by Camas Davis
“To a peasant,” Berger wrote, “the future is . . . [a] narrow path across an indeterminate expanse of known and unknown risks. When peasants cooperate to fight an outside force and the impulse to do this is always defensive, they adopt a guerrilla strategy—which is precisely a network of narrow paths across an indeterminate hostile environment.”
I believe this is exactly what Christiane meant by not knowing what was going to happen tomorrow, and what Dominique meant by his you-work-alone-and-you-die motto. The Chapolard family had employed its own kind of guerrilla strategy, a shared network of precarious paths across an ever-changing, often hostile economic and cultural environment. To some, this might seem like a burdensome amount of work. Why use a boning knife when a band saw is so much quicker? Why raise an animal humanely and slowly when it takes so much longer, and no one will even notice the difference anyway? But to me, the Chapolards’ guerrilla strategy and all the work it required of them seemed defiant. And maybe that kind of defiance was what I’d been missing in my life.
FOURTEEN
Back in the salle de découpe on Friday, Christiane instructed me to join Marjorie in stringing cubes of meat onto skewers for the next day’s market in Nérac. I set myself up so that I had a view of Bruno’s worktable, where he gracefully ran the blade of his knife along the contours of a few bones on a primal he was working on, removing what looked like a leg bone and maybe a shoulder blade. Since one of the muscles on the table looked a bit like the coppa I’d seen Dominique extract from underneath the ribs a few days back, I concluded that he was deboning a shoulder primal.
Every few minutes, Bruno would swipe each side of his knife very lightly along a honing steel. I’d watched so many chefs do this back home, but it was always with bravado—they’d hold the steel in front of their chests when they did it, drawing the knife dangerously toward them, and it was always very loud. By contrast, Bruno set the tip of his honing steel on the table to steady it, and his swipes were so light that I strained to hear whether the blade was actually touching the steel.
Bruno disappeared into the walk-in, then carried over to me a messy, tight mass of intertwined muscles that looked a bit like the primal he’d been working on. He picked up a few of the pieces of skewer meat I’d been threading onto skewers, then handed me a knife, saying something incomprehensible in French and pointing to the morass of meat he’d just set in front of me. I was unsure of what he wanted me to do and had no idea how to ask him to clarify, so I assumed he wanted me to cube the meat up for more brochettes and that it didn’t matter much how well I did it. I committed to a place for my knife to go and proceeded to turn the muscles into cubes.
After a while I looked at Marjorie. “Comme ça?” I asked her. Like this? She nodded silently—I had yet to hear her utter a word.
Next to me, Dominique massaged handfuls of coarse, grayish salt into several tightly grained muscles. Christiane tended to her pâté in the back room. Cecile tied roasts with red-and-white butcher’s twine.
Eventually, I built up a small mountain of brochette meat on the table and was just about to show Bruno when Marc walked in, looked down at my work, and yelled, “Merde!”
All six people in the cutting room began speaking in quick French.
I looked from one mouth to another as a young child might. I sensed the tension, knew it was aimed at me, but had no idea what I’d done wrong, so I continued cutting. Bruno motioned for everyone to be quiet, then moved toward me in slow motion. He put his left hand up gently, to stop what I was doing, placed his other hand over the handle of my knife, and took it away from me as a cop might cautiously take away the gun of a bank robber once she’d surrendered. And then he pulled me by the arm into the cold-storage walk-in, where a few primals and one side were still hanging. He motioned for me to crouch down near the floor with him, grabbed my right hand, and moved it toward the front leg of the hanging side. Then he moved my right hand to my own shoulder. “Épaule,” he said, motioning for me to repeat him.
“Épaule,” I repeated.
We stood up together and he moved my right hand toward the pig’s back leg.
“Jambon,” he said.
“Jambon,” I repeated.
“Expensive,” he said.
“Expensive? Shit!”
“Merde!” Bruno exclaimed, offering me a tense smile.
I realized, finally, what I’d done. I’d mistaken the ham for the bottom part of the shoulder, and transformed one of their most expensive cuts at the market into cheap skewer meat for the grill. Bruno had clearly assumed I knew what I was doing, when I barely knew a pig’s ass from its head. Had I not turned this meat into cheap brochettes, they would have rubbed each of the little hams—which they called noix de jambon—with that coarse gray sea salt I’d seen Dominique using, netted them, and then rolled them in copious amounts of cracked black pepper before cold-smoking them overnight in their “smokehouse,” which was really just an old fireplace in a crumbled part of their parents’ maison. Afterward they would have brought them into the drying room for nearly a month, until the hams shrank and became the most delicious little smoky jambons I’d ever tasted. They sold these at market for several times as much as they sold their brochettes, and I’d screwed it all up.
Why had he handed me this ham as though I knew what to do with it? Was it a test, like the blood sausage? Was it Bruno’s mistake or mine? Why had Marjorie nodded in approval? Maybe I had a way of convincing them that I knew exactly what I was doing when in fact I could be sure of very little.
“This pig, I open it like a book,” Dominique had said. This book was in two languages I didn’t understand—pig and French—with no glossary at the back.
Bruno put his hand on my shoulder and nodded silently, then motioned for me to follow him back into the only slightly warmer cutting room.
“Je suis très désolé,” I said to everyone, my face red with shame. I’m so sorry. It was one of the few things I could confidently say in French at this point, besides “I don’t know” and “What is this?” But they had already moved on. There was still work to do. Dominique came up next to me with a finished jambon in his hand and a knife.
“Camees,” he said—the Chapolards always seemed to pronounce my name as if they were attempting to sound like an American who was attempting to sound French—cutting into the ham and offering me a slice, “dees is whaht we do wit jambon.” He capped it off with a smile that his mustache only served to accentuate.
I felt guilty eating the piece of ham Dominique offered me. The Chapolards had taken me under their wing for very little money—I’d merely paid for them to feed me lunch and dinner a few times a week—and I had probably lost them all of that money and more. But I took a bite anyway, knowing it was expected of me, that this was part of the lesson, and when I did, my face flashed hot again and I suddenly felt like weeping. I’d come to France feeling like such a failure, and this single mistake—which, considering I’d been cutting pork for only a week, was fairly forgivable—felt, in the moment, like further evidence of my inadequacy.
I’d tasted the Chapolards’ ham before, but today it tasted entirely new. The jambon was salty and smoky, as always, but it had another flavor now. As a young and inexperienced food writer, I would have used the word umami to describe it. But that word seemed like a black hole into which my more complex experience of flavor and emotion could disappear. It wasn’t just flavor. It was something else altogether, and it needed a new word. But I could think of nothing.
Dominique watched me chew and swallow, then he said something in French that I’d heard him say a few times before. It sounded something like “Sayy-for-mee-dawb-luh.”
Before I could ask Dominique what he meant, Christiane touched my shoulder and said, “We go now?” Which meant it was time for her to drive me back to their house so that Kate could have lunch with us and take me home. It was to be a short day for me.
&nbs
p; * * *
—
DIRTY RAGS AND SMOCKS filled the passenger seat of Christiane’s beat-up Peugeot, so I parked myself in the back. We were silent as we drove away from the farm, down the long, narrow dirt-and-gravel driveway, bordered on either side by the golden barley and triticale wheat they grew to feed their pigs. I was suddenly tired. Once again, I felt like a burden, a disappointment, a failure. A fairly understandable mistake had brought the pendulum of loss and doubt from the past year crashing back toward me once again. What was I even doing here? How could I be so stupid? Shouldn’t I be back home finding a real job, settling into life with Will?
We bumped along the dirt road toward the highway, kicking up dust behind us, and then Christiane came to a sudden stop, turned the car off, and whipped around in her seat.
“Camees,” she said. She took a quick breath in and paused, perhaps trying to figure out if she should speak in English or French, and then began speaking in French, albeit slowly, for my sake. Given the fact that I clearly had no clue what anyone was saying in French, whatever I heard her ask me could have been completely wrong. Maybe she asked me if I needed to go to the bathroom. But this is what I think she said, because this is what I needed her to say in the moment:
“What will you do with all of this when you go home?”
There was so much I could have said: I’ll make bacon! I’ll work in a butcher shop! I’ll start a farm like yours!
Instead I said: “Je ne sais pas.” I didn’t know how to say what I wanted to say. But I also didn’t know the answer to her question. Maybe I wouldn’t do anything with all of this. The last time I had done something of significance with my life, it had collapsed in on itself.
Then she said, “If you don’t do anything with it, we will be very sad. It will all be for nothing.”
* * *
—
BACK AT Kate’s pigeonnier, I told her what had happened over glasses of sweet Floc. The sun was setting and, as it went every evening in the waning light of that blue hour, Bacon paced back and forth across the herb garden outside Kate’s kitchen window, barking.
“What does Sayy-for-mee-dawb-luh mean?” I asked Kate.
“What?” she asked, laughing at my ugly accent.
I repeated it for her.
“You mean ‘C’est formidable’?”
“Yeah, I think so,” I said, slurring a little from my third glass of Floc.
“‘That’s formidable,’” she said.
“What is?” I asked, confused.
“That’s the direct translation,” she said. “‘That’s formidable.’”
Not unlike the verb cleave, which can mean to divide or split but also to adhere closely or loyally to, formidable, an adjective, has contradictory definitions. If something is formidable, it can inspire fear, dread, or apprehension. But it can also inspire wonder.
Dominique had been describing the flavor of that ham, of course. But more than flavor, the word perfectly described my uselessness, the uncertainty I had about everything in that moment, as well as the uncertainty I would face when I returned home.
Christiane’s words lodged into the tiny space between my rib cage and my heart.
FIFTEEN
At the end of my second week working with the Chapolards, Kate drove me to the Nérac market, where I would spend the day working alongside the Chapolards at their booth. From Camont, we drove west on the autoroute and then turned left at the sleepy town of Bruch, where the owner of what appeared to be the town’s only restaurant was setting up for the day, dragging bistro tables and chairs out front. We kept going, past more fields of rapeseed and sunflowers, until we passed through another sleepy town, Espiens, and then turned into a busy two-lane roundabout that shot us out toward the Petite Baïse river, which splits the town of Nérac in half. From the river I looked up at Nérac’s many stone buildings, perched on the hill above the water. The same burnt-cream color graced most of the buildings, but their owners had painted their front doors and shutters forest green, indigo blue, and an occasional cherry red.
Kate navigated the car around the perimeter of the sprawling outdoor market and parked, and we headed to the Chapolards’ stall. I stopped to take a picture of every colorful door we passed, many with their own unique brass or steel knockers. A hand. A tiger. A golden sphere. A horseshoe. Lucky charms and totems. I wanted to knock on each door and meet the people within, to enter their worlds and leave my own world back home behind me.
“Bonjour!” Kate yelled to Dominique, who was sporting his market beret and looking, in every way, quintessentially French. Dominique, Christiane, and their daughter Mathilde, home for the summer from university, were busy putting the final touches on their portable meat case, which they’d set up underneath a white tent. Behind them, a bright-yellow banner read DU PRODUCTEUR AU CONSOMMATEUR—L’ART DE COCHON. “From Producer to Consumer—the Art of the Pig.” Their meat case rivaled that of any indoor butcher shop I’d seen in France so far.
“It took me years to get the double entendre,” Kate said. “L’art and lard sound the same when you say them.”
There were several other outdoor meat counters at the Nérac market, some much bigger than the Chapolards’ setup. Most were producers like the Chapolards, specializing in one species, while a few were more traditional, albeit portable, butcher shops, buying animals from farmers like the Chapolards and then butchering and further processing them for their customers. Some specialized in only cooked and cured products, like Jehanne and her foie-gras-stuffed duck prosciutto.
At the farmers’ markets in Portland, as well as those in most other American cities I’d been to, plenty of meat producers set up booths to sell their products, but food safety regulations can make it a challenge to sell fresh meat at the markets. And since farmers often are not inclined to re-portion the meat they are selling once it has been cut and wrapped at the slaughterhouse or other processor, they mostly sell frozen cuts that have been vacuum-sealed or paper-wrapped, placing them in coolers full of ice and putting chalkboard signs out to advertise what they have for sale. This makes buying meat at the farmers’ markets in America a crapshoot. If you ask the farmer to tell you about the meat, most of them will talk your ear off, but there is very little sensory activity involved in buying meat from them. Plus, the farmer is almost never the person who killed the animal or butchered the meat. So you glean what information you can, you buy the meat, you hope it’s good, you take it home and cook it, and then you decide whether you’re going to go back and buy more.
Before the market officially opened, Dominique and Christiane walked me through the case. One side was taken up mostly by fresh cuts like the long, trimmed whole loin that they would cut roasts off of when customers asked, plus a few of the one- and two-pound shoulder roasts—at least I thought they were from the shoulder—that Cecile had trussed on Friday. A fanned pile of thick, red, bone-in pork chops, each with a healthy layer of fat around the edges, surrounded the roasts. Christiane’s beautiful paupiettes lined the front of the case, each tied with twine like a present. Christiane told me that if customers asked how to cook them, I should tell them to brown the paupiettes over high heat and then stew them over low heat with tomatoes and onions. I tried to memorize how to say this in French, in case anyone asked me, but immediately forgot.
With the exception of the paupiettes, these were all cuts that I would likely see at any meat counter in the States. But there were also trotters here. Raw pig ears. Cooked tongues. A few fresh hocks. There were the rolls of skin that Marjorie had neatly tied. No brains today, since the Chapolards had sold out of those earlier in the week. All of these parts were reminders that this meat came from a live pig, a pig with feet, a head, skin, and bone. Unless I went to an Asian or Latino grocery store in Portland, I wouldn’t see these parts. In fact, most meat-counter workers tried very hard to make sure that we did not have to be reminded of such things—not
only by omitting the parts that look too much like they came from an animal, but also by sprinkling the case with parsley or rosemary sprigs, lemon or orange slices, or those bright-green plastic separators made to look like fake grass.
On the other side of the case, the Chapolards had piled all manner of sausages, including their boudin noir, which they’d poached off already, a process that had turned the blood sausage an unattractive brown color, and yet by the end of the day they would sell out. The Chapolards sold the rest of their sausages—a bright-orange merguez, as well as some simple pink-and-white sausages made from just salt, pepper, pork, and fat—uncooked, leaving all the links attached to one another, such that each long snake of sausage links piled into one big haphazard mountain, a good reminder that these sausages were cased in intestines that formed their own unique snakelike coils inside the pig they’d come from. Customers would ask for a certain number of sausages, Dominique explained, and then we would count that number of links and cut them off from the rest.
A few brined, boiled, and pressed hams peeked out from behind the mountains of sausages. I saw two oblong loaf pans of the pâté de tête they’d made earlier in the week. In the very front of the case, a few more pans of Christiane’s pâté, which sat next to yet more pans of smaller, fist-size balls of that same pâté, each covered in caul fat; they called these fricandeaux, and they were good for one or two people, she said. In the case, the Chapolards had also placed a pan of gratton, a coarse, slightly fatty meat spread they make by slowly cooking stray pieces of skin, fat, and other scraps left over from the butchery process, until all the fat has rendered and the meat and skin have turned tender. They then whip this all together to form a smooth meat paste, meant to be spread on bread like butter.
Above the refrigerated meat case, Dominique and Christiane elegantly displayed all their cured, dried charcuterie—from ventrèche to saucisse sèche, filet sec, and the small, boneless, salted, smoked, and dried hams they called noix de jambon.