur made from wine fortified with Armagnac, and a plate piled high with thick slices of saucisson. She taught us how to cook by taking us to the market and asking, “So, what’s for dinner?” The answer should always be: whatever is in season, grown by whomever you can trust.
* * *
—
DURING MY TIME at Kate’s, I wasn’t the only one working in exchange for food, knowledge, and a place to lay my head. A man my age, a sous-chef named Jonathan, had come from Portland via Robert Reynolds, too. At first, Jonathan was standoffish. When he wasn’t raking leaves or mowing the lawn or weeding or cleaning Kate’s barge, he lay in one of her hammocks, reciting French to himself. Once or twice a day, he’d saunter into the kitchen and begin silently chopping whatever needed to be chopped. Together we planted seeds, washed dishes, spoke cordially to each other. He, like me, wanted to learn the art of Gascon butchery.
Jonathan and I, along with a few other lost souls who came and went during my time there, were Kate’s summer entourage, moving from bedroom to barge to hammock at night, depending on how many clients Kate was hosting. We knew how to fit into the gaps Kate opened for us. Every once in a while, we probably drank more of her Armagnac than we should have, but she was kind in her scolding.
Kate’s house was as eclectic as the clientele and friends and boat girls and garden boys she attracted. By “house” I really mean a sprawling indoor/outdoor complex of outbuildings, sheds, barns, trailers, her barge, gardens, patios, pantries, and lawns that I came to call Kate’s French Commune. Inside her renovated stone pigeonnier—built in the 1790s for roosting pigeons and doves, once commonly kept for their meat and eggs and the fertilizing powers of their guano—where Kate taught and hosted students and guests, there were crocks full of homemade vinegar. A chandelier with dried hams hanging from it. Stacks of cookbooks along the stairs. A baby-blue bedroom—my room whenever guests weren’t sleeping in it—with a claw-foot tub, a bed, a writing desk. Above the blue room, a sunny yellow bedroom with two beds and a Rapunzel-let-down-your-hair window. The walls and floors were made from thic
k stone, but the sounds of clanking pots, sizzling leeks, boiling soups, and laughing guests snuck in to greet me through the crack under my door. I could hear everything, all the time.
I came to think of Kate’s kitchen on the ground floor of the pigeonnier as a character itself, singing a song of abundance: stacks of pots and pans, tins of tea piled ten high, wineglasses, Floc glasses, water glasses, Armagnac glasses, ramekins, cutting boards, tiny clay vessels meant for serving olives. Hand-cranked pepper grinders. Wooden bowls, each filled with a different kind of salt. Dried herbs hanging from nails. Handmade cassoles overflowing with bright-red tomatoes and runner beans and buttery lettuces. Drawers in the tiny fridge filled to the brim with stinky charcuterie and ripe, oozing cheese.
Outside, baskets hung from worn limestone walls. Six different kinds of roses ran along the pathways. An old circular wooden table that seated eight, perched underneath a sprawling arbor tangled with grapevines. A pull-along trailer Kate permanently parked and transformed into her office for the summer. A duck corral. A toolshed. A cold storage room she called her piggery, where she dried hams and duck prosciutto and stored her sealed jars of duck confit and jams and beans. Ceramic sculptures. Laundry hanging from lines strung between the pigeonnier and the barn. Hammocks strung from trees. A boules court. A black cat drinking milk from the barn window. An orange-and-white cat watching all the bustle from beneath a spirea bush. Kate’s well-loved, fully furnished barge, anchored out back in the Canal du Midi, where Kate slept, and sometimes Jonathan and I did, too. An outdoor wood-fired oven perched atop cement blocks set atop an old metal table. Rusted wheelbarrows in which we’d build fires. A barn full of suitcases and more books, ratty umbrellas, old letters.