by Camas Davis
I recently befriended a woman who, when I am feeling pessimistic and down, likes to say to me, “I believe things will work out and they always do. I live my life in abundance. You should try it sometime.”
Kate most definitely lived her life in abundance. She was a collector of people, objects, ideas, and ingredients. Everything, everyone, belonged until proved otherwise. There was always someone to talk to, always work to be done. There was always aperitif hour, too. Always a long lunch, a leisurely dinner. Always time for bike rides along the canal, and for swinging in the hammock.
“We’re on Gascon time,” Kate often said, and by that she also meant we were on Kate time. After ten years working long, disciplined magazine days without much rest, it took some getting used to.
* * *
—
BY MY THIRD DAY at Kate’s, I was stripping all the sheets from the beds in preparation for her next guests. Sweeping the floors, cleaning toilets. But then there was a need to head to the market and stock up on food for the days of entertaining and teaching that lay ahead. So we were off, driving the back roads—it never felt like there were front roads in Gascony—to Agen, to fetch whatever the market gave us. My first week it was fava beans, cherries, white strawberries, white asparagus, peas, a melon or two. Then we moved on to green asparagus, red strawberries, some early tomatoes, and all manner of soft, buttery, purple and green lettuces, some bitter and some sweet.
We briefly stopped at an outdoor market under a raised concrete parking structure in Agen, where Kate located a man with cages of live chickens and roosters in the back of his parked truck and began talking to him in rapid French.
“Next week I’ll buy a couple chickens from him,” she told me. “Our quarterly fox attack just cost me a few.”
After the outdoor market, we drove to an indoor market, where a man with a timid smile, standing in front of a mound of melons, nodded at us. I picked a melon up to smell it, but the man said something curt in French and took it from me. He set it back down, wagged his finger, and picked up another one, looking to Kate, because clearly I did not know what I was doing.
“It’s his job to tell you which melon is the best for you,” Kate said. “It’s an insult to pick up the melon yourself and inspect it, because it means you don’t trust him.”
Kate turned to him and spoke a few polite words in French. Without letting us touch or smell the melon he’d chosen, he gently placed it in a bag, as a mother might place a baby in a bassinet, and handed it to me, bowing his head slightly. Kate gave him a few coins.
“He asked me when we thought we would be eating it,” Kate said. “I told him tomorrow, so he picked one that would taste good tomorrow.”
Kate led me to a goat cheese stall, waving to several fromagers and charcutiers along the way. She bought a few tiny medallions of chèvre, no bigger than the palm-size, smooth river rocks I often collected from the Umpqua River, where my parents now lived, back home.
“These are small,” she said, “but their flavor is so intense that you only need a sliver to feel satisfied.”
We headed to the meat counter. Six or seven people stood in front of the meat case, and the six or seven men working behind the counter tended to each of them, looking full of pride in their red-and-black-pinstriped short-sleeved shirts, tailored to show off their muscular frames, and their white butcher’s aprons, with just one strap that reached over one shoulder, so that the other arm was free to do all the movements required of a butcher.
The case was long, filled with so many cuts of meat—lamb, beef, pork, chicken, and duck, all laid out in such an advanced manner, organized by species but also by cut and by cooking method required—that stepping back from the case to take in its entirety resembled the experience of viewing a Chuck Close portrait up close and then from afar. I thought of the meat counters back home, where ground meat and sausages were king, with maybe a tied roast or two, and a lot of steaks and chops to fill the case out. This case held a good deal more cuts than that, many I didn’t recognize.
Bright-red-and-white tile covered the wall behind the men, who spoke in polite French to their customers and ripped squares of butcher paper off of rolls hung from the ceiling. Dried sausages covered in white mold also hung from the ceiling. Through a glass window I could see hulking sides of beef and pork hanging—the pork looked almost as red as the beef, not the pale pink of the pork I ate back home. The counters they cut on were wooden, oiled by animal fat alone, with deeply worn grooves that had formed from years of cutting and cleaving. Even the sturdy red-and-white twine they used to tie the roasts was beautiful.
“This is a different kind of operation than the Chapolards have,” Kate said. “These guys buy whole carcasses from small local farmers. They get them from the slaughterhouses and then cut them up and turn them into everything in this case. They’re butchers only. But they are like a cheesemonger or an affineur. You won’t find commodity meat at a shop like this in France.”
Affineurs are the people who buy fresh cheese from cheesemakers and age them. And a cheesemonger is someone who doesn’t just sell cheese, but handpicks it from the fromagers—the cheesemakers—and dairies. They are shepherds, in a way, of a product that requires careful curation, handling, and explanation. To think of a butcher this way felt new. They weren’t just slingers of meat who opened up boxes of precut muscles and set them in their display case. They were trusted liaisons between the field and the plate. Their customers knew they had chosen the best product for them. Did we have anything resembling that back home in Portland? Not really. Not that I knew of. Not yet, anyway.
Kate looked at her watch. “Oh, no. Their train is already here!” It was time to go pick up her new students, Connie and Jenny, who wanted to learn all things baking during their stay.
“We’ll eat heavy on the pastry this week,” Kate said on the way to the train station. “Pie, croustade, tarts . . . pâté en croûte. We’ll visit a few boulangeries.” There would be salads made of fresh bitter greens, too, and meats both roasted and grilled, salted and cured, but the lessons would be in the language of flour, water, and butter. As Kate planned her lessons out loud, I wagered a guess that they’d never feel like lessons—they’d just feel like dinner.
SEVEN
We found Connie and Jenny standing out front of the train station, looking perturbed. Connie sported a well-coiffed, honeyed-blond bob resembling the rounded top of a brioche. Jenny’s hairdo matched Connie’s but had more of a bleach-blond hue. They hailed from Colorado Springs. When Connie spoke, I imagined the large bubbles that form on the sides of a glass of soda poured from the can, rising up into the air. Connie told us she’d homeschooled her children and that when they left home, her husband—who, she hinted, maybe had his own private jet—had bought her a commercial bread oven, which they’d installed in their three-car garage. She told us she wanted to turn an old house in her neighborhood into a bakery, “if only I could find a cheap Mexican boy to do all the work.”
Jenny revealed that she’d just recently been pushed out of her family’s medical supply company. She’d found God and dedicated her life to saving orphans in Brazil. And she was taking medication for her eczema, which made her nauseated and likely unable to eat most of the food we would be cooking for her. She seemed forlorn in a permanent way, whereas Connie seemed perpetually perky and positive. Connie was fit; Jenny was doughy. Connie liked to tell people what to do; Jenny wanted someone to tell her. They were perfect for each other. When I told them I’d left my magazine career and wanted to become a butcher, Jenny blinked at me and then said, with hesitation, “How . . . interesting.”
That evening, after they’d settled into their upstairs room with the Rapunzel-let-down-your-hair window, we got to work immediately, the four of us cooking dinner in Kate’s kitchen, with Jonathan bobbing in and out as needed. While we cooked, Kate poured us little, delicate glasses of white Floc. It tasted a touch honeyed
but with just the right amount of acidity—a perfectly placed semicolon between afternoon and evening.
Along with the Floc, she served us slices of cured duck prosciutto stuffed with foie gras. Eventually, Kate said, she’d take me to meet Jehanne Rignault, the duck-and-goose farmer who had made this epiphanic creation. But I wanted to know how she made it now—I’d never tasted anything like it.
“I’m still earning Jehanne’s trust, so I don’t have all the details yet,” Kate admitted. “She salts two duck breasts with the skin on, then salts really fresh foie gras and puts that in between the breasts, and trusses it all together. She hangs it to dry for a few weeks in a cool, not-too-humid environment, like my piggery, until it’s lost enough moisture that it’s safe to eat, just like prosciutto or dried ham.” I knew that all of the delicious, mostly imported, cured meats I bought at various delis back home were made this way, but I’d never really had to imagine the process, and it had never occurred to me to apply the process to duck breasts, let alone fattened duck liver.
The breast meat was a deep purple, the color of the venison and duck jerky I sometimes ate as a kid. It was firm but not hard, and it tasted salty like ham but with the added richness of that thick layer of duck fat and skin. The process of drying and fermenting had concentrated the meat and fat into a nearly inexplicable flavor—a deep, dark elementality. And in between these two already transformative duck breasts, yet another layer of complexity: the salted, semi-dried foie gras. Not a semicolon, but a colon, an opening onto an inordinate plane of complexity. Words to describe the flavor of that creamy, fattened liver loomed for an instant in my head, but just as I was about to utter each word, it disappeared.
“No wonder this shit is so controversial,” I said. Anything with complexity always is, and the controversy always serves to reduce its object of ire to something so much less complex than the sum of its parts. Jenny blinked aggressively at me. She was doing that a lot. Maybe the God she had recently discovered didn’t like swearing.
“They’re trying to ban foie gras in California,” Connie said, just a tad too righteously for my taste. I noticed she hadn’t touched her slice.
“So are you planning on eating that?” I asked, picking a fight. Why would you come to Gascony and not eat this?
Kate chose the route of distraction. “I’m about to make a savory tart with tomatoes and chard and onions. Connie, why don’t you make the crust.”
Connie turned to find an apron. I grabbed the foie-gras-stuffed duck prosciutto from her plate and did not regret eating it.
* * *
—
THE NEXT DAY, Kate was hosting a group of journalists for lunch, so in the morning she led Connie and Jenny and me in the preparation of a salade gascogne, composed of crisp lettuces plucked straight from her garden and dressed lightly with a subtle mustard vinaigrette. We topped the salad with seared and sliced duck breast, foie gras pâté on toast, skewers of grilled duck tenderloin, grilled duck hearts that we marinated briefly in vinegar and shallots, and duck confit that Kate had made the previous winter and stored in tall jars in her piggery. This wasn’t something people usually ate at home, Kate said. It was a dish for special occasions. The only thing I’d ever done with a duck as an adult was roast it whole and eat it in one sitting. When I was a kid, my dad and my grandpa had turned all the wild ducks they killed into jerky. In less than two hours, I’d learned how to turn one duck into five different dishes.
We set the table, poured a bottle of rosé into a decanter, and laid out the silverware and napkins and glasses just minutes before the journalists arrived. It’d been months since I talked to a journalist, so I chatted away with each of them, gossiping about the closing of several magazines in New York, the rise of Internet media, the controversial ousting of my old editor in chief at Saveur. They asked me if I would write about my time in France. I said I doubted it.
“I just want to be in the moment for now,” I said to them, to which they offered me a knowing nod. I respected them for what they did, but I did not miss my old life.
* * *
—
THAT EVENING, after another late, long dinner—a savory meat pie, a tomato-and-corn salad, charcuterie, cheese—we all retired to our respective beds. Through the ceiling of my blue room, I could hear Connie and Jenny upstairs, gossiping, complaining.
“I can’t believe Kate’s making us do the dishes. How can she possibly charge us for this?” Connie said.
“Yeah, and why isn’t she teaching us cassoulet?” Jenny said. “She’s so free-form.” Then, whispering, “Do you think she’s a hippie?”
I laughed. Having grown up in Eugene, an epicenter for America’s counterculture, Kate struck me as far from a hippie. Connie and Jenny had come looking for something specific. Maybe they wanted to wear toques and be yelled at for eight hours by a Gordon Ramsay look-alike with a stopwatch in his hand. Or maybe they just wanted to be waited on. But in the process of looking for whatever it was they hadn’t found, they’d missed all the lessons Kate was throwing right onto the kitchen counter in front of them. This was Kate’s magic. Here’s the difference between puff pastry and pie dough. Can you feel the difference with your hands? You’re kneading that bread too much. Let it rest. See how it feels now? We don’t make cassoulet in summer because the beans aren’t ready, but tomatoes are, so let’s make a tomato tart. We’ll have to make a dough that can stand up to the liquid from the tomatoes. That stack of dishes over there—that’s a sign we ate well tonight.
“I don’t know, but what about Skinny Girl?” Connie whispered back. They were talking about me. “What’s with that butchery stuff? Do you think she’s a dyke?” They both laughed.
When we’re looking desperately for something particular—a culinary lesson, a person to love or hate, an easy justification for our bad behavior, a reason for why we don’t fit in—or when we are guided solely by our self-serving expectations, we’re willing to tell ourselves whatever story we need to, no matter whether the story is true or not, and, often, no matter the cost.
I had come to France in order to stop telling myself convenient but mostly untrue stories about myself. But I had also come to France to escape the stories I had no control over, the stories other people told themselves about me. I was naïve to think I could ever escape these.
A few days before I was fired from my magazine job, I’d knelt on my office floor next to the air vent that conveniently ran from my office to my editor in chief’s, listening to her talk about me to our publisher.
“Completely insubordinate . . .”
“I can’t have her around much longer . . .”
“The staff is scared of her . . .”
“Barely knows how to write . . .”
The story my editor in chief told herself about me wasn’t altogether true—it merely justified my impending firing or layoff, or whatever it was, and, I suspect, her own insecurity. Nonetheless, I let her story shape my experience walking into the office every day. And until I arrived in France, I’d let it haunt me every day after I walked out of that office for the last time.
For Jenny and Connie, a wannabe butcher dyke and the lack of Mexicans to do their dishes had interrupted their expectations. A free-form hippie had swindled them out of their dreams and their money. They clearly weren’t going to learn anything. They’d been duped. They were probably always being duped—by Mexicans and hippies and dykes and public schools and airlines.
On the other hand, I felt I’d been delivered to a French Shangri-la. I never wanted to leave. It wasn’t that I minded so much being called a wannabe butcher dyke—I actually found it quite flattering—but I was determined to write my own story here, a truer one this time, whatever that might mean. Connie and Jenny and my editor in chief could go to hell.
Connie and Jenny left a day or two earlier than they had originally planned. We were all relieved.
EIGHT
Sunday supper at Dominique and Christiane Chapolard’s house began at one in the afternoon and ended about four hours later. When Kate and Jonathan and I entered their kitchen, they immediately put down what they were working on, kissed me on each of my cheeks, and hugged me as though we had known one another for years. Bonjour! Ça va? Bonjour! Ça va?
Delighted is not a word I use lightly, ever. But it was, I think, how we all looked and felt in that moment. And this despite the fact that these people didn’t know me, despite the fact that the payoff for taking me under their wing—I was unable to pay them much to do so—was probably not very clear. They were taking a chance on me, an unknown entity with no butchery experience, yet they didn’t seem the least bit worried. Instead they were hugging me, practically singing in French to me, pushing paper-thin slices of jambon into my hand. I wanted to stand there forever with them, absorbing their warmth.