David McAninch - Duck Season : Eating, Drinking, and Other Misadventures in Gascony, France’s Last Best Place

T he making of dinner began auspiciously enough. Having stumbled ontorather, intoa small barbecue pit in the backyard of our new home, I decided to kick off our eight-month epicurean journey in the Southwest of France with a dish as elemental as it was delicious, a dish that would root us firmly in the local culinary idiom, a dish that, not for nothing, was hard to screw up: grilled duck breasts. As if to endorse my decision, the rain clouds that had been dogging us since our arrival a few days ago were finally breaking up. Tonight, I would cook under the open sky and we would eat like Gascons.

At a nearby duck farm, I purchased two magrets, as duck breasts are called in France, from a woman in rubber boots and a white smock smeared with blooda ducks, I presumed. The two heavy red ingots were topped with a layer of fatty skin as thick as my finger. They looked as if theyd belonged to a creature larger than a waterfowlsay, a creature with hooves. For a few euros, I also bought a mason jar filled with rendered duck fat, an ingredient as indispensable to Gascons as olive oil is to Sicilians: a balm for the wounds of the soul, as Id sometimes heard it referred to. The fat, in which I intended to roast some potatoes, looked like white cake frosting.

Gascons like to grill duck over dried vine cuttings. I had to settle for damp firewood left over from the previous winter, but eventually I got the flames going. While the logs popped and hissed, I swirled my wine and took stock of my surroundings. Looming above me was our rented house, a 200-year-old converted textile mill. It was an austere-looking edifice, of a style common to early-nineteenth-century water mills in this rural corner of France: plastered-stone faade, red tile roof, tall casement windows, and stout dimensions that called to mind the plastic houses from a Monopoly game. To one end of the structure a small balcony had been tacked on. Perched on it at present, enjoying a pre-dinner snack of goose rillettes on toasts, were my wife, Michele, and six-year-old daughter, Charlotte, who was peering at me through the balcony railings. I looked up and waved.

The most interesting thing about our dwelling, in my estimation, was that a river ran through it, or at least a stream. From where I was standing, I could see where it emerged from dense foliage on the south side of the house, trickled under three arches cut into the mills foundation, flowed beneath the roof of the old wheel shed, and emptied into the greenish-brown waters of the Arros River some twenty yards on. The meeting of the stream and the river created the grassy wedge of land, shaded by walnut trees and garlanded with stinging nettle, that served as our yard.

This private edena robust habitat for insects, it must be said, and also river rats, which Id seen lumbering along the streams pebbly shoalsoffered a fine view of the sand-colored stone bridge that spanned the Arros and led to the heart of the village, which was named, agreeably enough, Plaisance. An old stone bridge being a fine thing to gaze at while sipping a drink, I watched idly as a tractor rumbled across, followed by an old man on a womans bike, then a dog that appeared to have taken a dip in the river. If I looked east, past the shallow ravine that edged our property, I could see a grove of oak trees and a muddy cornfield. Beyond that, just out of sight, gentle hills and rolling vineyards rose up from the alluvial plain. If I climbed atop the stone retaining wall near the stream embankment, stood on my tiptoes, and looked south, I could make out the serrated silhouette of the Pyrenees. On the other side of those mountains lay Spain.

Had I been a pin on a map, Id have been sticking out of the lower-left edge of the Gallic hexagon, halfway between Toulouse and Bordeaux, in a Delaware-size swath of countryside devoid of highways, major train lines, and big citiesabout as close to the middle of nowhere as you could get nowadays in mainland France. This was the Gers, the most rural of Frances 101 dpartements, a place where ducks outnumbered people twenty to one. This was the verdant heart of Gascony.

I swatted at a bug and glanced at the fire. It was ready. After three jet-lagged days of supping on bread and pt, it was time to put heat to meat.

ID BEEN A CARD-CARRYING FRANCOPHILE for most of my life. I felt the first stirrings in high school, in a French classroom adorned with paper tricolor flags and furnished with a wastebasket on which the teacher, Madame Liesman, had taped a sign reading INTERDICTION DE CRACHER ET DE VOMIRNo spitting or vomiting. But the love affair really blossomed in my early twenties, when I lived in the South of France as a student for a year and then for another year in Paris, working as a teacher and, like so many feckless expats before me, leading a life of splendid dissipation, hopping trains and hitchhiking all over the country every chance I got. I traveled wide and deep. I had my first tastes of magret and foie gras and cassoulet. I became a habitu of cheap, chalkboard-menu bistros. I fell in wholeheartedly with the French conviction that meals should be long and relaxing, that they were the days focus and that work was merely a necessary intermission. I learned to speak the language well enough that French people sometimes thought I was Belgian, or at least not American. I went back home and got a masters degree in French literature. I honeymooned in France with Michele. I started cooking coq au vin and boeuf bourguignonne regularly. I pursued a career as a food writer largely so I could return to France as often as possible on someone elses dime. Indeed, as is the case with so many Francophiles, food became the lens through which I viewed my travels, and life in general.

I dont recall precisely when Gascony slipped onto my radarId passed through the region a few times as a tourist, not pausing long enough to really see or taste the placebut I do remember when I first fell hard. It was 2012. I was on assignment for the food magazine I worked for, researching a story on duck, an ingredient Id always loved but which got short shrift in the United States, usually taking a backseat to the exalted beefsteak or the oh-so-fashionable pig. Driving around the region, I discovered a land where duck is kingfour and a half million were being raised each year in the Gers alone, twenty-five million across the greater Southwest of France. Duck got top billing on virtually every restaurant menu from Toulouse to Bordeaux. Cooks in Gascony used every part of the birdthe breasts, the legs, the wings, the neck, the feet, and, of course, the fattened liverand they cooked its flesh every which way: They grilled it, roasted it, sauted it, braised it in wine, and, most famously, cured it lightly in salt and simmered it in its own fat to make confit, that pillar of farmhouse canning cellars all over southwestern France.

This had all duly impressed me, but my come-to-Jesus moment didnt occur until the last day of that duck-filled visit, after a string of rich meals that included, in no particular order, Armagnac-flambed duck tenderloins, skewered duck hearts with chanterelles, duck carpaccio, and a duck-confit shepherds pie strewn with shavings of foie gras. At dinner that night, somewhat the worse for wear, I asked the server at my hotel for a green salad. A bewildered, slightly hurt expression flickered across his face. He nodded curtly and returned minutes later with a plate containing a few leaves of Bibb lettuce topped with confited duck gizzards, six slices of cured duck breast, duck-skin cracklings, and a quartered hard-boiled egg. It wasnt what Id had in mind, but, my God, was it good.