by Camas Davis
Everything we planned to make would be used as accents to Kate’s everlasting meal. Just small amounts of highly concentrated, flavorful meats, preserved in fat or liquid or salt, with the help of heat, smoke, or the open air.
It took us each a little over an hour to cut up our pigs, and we were tired afterward, but we didn’t have enough refrigerators to store all the meat for the next day, so we needed to start cooking and salting right away. This process normally would have been done in the fall, when it was cooler, but for the sake of our education, we were doing it in July.
We salted the bellies, which would have to fit into Kate’s small refrigerator for a day or two before smoking. We salted our hams and the tenderloin, all of which would eventually be smoked and/or hung to dry. We talked about salting some of the loin to turn it into Spanish-style lomo, but then Kate suggested we make a small batch of paupiettes and preserve those in rendered fat in mason jars.
Kate pulled out an antique, hand-cranked meat grinder that we attached by way of a vise to the kitchen table, and I began to grind meat and fat for sausage and pâté. But it was too warm, so it smeared out of the grinder like a paste, as opposed to neatly separated coils.
“This is why we do this when it’s cold outside,” Kate said. “We’ll have to put the meat in the freezer for a while.” Thank goodness for freezers, even small ones like Kate’s.
We put smaller pieces of fresh ham muscle in a Dutch oven on the stove and covered it with white wine and bay leaves, a smattering of peppercorns, and lots of olive oil to make the jambons de Tonneins. And we began cooking our stock and rillettes.
Everything cooked on low heat on the stove or in the oven overnight, and in the morning we commenced to stuffing jars with all of our recipes. We filled two very tall canning pots with water, stacked the jars inside, and set the pots over portable burners outside. While we waited for the cans to seal, we began stuffing sausages—simple ones, just like the Chapolards made. Salt. Pepper. Pork. Fat. The sausage-stuffing attachment for her antique grinder was a bit rickety, but we managed.
By lunchtime, Bill, Eugenie, Jonathan, and I were flagging. We took a break by the boules court, sprayed one another with the hose to cool down, and drank lukewarm beer with ice in it. But after a few minutes, Kate found us.
“There’s no time for rest now, guys. It’s hot out. I’m paying for this meat. I’m the one who has to eat it. I need you to help me get this done.”
Our intention had been to take a short break and then return to work, but I felt guilty nonetheless. Even though we understood the limitations of Kate’s refrigeration, the whole thing felt a bit like an abstract learning exercise to me. I was still a tourist. For Kate, this was her life—not a lifestyle—and it was how she was going to eat for the next year. We were all going to go home soon to America, where meat was everywhere, easy to find, easy to buy, on everyone’s plates—where, if we chose, we wouldn’t have to think about any of it ever again. Not that this was my plan. In fact, I couldn’t wrap my head around going back to the way things were.
I had the sense that finding the Chapolards of America, acquiring the kind of meat they raised, ensuring that I, too, had a pantry full of jambon and rillettes, was going to require just as much work as it did here in Gascony, if not more. Living and eating and cooking like Kate meant you had to work. You had to be a rapt and active participant in nearly every step of the process of getting food to your table. Sure, it was hard, but I liked to think I was the kind of person for whom this sort of work was fulfilling. I hadn’t known I was that kind of person until I went to Gascony. But I was. I still am.
* * *
—
AT THE END of two long days of pig processing, we all pitched in to prepare what Kate called leftovers but what felt to me, as usual, like an extravagant feast. We toasted bread over a hot fire we built in her outdoor oven and spread our pork rillettes over it. The Swiss chard in Kate’s garden was about to bolt, so Kate taught me how to make a tourte aux blettes, a sweet and savory Provençal tart made from currants, Swiss chard, eggs, and pine nuts. We added chopped prunes to make it more Gascon. We gathered greens from her garden for a salad, pulled out whatever stinky cheese in Kate’s cheese stash needed eating, and sat outside devouring our leftovers and washing it all down with tart rosé dispensed from a box that we’d bought from a local wine cooperative earlier in the week.
Afterward, we all lazed about outside Kate’s outdoor trailer office and hooked into her Wi-Fi so we could each catch up on the rest of the world, which I’d ignored for quite some time. Kate sat working on her computer in her trailer. Bacon lay on the floor by her side. Eugenie lay in a hammock next to Jonathan, who’d taken a much quicker shine to her than he had to me. Bill poked around in Kate’s overgrown potager nearby.
I was skimming through articles online when a piece in The New York Times caught my eye. “Young Idols with Cleavers Rule the Stage,” the headline read.
The article talked about a couple, Joshua and Jessica Applestone, and their Fleishers butcher shop, in upstate New York, how they were sourcing animals from local, humane farmers and attempting to sell the whole animal to their customers. A chef named Ryan Farr had begun holding butchery demonstrations in California bars and was charging good money for them. Avedano’s, a female-run shop that had just opened up in San Francisco, had begun offering pig butchery classes, and a guy named Tom Mylan, who headed up the meat program at Marlow & Daughters, in Brooklyn, had also started doing public butchery demonstrations. All of these people had several things in common: They were trying to change how we thought about meat in America by going back to a more traditional way of doing things. They were dedicated to whole-animal butchery and utilization, and to throwing open at least some of the closed doors of our meat industry so that consumers could start to understand where meat came from. And they were young—the new thirtysomething young, like me—and many had once succeeded at other, completely unrelated careers and then decided, seemingly around the same time, to become butchers.
I’d had no idea.
“I guess you’re going home at exactly the right time,” Kate said.
But I didn’t like what I read:
“If chefs were rock stars, they would be arena bands, playing hard and loud with thousands cheering.
“Farmers, who gently coax food from the earth, are more like folk singers, less flashy and more introspective.
“Now there is a new kind of star on the food scene: young butchers. With their swinging scabbards, muscled forearms, and constant proximity to flesh, butchers have the raw, emotional appeal of an indie band. They turn death into life, in the form of a really good skirt steak.”
I could not help but roll my eyes. Swinging scabbards? Muscled forearms?
It was so very American the way the Times had distanced these new butchers—every one of whom I wanted to meet—from reality by likening the act of turning animals into food to performance.
“Seriously?” I said, turning to the others. “An indie band?”
Little did I know that the media would soon try to do the very same thing to me.
TWENTY-ONE
A week before I returned to Oregon, Eugenie and I rented a car and meandered our way through northern Spain for a week. We ate salty ham and briny olives every day, washing it all down with sweet, herbaceous vermouth. We swam naked in the ocean off the Costa Brava and sunbathed on the same beaches that Salvador Dalí wandered as a boy. We stocked up on red-and-gold tins of piment d’Espelette in the hills of Spain’s Basque country and stuffed ourselves with pintxos in San Sebastián. Our time in Spain felt luxurious, maybe even undeserved, and eventually the idleness of it all—not to mention how close I was to maxing out my credit card—begin to make me anxious, though I tried my best to fight it, to allow myself this one last break from real life back home. Real life. Whatever that meant.
After dropping Eugenie off at the airpor
t, I returned to Kate’s for a few more days. She’d promised to help me brainstorm how I might take what I’d learned in Gascony back home and do something of value with it, as Christiane had urged me to. I dreamed of opening up my own portable butcher shop like the Chapolards’, and Kate and I were excited about the name we’d come up with: La Belle Bouche. Bouche is short for boucherie, or “butchery,” but it is also the word for “mouth.” Belle means “beautiful,” and we felt it added a touch of the feminine to a largely male realm. I loved it. It felt defiant and welcoming in the same breath. But when I shared the name with a few friends back home, they separately reminded me of that famously creepy “purty mouth” line from the movie Deliverance. Leave it to Americans to turn a lovely French name for a butcher shop into a reference to backwoods Appalachian sodomy. Right. Back to the drawing board.
At my last lunch at Dominique and Christiane’s house, Christiane told me she loved the idea and had me write down a list of things she wanted me to achieve when I got back home.
“Trouve un ami français,” she said. Find a French friend to teach me how to speak French better, so that the next time I came to France, she and I could talk to each other more easily.
Then, “Trouve une ferme ou une boucherie pour un stage.” Find a farm or a butcher shop to study with.
“Fais un plan pour ouvrir ta boucherie.” Make a business plan for my butcher shop.
And finally, “Trouve un garçon riche,” she said, laughing. Find a rich man to fund my butcher shop. “It will be much easier that way,” Christiane said, only half-joking, I guessed. Easier, she meant, than navigating the narrow path that she and Dominique and his brothers had forged across that indeterminate expanse of known and unknown risks.
But I was no longer interested in easy. Kate and the Chapolards had helped me to see the potential rewards in their various guerrilla strategies, their own defiant form of ownership, and I had subsequently fallen in love with the hard work such a strategy required.
* * *
—
ON THE PLANE RIDE back to the States, my seatmate, a woman with bright-pink, angular cheeks, asked me where I was headed, employing the pitch-perfect, staccato English of a well-studied non–native speaker.
“Home,” I said. “Oregon.”
“And what do you do at home?” she asked.
I wasn’t sure how to answer. I was far enough away from the world of magazine writing that I couldn’t call myself a writer anymore. But I was hardly a butcher. I knew I was going home to unemployment checks, an embarrassingly low bank account balance, and a maxed-out credit card with a very high interest rate. And to the half-finished house I’d hastily moved into with Will. I was going home to all the reminders that my life had not turned out the way it was supposed to. I was going home to the person I once was. I had no idea who I was about to become. The space in between felt vast and lonely. I so desperately wanted to erase everything that had come before France and start over, like an immigrant in a completely new country. I even wished I could change my name.
And yet, beneath this pressing anxiety, I felt a near-innocent hopefulness, something I hadn’t felt since I first moved to New York to become a magazine editor. France had snuck a tiny seedling inside of me. Its precise nature was still hidden. I didn’t know what it needed in the way of nourishment, but I could feel it blowing around behind my rib cage, searching for a place to take root.
My seatmate waited patiently for a response, but I shrugged and turned away from her without answering and pressed my forehead against the tiny airplane window. As the plane took off, I looked out over the dirty-ocher expanse of Toulouse and silently repeated the vocabulary of French butchery I’d just learned. Épaule. Saucisson. Filet mignon. So many beautiful vowels with their soft edges and open-ended tones. I closed my eyes and imagined my life back home as one long, tiresome sentence made up entirely of consonants. I fell asleep briefly, jerking awake every few minutes, and in my spasmodic half sleep I dreamed that I spoke entirely in AEIOU.
This much was obvious: Learning to kill an animal and turn it into dinner had changed everything. So had picking up a knife and learning how to follow the road map of muscle and sinew and skin and bone. As did the realization that when you rub salt into meat and fat and let it sit, magical things happen, like bacon and saucisson and jambon. Except they weren’t really magical. They were part of the real world of practical things, loyal citizens of the rapidly decaying empire of the genuine article. France had begun to feel like real life to me, and home felt like a supremely disappointing representation of it.
This was what I wanted my real life back home to start looking like: We killed this pig. She was a good pig. I was there to help bleed her. He helped raise her. The pig lived a good life, had a good death. We will embrace the complexities of this experience and we will eat well tonight. We will savor every part and make it last. We will render the fat into lard and make salve and soap out of it. We will take those bones and heal ourselves with its broth. We’ll dream in the language of fat and skin. This language will make us think. Thinking will fill us with reverence. This reverence will make us whole.
John Berger once described the act of writing as resembling “that of a shuttle on a loom: repeatedly it approaches and withdraws, closes in and takes its distance.” But unlike a shuttle, Berger goes on to write, “it is not fixed to a static frame. As the movement of writing repeats itself, its intimacy with the experience increases. Finally, if one is fortunate, meaning is the fruit of this intimacy.” Writing had once, long ago, done that for me, and now learning how to turn a pig into dinner in France had forced me out of my own safe, static frame and into the realm of intimacy and meaning. That was the real life I wanted to keep living. But this is what I was returning to: A lone, pale pork chop in a Styrofoam package. Men in business suits feasting on bland twenty-nine-dollar filet mignon. Butcher shops with no one inside them who has ever even seen a live pig.
* * *
—
IN FRANCE I’d begun to develop a new lexicon for myself, one that didn’t trade in fear or denial, one that embraced fully open-ended vowels, one that allowed for a more complex rendering of the world of food, one that would, inevitably, reach into other facets of my life as well. Ands, not buts. Ands that felt defiant.
Confront one genuine article and you’re bound to encounter a whole lot more. My journey into the world of meat—a journey that forced me to dwell within that gap between what I thought I knew and what I had chosen not to, between who I’d thought I was and who I was becoming—inspired me to poke at every person, place, and thing around me until I revealed their inner workings. This maybe explains why my reentry back home looked a lot like a bad head-on collision.
PART III
TWENTY-TWO
With its dust and gravel and potholes, the long dirt road that wound its way to Pure Pork farm, just outside Sandy, Oregon, was not unlike the long dirt road that led to the Chapolards’ farm, except that where fields of féverole and barley bordered the Chapolards’ driveway, fir trees lined Pure Pork’s.
When I arrived, Levi Cole, a tall, lanky rope of a man, a few years younger than me, with a shaved head, angular cheekbones, and the kind of piercing eyes that slice through just about every form of bullshit, kissed me on one of my cheeks and then hugged me, saying, “Hey, lady! You ready to kill a pig?”
Levi looked down at himself. He’d torn the right leg of his jeans from just above the knee to just below his crotch, such that I could see his boxers, which were bright pink, with red hearts on them.
“What happened to you?” I asked.
“I got in a little bit of a tangle with that there rooster,” Levi said, pointing to a rusty red rooster strutting around in the back of his truck.
“Do you happen to have an extra pair of pants, Linda?” Levi asked a sturdy woman in dirty Carhartt overalls, standing across the driveway from us. Linda Burkett stood quit
e a few inches taller than my five feet ten inches, sported short, dyed auburn hair, and was perhaps fifteen years my senior.
“She’s the farmer,” Levi told me. “Linda, this is Camas. Camas, meet Linda.”
We shook hands. She had a confident, firm grip.
“Glad to meet you. So you’re the reporter lady?”
“I guess so,” I said, wishing that I were not, in fact, “the reporter lady,” but just a regular person who’d shown up to help Levi slaughter the pig she’d raised for him.
“I’m gonna turn that cock into coq au vin next week,” Levi said to me, pointing to his feathered opponent. “You gonna come over for dinner?” It would make a good scene for the story I was writing about him for a new local food magazine, so I said I would.
“I’ve got pants,” Linda said to Levi. “They’re ladies’ pants, though. But heck, you’d look good in anything.” She winked at me.
“I’ll be right back,” Levi said as they turned to walk toward Linda’s house.
I’d met Levi a few years before I went to France, through Robert Reynolds, the chef and culinary teacher who’d introduced me to Kate and whom I’d profiled for the city magazine before I lost my job. For the story, Robert and I had cooked dinner together at his house for a few of his former students, one of whom was Levi. Before meeting Levi for the first time, Robert had described him to me as “the real thing, the genuine article.”