by Camas Davis
As they prepared the meal for their guests, conversing enthusiastically with Kate, who only occasionally translated for me what they were saying, I studied the two of them. They both looked to be in their early fifties. Dominique had curly brown-and-gray hair and what struck me as a quintessentially French mustache—thick, salt-and-pepper, with ends that naturally curled up—accentuating his kind smile. “He looks even more French when he wears his beret at the market,” Kate told me. He was shorter than me, stocky, solid, firmly connected to the ground. The considered, kind meter of his voice calmed me.
Dominique’s wife, Christiane, stood a little shorter than him. Her voice often lilted up into a high, singsongy, operatic register. She possessed a stern, hawklike attention to the goings-on around her, but she also appeared friendly, open. I immediately liked my new French mère and père. After a few minutes, they shooed us outside to join the other guests on the lawn.
At least twenty people milled about out front of Dominique and Christiane’s house. The other Chapolard brothers, Bruno, Marc, and Jacques, each greeted me in a slightly formal manner, with kisses on my cheeks but no hugs, and introduced me to their wives, and at least a few of each of their children, some fully grown, others well on their way to adulthood. Madame and Monsieur Chapolard, François and Antoine, the brothers’ parents, kissed me on my cheeks and nodded silently. Kate’s svelte, tan handyman arrived with his girlfriend and child. A few of the Chapolards’ fellow producteurs at the outdoor markets where they sold their pork each week showed up, too.
“Oh, there’s Jehanne!” Kate said, pointing to a beat-up, dust-covered farm truck coming up the driveway. “She’s the duck woman I want you to meet.”
I had not stopped thinking about Jehanne’s foie-gras-stuffed duck prosciutto.
“We need to take you to her ferme auberge.” Kate was talking about Jehanne’s farm, where Jehanne fed overnight guests lunch and dinner and where she raised, slaughtered, butchered, and processed a small number of fattened ducks and geese per year and turned them into various forms of charcuterie, which she sold at markets, just like the Chapolards.
Jehanne had a weathered, tan face, graying blond hair, a square jaw, big brown eyes, and a long nose and forehead. She was aging, tired, and gorgeous all at once. As Kate explained to her why I had come to Gascony, she looked me up and down with squinting, scrutinizing eyes. She wants to be a butcher. She wants to learn about meat. Can she come watch your next slaughter? Can you show her how you butcher the meat while it’s still warm? How you make your foie gras taste so good?
“That is a secret,” Jehanne said in English, not smiling, but with a wink to me. She seemed reserved and pragmatic, but I sensed that she harbored a wilder past. We made arrangements for a visit.
Christiane offered us each small glasses of hard apple cider mixed with a little pear juice and told us to find a seat at the long table they’d set up outside. We first dined on melon wrapped with the Chapolards’ salted, smoked, and dried jambon. Then Dominique brought out a heavy ceramic pot filled with one of their pork shoulders, which he had stuffed with Gascon prunes and roasted, along with onions and golden potatoes that had caramelized in the oven, turning them creamy and sweet. Just as that steak Kate had bought me in the train station tasted more like meat than any of the meat I ate back in the States, so, too, did this pork. I told Kate this, and she assured me that once I started working with the Chapolards, I’d understand why.
We switched to a red wine from Bruilhois, a wine whose color was nearly black and whose flavors reminded me of ingredients of the same hue. Blackberries. Black currants. The color of that cured duck breast, which is now the color I think of when I think of Gascony.
Every time Kate and I bought wine at the grocery store or went to the Buzet wine cooperative and filled our big plastic jugs with wine, I marveled at how low the prices were, given the quality. Sure, some bottles were more expensive, and perhaps more nuanced than others, but none of it was swill, and “cheap” didn’t mean bad. Nor was “expensive” ever as expensive as it was in the States. Kate told me that the French thought of wine as a native right, an essential ingredient that everyone should be able to afford. Also, as with the way they ate meat and cheese, I noticed people didn’t drink very much of it. The modest pours in our glasses were for tasting and savoring, not for gulping or getting drunk, which, given my drinking habits of late, I found a bit challenging at first.
Gascon portions of food and drink were generally modest compared with American portions. And yet Gascons (and maybe the French in general) seemed to spend more time eating than Americans do—even when my goal was to have a long, leisurely dinner party for friends, they never lasted this long. The food on their plates also represented quality, not quantity, and they did very little snacking in between. In America, we take as little time as possible to finish our food, even though we have more of it on our plates. We also seem to be eating all the time—we are so very hungry, but never sated.
I read a study recently that asked people in France and the United States which word came to mind when they thought of heavy cream: whipped or unhealthy. An overwhelming majority of Americans related the word unhealthy to heavy cream. The French imagined the cream whipped, frothy, and delicious above all else. When asked whether they eat a healthy diet, a majority of Americans answered no. A majority of French subjects said they did eat healthy diets—whipped cream, duck fat, foie gras, and all. Moderation, it seemed to me, was key here, but moderation made sense only because the quality of the food and drink was so high.
Kate once complained to me that when she took her American students to eat at the Chapolards’ home or those of other French friends, and the hosts offered her students a second helping of food, her students often replied, “No, thank you. I’m stuffed!” or, “I couldn’t possibly eat another bite,” while pointing at their bellies.
“In America, that’s a compliment, but in France it’s rude to say that,” Kate said. “Now I teach my students to say, ‘J’ai bien mangé, merci.’” I have eaten well, thank you.
After supper, everyone sat back in their chairs and began talking a little slower. Dominique brought us small cups of coffee, which somehow made me sleepier. To wake us up and to cleanse our palates, Christiane served us all cold shot glasses of a slushy, frozen strawberry liquid, a cross between sorbet and a snow cone. We sang “Bon Anniversaire” to Grand-Père. Everyone spoke in French. Kate had long ago stopped translating for me. I felt sated but not stuffed, sleepy from all the words I could not understand. My eyelids drooped, and my brain denied me all possibility of linguistic comprehension. I noticed that Grand-Père had dozed off and Dominique’s eyelids were fluttering. But we all stayed at the table.
* * *
—
AT FIVE, Kate drove Jonathan and me back to her house. We each found a hammock under the tall fir trees by Kate’s boules court and swung silently in our nets. It was humid and sticky out, and the heat pushed us into a deep, warm, muddy, post-Sunday-supper coma.
Before I fell asleep, I remembered an e-mail I’d received from Will that morning, hinting that he was worried I was having an affair over in France. I hadn’t been very good at writing or calling, so I could understand why he wondered.
I am having an affair with myself, I thought. And I quite like it.
When I awoke, the sun was setting, and Kate stood over me. She’d painted on bright-red lipstick, put on a pair of midnight-blue glass earrings, and covered her shoulders with a paisley shawl in fuchsia and purple. She’d showered and found her second wind. How did she do it?
“Ready to go to the fête de l’escargot?”
The snail fest in the main village of Sainte-Colombe-en-Bruilhois. I’d been looking forward to it all week.
“I’m ready,” Jonathan declared with a level of enthusiasm I’d not yet heard him express. He rubbed his hands through his messy hair, in an attempt to smooth it down. Pe
rhaps, I remember thinking, like me, he was slowly letting down his guard, learning to relax and enjoy himself, after years spent working way too hard and taking everything way too seriously.
“I’m ready, too,” I said, groggy, with one eye open. I ran up to my blue room to put on some pants and a sweater—it still grew cold at night in this river basin.
At the fête, one of many we would go to during my time in Gascony, hairy, shirtless, sweating men stood over open flames, stirring huge paella pans of escargot. Kate’s American friends Alvin and Renee saved a table for us. We poured a little more wine, scooped garlicky snails out of their shells with flimsy toothpicks, and dipped our fries in mayonnaise. A gypsy band played from a small stage. Wispy clouds scooted lazily along the horizon. My kind of affair.
* * *
—
THAT NIGHT, lying on my bed in the blue room, a French word settled into my head and prevented me from sleeping. I wasn’t sure what prompted its arrival, but I silently repeated it over and over. Débrouillard. Perhaps I’d heard someone say it in passing, though I could not remember the context. I turned my bedside light back on and looked up the root word, brouillard, in the little French dictionary I carried everywhere. It meant “fog.” Débrouillard, I guessed, must mean “to defog.”
My first week in France had been all about the fog of travel and jet lag, the fog of being a new person in a new place. By the end of the first week, I’d just begun the process of defogging.
But when I looked up débrouillard in the same dictionary, it gave the meaning as “resourceful.” I liked the notion that to find one’s way out of the fog required resourcefulness. And then I remembered how I’d first become aware of the word. It was a few years back, when I’d been preparing for an interview with Anthony Bourdain while he was in Portland to film an episode for one of his travel shows and come across mention of the word in his book The Nasty Bits. Bourdain talked about the French word in relation to the term System D, a shorthand used in kitchens to describe a manner of thinking fast on one’s feet in response to a spur-of-the-moment challenge that arises. Employing System D, in Bourdain’s world, meant improvising to get an urgent job done, solving complex problems with whatever resources you had to work with, even if they were few, like fixing a broken piece of kitchen equipment with a teaspoon or turning a frozen mini-pizza, frostbitten from too much time spent hiding in the recesses of the freezer, into something presentable when you’ve run out of fancier hors d’oeuvres for a corporate cocktail party.
“Every kitchen has one evil genius who’s tolerated,” Bourdain once said in an interview with the Harvard Business Journal, “someone you turn to when all else fails—a rule breaker, a scamp who’s willing to make a hard and sometimes unlovely decision for expediency. There’s actually a name for this person—the débrouillard, the person who gets you out of a jam.”
The D in System D might be traced back to the noun débrouillard, or it might refer back to the verbs se débrouiller and se démerder, both of which mean “to make do, to manage, especially in an adverse situation.” It seemed to me that débrouillard wasn’t just a noun or an adjective or a verb but a philosophical state of mind, one that required you to be fully in the world as it presented itself to you.
I couldn’t truthfully say that I’d consciously chosen this particular philosophical state of mind—unemployment and an early onset midlife crisis surrounding the meaning of love and the value of work had forced me in this direction. Everything had gone to shit back home, so I’d become my own débrouillard and made a risky and perhaps unlovely decision to leave everyone and everything I knew. In the spirit of débrouillardise, I was attempting to forge a clear path for myself into a world dominated by men, a world that is often associated with the darker side of eating, what with the blood and guts and bone involved in turning animals into dinner. The next morning, when I stepped into the Chapolards’ cutting room for the first time, I was forced, finally, into the immediate present, into whatever stood right in front of me, forced to draw from my own resources in order to make my way. And in making my way, I felt tremendous relief.
NINE
We were all dressed in white. White rubber boots. White coats. The Chapolard brothers wore coats with hoods, which they pulled over their heads to keep warm and to keep their hair from contacting the meat. Dominique, Marc, and Bruno all held knives in their hands. Jacques roamed around outside, tending to the pigs in his blue coveralls. Every once in a while I caught a glimpse of him through the one small window in the Chapolards’ salle de découpe, the cutting room, walking from the pig barns to a large silo of grain to a tractor and back again.
All five women in the room were gathered around one table, wearing white hairnets, hard at work. Dominique’s wife, Christiane, stood next to Marc’s wife, Cecile, who stood next to Marjorie, a young Frenchwoman who was enrolled in a nearby agricultural school to become a butcher and had recently begun staging with the Chapolards. Kate was there, too, to help orient me on my first day, to translate for me, but soon my French mother hen, my linguistic lifeline, would leave me and I would have to navigate this language on my own, in this tiny room with so many people and so many cuts of meat I did not know.
The cutting room was kept at around forty-five degrees, but outside it was summer, so the brothers were dressed in short white shorts, exposing their hairy legs, nearly as thick as whole hams, to the air-conditioned elements. They didn’t seem to mind the cold. I, on the other hand, had covered my skinny legs in tight black jeans. A black turtleneck and a cotton sweatshirt kept my torso and neck warm, but barely. I was swimming in a white cotton butcher’s coat meant for someone much larger than me, and I’d buttoned it up to my chin and turned the collar up. The Chapolards were a tidy clan, but nevertheless, the floor was slippery with fat and water—par for the course in the land of butchery. Even when I tried to stand still, I slid in my too big boots, a clumsy fawn just learning to use her legs and feet.
The unspoken rules of the cutting room: Keep your elbows in. When one person changes positions, or needs salt for the jambons, or is ready to bring a lug of meat to the grinder, adjust accordingly. It was that tight. The Chapolards’ salle de découpe was the size of a deluxe Airstream at best. Part of an old aboveground winemaking cellar built before the brothers’ grandfather and great-uncle bought it after the First World War it was, like Kate’s pigeonnier, made of limestone rubble, rock, brick, and mortar. Worn brown and gray stone outside. White vinyl walls and fluorescent lights inside.
The long, narrow cutting room had four successive doorways on the right-hand side, leading into smaller rooms. Dominique began giving me a tour. First, on the right, was a large walk-in refrigerator, even colder than the room they cut meat in, with an entrance from the outside so that they could pull up with their truck and unload carcasses easily. The walk-in was mostly empty this early Monday afternoon, save for a couple of buckets and sets of organs from each of the ten pigs that were killed at the abattoir that morning, the abattoir where I had earlier—very early, in fact—witnessed the slaughter of that seven-hundred-pound sow, owned by a different farmer, who now had a whole lot of sausage to make. Dominique pointed to a blue bucket full of bright-red liquid.
“Le sang,” he said. Blood.
“Le sang,” I repeated.
He pointed to a white bucket full of a lacy netting of caul fat, the thin membrane that surrounds the digestive organs.
“Crépine,” Dominique said.
“Cray-PEEN,” I said back.
“And that’s pig intestine,” Kate said, pointing to another bucket. “They call the intestines and the caul fat white offal. And this is the red offal,” she explained, pointing to the sets of organs hanging from the ceiling. “The lungs, heart, and liver are left attached to the trachea and pulled out of the carcass all in one piece so they’re easy to hang and store until they’re ready to work with them.” Each set of red offal looked like a Dalí p
ainting, spilling off the tip of an S-shaped metal hook. I recognized only the heart.
* * *
—
IN FRENCH AND ENGLISH, Kate and Dominique caught me up on where the Chapolards were in their weekly cycle.
It was just after lunch on Monday. On Sunday, before Grand-Père’s birthday party, the Chapolards had dropped their ten live pigs off at the abattoir to settle into their new surroundings—a barn attached to the abattoir—the day before slaughter. Earlier this morning, after the slaughter, Marc had retrieved the heads, the red and white offal, and the blood to be used for boudin noir and brought them back to the salle de découpe. They’d spent the morning processing all of this.
“This afternoon, Jacques is going to the abattoir to pick up the carcasses,” Kate told me. “And you’re going with him.”
Eight to ten pigs split in half every week. That was somewhere between four hundred and five hundred pigs a year. It sounded like a lot to me, but what did I know? I asked Kate whether it was.
“It’s not,” she said, “not compared to factory farms. This is a very small pig farm.”
I asked her if she knew how many pigs are raised and slaughtered by factory farms each year.
“A lot,” she said. “This is a different kind of operation.” By comparison, a confined animal-feeding operation in America can raise upward of 150,000 per year.
* * *
—
WHILE WE WAITED for Jacques to arrive, Kate and Dominique tried to give me a better sense of scale. By the end of each week, they explained, after three different outdoor markets, the Chapolards had usually sold every part of every one of their ten weekly animals to their customers, save for the bones, which they composted for use on their farm, and whatever they took home to feed their own families. When a customer bought a slice of ham from them, the Chapolards could vouch for every part of the process that transformed one of their pigs into that slice of ham. They grew the grain to feed their pigs. They raised the pigs themselves. They owned their cooperative abattoir with other small farmers. They did all the cutting and curing. They sold the meat at outdoor markets. They owned every part of the process, and this was their appeal. By French standards, they lived modestly, though comfortably—a kind of modern-day middle-class peasant.