by Dan Barber
“Eduardo?” she said, much more loudly. The geese shrieked and ran for the other side of the fence line, and Eduardo stood up quickly, his carefree air marred briefly by concern. After whispering something in the direction of the geese, he beamed even more brightly, then turned to acknowledge us with a gentle wave. Eduardo is large but not fat, with small eyes, puffy cheeks, and very thick black hair. His rounded belly, green sweater-vest, and brown loafers called to mind a building superintendent.
Lisa introduced us. “Vale,” she said. “Dan es chef de Nueva York.” Eduardo raised an eyebrow in my direction.
“It’s an honor to meet you, sir,” I said, awkwardly formal. In the instant of that raised eyebrow, I was overcome with a feeling that our trip was doomed. Foie gras without gavage? Who was I kidding? More to the point, who was Eduardo kidding? You didn’t need to be Columbo to question this guy’s story. He looked nothing like a farmer, and this didn’t look anything like a farm. There were no tractors, no barns, and no silos. There was only a smiling, slightly chubby man in a green sweater-vest and a phone filled with morning portraits of his geese.
A long moment of silence followed. I fought the urge to speak bluntly. Chefs suffer from this often. It’s a regrettable but identifying trait acquired from years of working in a restaurant kitchen. The dialogue is curt. It skewers subtlety to get to the point. The point is to get to the point before the hot food turns cold. It’s a survival tactic. And it works. But out of the kitchen, it is often difficult to regulate.
“How often are you moving the geese to new grass?” I asked abruptly. Lisa, startled, repeated the question in Spanish, drawing it out for the sake of politeness.
Eduardo shook his head. “I listen to the geese,” he said. “I give them what they want.” We began walking the perimeter of the fence.
“And what are you feeding them?” I asked.
“Feed? No, we don’t feed,” he said.
“He doesn’t feed his geese?” I asked, looking at Lisa. Having traveled halfway around the world to learn about what was considered an impossibility—foie gras without force-feeding—I wasn’t prepared for a farm that . . . didn’t feed at all?
Eduardo smiled and held out his hands, palms down, moving them up and down briefly as if to say, Slow down, the understanding takes time. “The geese eat what they want. They feed off the land,” he said. “Very simple.”
We continued walking around the fence. The geese followed, slowly at first, their movements nearly imperceptible, but within a few minutes they were in a neat phalanx, marching across the paddock until they arrived, a few feet from where we stood, quacking and ruffling their feathers in delight.
Eduardo pointed at the power source for the orange fence, a solar box that converted the sun’s energy into electricity. “The geese avoid getting too close to the fence. It feels foreign to them, I think. And anyway, it doesn’t much matter, because only the outside of the fence is electrified.”
“Only the outside?”
“The outside is electrified and not inside of the fence—there’s no current running through the inside.”
I looked at Lisa and laughed. “A fence for the animals that’s not electrified. Does he mean they’re free to leave?”
“Free!” Eduardo said, his arms flapping wildly to show me just how free.
His job, he explained, was to give the geese what they wanted, and if he succeeded, they wouldn’t leave. Part of what they wanted, apparently, was to not feel fenced in, because if they felt fenced in they would feel manipulated. “They eat less when they feel manipulated,” he said.
“But they’re still fenced in, even if it’s not electrified,” I noted, a little too pointedly. Lisa struggled to find the right wording, to avoid offending Eduardo, but he anticipated the question and cut her off.
The fence, he said, is used only when the geese are too young to protect themselves from predators. And even then, “The geese don’t feel fenced in. They feel protected.” To be fenced in, in fact, didn’t exist on Eduardo’s farm. Until now, I hadn’t thought of a fence as much more than an instrument of enclosure and control. But for Eduardo it is a means of protection—a physical one and a psychological one, too. In feeling unmanipulated, the geese felt free, and a goose that felt free was, according Eduardo, a hungrier goose.
My mind went to Padraic and the lambs at Stone Barns. Is it possible that the animals were so delicious not just because they grazed on grass at the perfect moment, but because they felt free to do so? Perhaps the secret to natural foie gras was similar to that for superior lamb. Allow the goose to feel free, give it the opportunity to eat what it wants to eat, and nature will take care of the rest.
Eduardo insisted we drive to another area of the farm. The fencing system was important, he told us, but the freedom to roam and forage was essential to the success of the foie gras. He wanted us to see the adult geese at work.
He drove us along a back road, so slowly that I wondered if he had a flat tire. The effect, if not the intent, of this meandering was a shared appreciation for our surroundings. Winding through these open fields, intercut with enormous oak trees, it struck me for the first time (I didn’t admit to Lisa or Eduardo that I hadn’t bothered to consult a map of Spain before coming on the trip) that we were driving through the famed Spanish dehesa. I had seen pictures and heard about the history of this land, but for most chefs (and Spaniards, too), coming to the dehesa is a pilgrimage to a sacred place, the source of the renowned jamón ibérico.
Food writers tell us that chefs are obsessed with superior ingredients, especially ingredients that make their cooking sing—Périgord truffles, artisanal olive oils from Italy, sea salts from Brittany—and it’s true. Like anyone devoted to their craft, we are drawn to ingredients that help us elevate a dish. Which is another way of saying we’re drawn to anything that makes our food taste better. But there are a select few products that inspire complete subservience—which arrive at and depart our kitchens unchanged and without garnish. These foods fall into the category not of ingredients on a chef’s palette but of fully formed works of art. A perfectly ripe cheese, for instance, or a just-picked heirloom tomato, still warm from the sun. Or jamón ibérico. Even the most talented chefs (perhaps especially the most talented chefs) agree that they’re better left alone.
But unlike the perfectly ripe cheese or the heirloom tomato—which can be produced with exceptional results most anywhere—no one has been able to replicate the taste of jamón ibérico. It is unquestionably the finest ham in the world. With a taste that is both rich and dry, as nutty as Spanish almonds or aged sherry—it’s almost indescribably mouth-filling and deeply satisfying.
I first saw jamón ibérico a few years after leaving Los Angeles, while working as a line cook in Paris for the great French chef Michel Rostang. Chef Rostang was famous for his modern interpretation of classic French food, but in the industry he was also known for his massive eruptions during a stressful dinner service—outbursts that would often bring young line cooks to tears. I witnessed one such explosion that I still think about, nearly twenty years later. Guillaume, a lovable but absent-minded vegetable cook, had used the wrong potatoes for a fricassee, something he apparently had done many times before, and Chef Rostang, on seeing the potato dish leave the kitchen this one night, nearly split in two with anger. He screamed Guillaume’s name, then hurled a barrage of curses and insults at Guillaume’s attitude, his intelligence, his appearance—in a way that was so personal and so intense, I was sure Rostang’s heart would just give up from the thunderous beats required to pump the rage through his body. (In fact, he had already suffered two heart attacks, both in the middle of dinner service.)
It went on so long that it stopped conversations in the dining room, which is when the maître d’hôtel, Bruno, appeared in the kitchen carrying a leg of jamón ibérico in a tong, the traditional metal clamp that holds the ham for proper slicing. Up t
o that moment, I had only seen pictures of jamón ibérico, and I never imagined that my first sighting would be in a famous Parisian restaurant. Nor did I ever imagine that the jamón would act as a pacifier. Bruno placed the ham (purposefully, I was told later) next to the unhinged chef, who stared down at it and immediately, almost reflexively rested his right hand on the front of the leg. He stopped yelling and looked down at the ham as though he were looking down at the crib of his sleeping newborn. It was as if Chef Rostang, suddenly in the presence of something so perfect, felt embarrassed by his behavior.
As we drove, I admired the oak trees outside my window—the source of the pigs’ famous acorn diet. The oaks were green and gray, gnarled through the trunk. They looked ancient but powerful, as though they’d risen up from the thick grassland through sheer force of will.
I mentioned how thrilled I was to finally see the dehesa for myself. “It’s more beautiful than the pictures,” I said. “Amazing.”
“And this is the ugliest time of year!” Eduardo said, his right index finger pointing straight up in exclamation. “You have to come back when it’s green, and the light is fading. Right now, well, I’m sorry for the way it looks.”
Lisa explained that locals, in their attachment to the dehesa, always bemoan your not seeing the landscape at its peak. “I’ve been coming to the dehesa for a long time, and I swear I get the same reaction whenever I marvel at the beauty. It’s like you’re visiting someone’s home for the first time who’s apologizing for the condition it’s in.”
We took a sharp right onto a dirt road and drove slowly through a maze of trees until we hit an opening. The lush grass and the scattering of oak trees came into quick focus. I asked whether Eduardo raised any of the famous Iberian pigs.
“Pigs? Sure, I have some pigs,” he said with disinterest, as though shrugging off a litter of barn cats.
Suddenly Eduardo screamed—“LOOK!” He slammed on the brakes, threw his body forward, and pasted his hands on the windshield. (I thought to myself: dinosaur?) Eduardo could see his beloved geese in the distance, doing what I imagine he saw them do every day, which was waddle in the grass and hunt for food. We were at least eight hundred feet away, but he leapt from the car and began walking very slowly, crouching slightly and humming something I couldn’t hear. I followed close behind. Suddenly, with what I would have mistaken for theatrics if I wasn’t seeing it up close for what it was—love—he fell to the ground and began to crawl.
“Hola, bonitas,” he said, and Lisa translated for me as we followed him. “Lovelies,” he was saying. “Oh, my lovelies. How are you, my lovelies?”
He stopped and showed us that they were scavenging olives from a collection of trees. He was smiling in the way a father might when he sees his children sitting down together to a well-rounded meal. Eduardo acknowledged that it was an expensive lunch. He said he probably makes more money selling his olives for first-press olive oil than he does from his livers.
“In the end they eat 50 percent and I sell the other 50 percent.” It was the “take half, leave half” rule of rotating herbivores onto fresh grass, except here the geese dictated the terms. He paused in a vain attempt to calculate the math, adding simply, “They’re always quite fair.”
“If you make sure the geese are relaxed and happy, you’ll be rewarded with the gift of fatty livers. That is God’s way of thanking us for providing so much good food for the geese,” he said, in a pronouncement that somehow sounded neither mystical nor evangelical, just likely.
Or was there false modesty at work here? I pressed Eduardo about intervening more than he let on. Didn’t he, and his father and grandfather before him, face any challenges from the environment? Eduardo shook his head. His challenge had nothing to do with the landscape, he said. It had to do with the marketplace—with the chefs, distributors, and consumers who all demand yellow foie gras.
The quality of a liver is determined by several factors. Among the most important is its color. The yellower, the better. A pale liver commands a much lower price.
Chefs learn early in their careers to be vigilant about avoiding pale livers. My education came in cooking school, when we visited Ariane Daguin at her famous specialty-foods distributing company, D’Artagnan. We learned about how all the finest foods—caviar, truffles, and of course foie gras—were imported and arranged for distribution to the best restaurants in America. Toward the end of the warehouse, we passed a small refrigerated cold room. I looked inside. Three signs, marked A, B, and C, were spaced apart and hanging along the back wall. Livers were arranged on a long table below each rating. Off in the corner, underneath a piece of notebook paper with a hastily scribbled A++, a small table held perhaps a dozen livers. I walked over for a closer look. They were the smoothest, brightest yellow livers I had ever seen.
I asked Ariane if these golden livers were separated as A++ because they were going to the most famous chefs. She looked at me. “Mais non,” she said, “these are for the chefs who know the difference.”
The problem for Eduardo is that the coveted yellow color comes from corn. The higher the concentration of corn in the feed, the better chance you have for brighter livers. Since Eduardo only occasionally allowed for free-choice corn, his livers were naturally pale gray. For many years he embraced this idiosyncrasy in a vain attempt to celebrate his process. “I cannot tell my geese to make their livers more yellow,” he would say. It didn’t matter. People wanted yellow livers and were willing to pay more for them. Eduardo had a difficult time competing.
As luck would have it, several years ago Eduardo’s geese spent their last few weeks in an area of his farm inundated with lupin plants. Lupins are a good source of protein, popular in livestock feed. They grow wild throughout the dehesa, often densely concentrated in certain areas. They also happen to be bright yellow. Eduardo’s geese didn’t especially care for the plant until it matured and went to seed. Then, he said, they nearly attacked it, gorging on the seeds and devouring the entire pasture.
“They went wild!” he said, fondly remembering the sight. He forgot about how much of it they ate until after the slaughter. That’s when he discovered that the livers had turned yellow, as if his geese had consumed enormous amounts of corn. The next year, he maneuvered them into the same lupin-dense field, which again made the livers bright yellow. It’s become a routine.
Thinking of jamón ibérico, I asked Eduardo if he wouldn’t prefer that his geese eat a diet of the famous acorns alone. They may not provide the same bright color, but surely the flavor would be compensation enough. He shrugged his shoulders. “That’s for them to decide.”
“Acorns,” he added, suddenly impatient. “Why is jamón ibérico always just about the acorns? Acorns—‘the best feed in the world!’ Acorns—‘the best fat in the world!’ Did anyone ever consider that there are acorns all over the world, but no one can replicate jamón ibérico?” He paused to indicate that the answer was obvious. “These geese eat tons of acorns, but if they don’t move around, if they don’t eat all this grass”—here he raised his arm to outline the lush pasture—“without grass, the acorns are nothing.”
The grass, he explained, makes the acorns taste sweet, which means the more grass his geese have access to, the more acorns they eat. Their systems are primed, in essence, because of a chemical reaction that occurs between grass and acorns. Eduardo claimed that the reaction causes an increase in weight much faster than if the geese ate acorns alone.
Just then, twenty or so pigs walked into our view. With their lumbering torsos, Iberian pigs tend to resemble beer kegs with legs. They have large ears that stick out like the bill of a baseball cap, shading their eyes from the fierce Mediterranean sun. Their snouts are unusually long, making it easier to root around for acorns.
It was the first I’d seen them up close, and it was a thrill—and not just because I was standing just a few yards from the most famous pigs in the world. I was inspired be
cause, until that moment, Iberian pigs and their famous hams had always been synonymous with thick, undulating fat—the product of their indulgent acorn diet. They were, in my mind, the hog equivalent of couch potatoes. Up close, looking at the muscular, long-legged animals, I realized my mistake. Having spent a lot of time with happy pigs, pigs that live outdoors and eat organic grain, foraging and farrowing in a kind of porcine bliss, I shouldn’t have been so surprised. But I swear I saw something I’d never seen in a pig. I saw proud pigs.
Eduardo didn’t look inspired. He looked irritated. “My geese eat more acorns than those pigs,” he said, waving his hand in the direction of the famed Iberians. “And my geese are half the size!”
A REVOLUTIONARY TAX
Just as we turned to head back for lunch, Eduardo seemed to reconsider, suggesting that we see a few more geese first. He thought we’d find a group in the general vicinity, but as we walked around, stopping at several clearings, he admitted that he really had no idea.
It was another odd moment at his farm. How could he not know the whereabouts of his animals? If the geese were a hobby, a sideshow to the famed Iberian pigs, misremembering their location might make sense. But a foie gras company that didn’t keep track of its livers? And seemed to take pride in not knowing?
We continued searching. Eduardo’s hands were clasped behind his back as he walked. He looked, I noted, very nearly like a goose. His head rotated back and forth, and he kept his nose pointed skyward, as if following a scent. In forty minutes, we didn’t see a single goose.
Another black hawk swooped low over a hilltop. I asked Eduardo about them.
“Lots of hawks,” he said. “Lots to eat.”
“Like what?”
“Goose eggs!” he exclaimed cheerfully. “We lose more than half our eggs to hawks.”
“Half?” I repeated to Lisa. “That’s unbelievable.”