The Saucier's Apprentice

Chapter Four

LA MAISON AVEC LA PÉNICHE

When the train pulled into the station at Agen it was still dark. I had spent all night curled up in a couchette from Nice, under conditions that reminded me of troop transports chronicled in World War II films. It was a down-market affair. There were five other men, all strangers, sharing my quarters, each stacked on a wooden platform, three to a side, like bodies in a morgue, so that by the time we reached the West, the place smelled like a damp gym sock.

I had been reading Night Soldiers, one of Alan Furst’s atmospheric spy novels, and suddenly it seemed as if I’d been thrust into the story. My instructions were explicit: to find the sole taxi parked at the curb. The driver, Etienne, would be asleep. Wake him up, I was told; he would be expecting me. Then give him this instruction: “Please take me to Brax, Château Camont, juste après le village, sur le canal, en face des trois couronnes.” If he was at all hesitant, I was to remind him it was la maison avec la péniche.

To borrow from Furst, nothing here was what it seemed. The streets were empty, shrouded in patchy fog. Nothing stirred, aside from the growl of the retreating train. It was only by chance that I located the taxi, revealed by a momentary strand of light. The tide of secrecy that rippled through the streets made me tense and watchful. Of course, if Furst had written the scene, Etienne would be a woman and we would wind up in the tub together in the next chapter. As it happened, my driver, under his cap, had the face of Ernest Borgnine, and our clandestine exchange was acknowledged with a guttural “Oui.”

I couldn’t see a thing through the shifting darkness, only fragments of landscape as we sped off into the countryside. La France profonde: no real landmarks, no bread crumbs to mark my way. There was a web of narrow roads, one dissolving into the next, and before too long we were cruising through miles of shuttered farms that seemed shunned by civilization. I could smell the river, the Garonne, somewhere nearby—the moisture was so constant and strong—and knew we were close to the cluster of villages on its banks. Nevertheless, it was disconcerting, at five-thirty in the morning, to be this removed from humanity.

Of course, no one forced me into this strange scenario. The prize was a few days under the tutelage of Kate Hill, one of the unsurpassed virtuosos of Gascon cuisine. Hill had spent years here, exploring the distinctive kitchens of southwestern France, eager to promote its classic dishes and traditions. From duck confit to cassoulet, Gascon cuisine is food for hearty appetites, richly flavored with duck fat. A cookbook of Hill’s, A Culinary Journey in Gascony, had pride of place on my shelf, although the ongoing experiments with it, like most of my cooking, lacked the essential magic. Her foie gras au torchon had challenged me until I threw in the towel. And a magret flambéed in a splash of Armagnac was good, nothing more. I couldn’t quite swing it, despite a faithful preparation. I seldom opened the book anymore without reflecting that the cook who wrote it had some kind of pact with the place and its food that was either unavailable to or beyond me. It must take something very special, I thought, maybe genetic. Whatever it was, Kate Hill had the wherewithal to capture the magic on a plate.

“There isn’t a duck alive that hasn’t prayed for her demise,” said a friend who had urged me to put her school on my itinerary.

It wasn’t as easy as it sounded. There were a few references to her cooking program on the Internet, though all seemingly out of date. A notice posted on her website was even more enigmatic: “NOTHING OFFERED THIS SEASON.”

“She just seemed to drop out of the picture,” I was told by Karen Herbst, who runs The International Kitchen, an agency that represents some of the best cooking schools in Europe. “I used to send people there, but I felt like she got distracted, just lost her enthusiasm for organizing programs, which is a shame, because when it comes to teaching cooking, Kate is practically beloved.”

A flurry of emails and phone calls eventually produced a response: “Come if you wish. I can give you a few days at the end of September. There is a room here you will find quite comfortable.”

One of the things that attracted me most was the idea of a visit to western France. I had often been drawn here, like most Americans who make the pilgrimage to Bordeaux, and traveled extensively when I was younger and more impressionable, in search of the noble châteaux: Margaux, Pavie, Cheval Blanc, d’Yquem, La Tour, Haut Brion, the litany of names like rock stars on my lips. I had been back a few times recently, but without the same enthusiasm. The names still had that sizzle, though they no longer offered intimacy, having bequeathed their lovely assets as commodities to very rich men.

I have, however, felt a spiritual tie here that eluded me elsewhere. Perhaps it is because of its resemblance to the area where I was born in Pennsylvania, a buckling of farms and scenic villages in a forgotten corner of civilization. Agen was close enough to Bordeaux and Toulouse to spend the afternoon wandering around either of them, but remote enough so as not to attract significant crowds of tourists. There were none of the whistlestops on your typical swing through a designated region, no cave drawings, few notable ruins, none of the glittery churches in which to stop just long enough to take in an all-important fresco before heading off to the next artistic highlight noted in the guidebook.

Visitors came here to shed their skins, to wander unobstructed, seeking immunity from the clutter of choices, to relax, to reflect, to eat. If they were moving around fast, they might stop for a platter of oysters fished that morning out of Arcachon Bay; if they managed to strike a more soothing pace, maybe a fork-tender duck confit or a cassoulet simmering with flageolets. Those home-cooked dishes give the region its cachet, and the agricultural bounty—the endless miles of farms, orchards, and vineyards—distinguishes its character.

I’d heard all sorts of rumors about Kate Hill, an American cook living alone on a barge in the middle of nowhere. An American woman, no less, pushing the anomaly to its limit. “She’s running away from a broken heart…,” one version went. “…from the pressures of success…from a family fortune….” “She’s a misfit…a gypsy…Jim Morrison….” They got wickedly silly. Her colleague, Susan Loomis, warned me to get serious about the work. “Kate cooks as if every day is her last one on earth, and it’s a race against the clock to turn out the entire Gascon repertoire,” Loomis said. “You are going to work until your head will spin, but I doubt you’ll meet a gentler soul anywhere in Europe.”

I was not sure, as I made my way to Camont, that I was going to learn all that much. After the last few outings, my opinion of cooking schools had diminished.

“Les trois couronnes, M’sieur,” Etienne said, pointing at a billboard where three crowns floated above a neighboring orchard’s bill of particulars.

Before I could respond, he jerked the steering wheel to the right, and the car shot off the road onto a dirt track that seemed to plunge downward through an opening in the trees. The car hurtled through a thick salt mist. On all sides, tall sea grass rustled and slapped at the windshield. “Arrrgh!” I grabbed for something with which to brace my jerking body as we dipped into the last hollow before another modest rise. Suddenly, when I was certain the end was nigh, the Renault braked to a stop just inside a little gravel turnaround.

“Camont, M’sieur.”

In the clearing, I could just make out the outline of an ancient stone farmhouse, the mist rising around it like a showgirl’s slip. The half-light revealed a lovely crumbling limestone façade, worn by centuries of volatile weather, with a miniature turret off to the side and a curtain of ivy spilling over the red-tiled roof. Several tall potted plants stood on opposite sides of a blue doorway just beyond a lavender hedge. At one corner of the yard stood the potager, a vegetable garden whose neat rows pointed to a modest Puritan sense of how much the land would return. A trail, no more than a footpath worn into deep grass, splintered off in several different directions, where I assumed other gardens lay hidden beyond the surrounding brush.

Across the yard, almost like a mirage, was the péniche—the barge. It seemed like a prop at first, as if someone had moored it there and left it to rust, the French version of a hillbilly car cemetery. The vessel was larger than most canal barges I’d seen, a sixty-five-ton Dutch tjalk, with a long, flat white cabin, its hull painted a deep turquoise, and the wheelhouse, blocky and high-crowned, trimmed in teak. Next to the door, painted in a bold, greeting-card scrawl, was its name: the Julia Hoyt.

I smiled at it, feeling relieved, delighted, and touched by this poignant artifact transported from another kingdom. Behind the absurdly situated boat I imagined a philosophy, a lifestyle.

It wasn’t until I took a few steps toward the prow that I saw the canal, a narrow little channel, low at the moment, cut into the soft green woods. A manmade tributary of the Garonne, it stretched in either direction for seventy-five miles. On either side of its banks, a gravel footpath traced the trench and continued through backyards and along hedges and fences, past twenty-one locks, stringing together the nineteen villages like plastic beads.

I sat down on a garden bench to take it all in. Darkness still clung to the landscape like a lace shawl. Nothing moved in the house, on the barge, in the water, and the solitude was like a dream, unsteady, an enchanted stillness. For all I knew, this could be anyone’s house. I might be trespassing, soon to be confronted by some angry farmer in a housecoat and slippers, threatening to call the police. French police: your fault, M’sieur.

The cool air drew tight around my shoulders, so I fished a jeans jacket from my suitcase and shrugged into it. Dawn was not far off. Eventually, someone would appear and find me sitting here, their imprudent garden statue.

Not more than twenty minutes passed before a light went on in the wheelhouse. A gangplank fell out of the doorway like a dragon’s tongue, and a woman leaned, silent and smiling, in the open frame. A black dog slid past her legs and bounded straight for me.

“Don’t mind Dupont,” she called out gaily. “He’s in charge of passport control.”

“I’ve got contraband,” I confessed, holding a rumpled plastic bag above my head. It contained some chocolate truffles I’d brought as a house gift from Nice.

“In that case, you have to hand it over to the proper authorities. C’est moi.”

Kate Hill shuffled down from the boat and across a rose-arbor bridge, her soft face full of welcome, and pulled back comically when she saw my tower of baggage. “Are you leaving on a world cruise?” she wondered.

She was a tall woman, about my age or perhaps a little older. Her body seemed to fit my idea of someone who drove river barges, hearty and broad-shouldered, though trim in every other sort of way. She wore her hair short, in a spiky shag with a blotchy henna tint to it, and held back by a bandanna knotted at the top of her head. Her face was a good one, too, not classically beautiful, but pleasant and lived-in, with an outdoor blush to it, like windburn. There was nothing precious about her, nor about her personality, which was outgoing, even a bit horsy, and just Bohemian enough to pull the rest of it together. Carolyn would have referred to her, condescendingly, as a character.

Kate made coffee for me in the house, which had its own oddball story. It had caught her eye fourteen years earlier when she had been sailing down the canal. The building was an eighteenth-century relic, nothing but a wreck, with a fireplace the size of downtown Cincinnati. It might have been unlivable, she remembered thinking at the time, but you could cook your ass off in that hearth. There was a list of dishes she’d been dying to master, a veritable smorgasbord of duck and rabbit viscera. Meanwhile, there were two acres of incredibly fertile ground buried under the weeds and thicket, the soil covered with a dazzling coat of wildflowers that varied with the seasons. And it was situated directly on the canal.

All day long, a blur of faces strolled along both sides of the banks, stopping always to wave or to rest their feet from the unforeseen miles they’d walked. Shepherds used the path each morning and again just before twilight, herding their flocks to a sloping green meadow just beyond the canal.

“I couldn’t resist,” she said. “All my life I’d literally been floating from one place to the next. Here, within one scrap of land, was everything I had been searching for: the romance of the soil, the mystery of the water, the soulfulness of the food. It had the right stuff to hold me. It was my Shangri-la.”

The kitchen alone was worth dropping anchor for. It looked like something in which cavemen might have grilled a mastodon leg, renovated by Martha Stewart. The walls were sun-washed river stone, very simply adorned, with a few unmatched cabinets and flea-market shelving. A disfigured refectory worktable occupied the whole center of the room. There was a stove, of course, but Kate’s primary cooking source was the fireplace, where roasts and tarts came out crisped by the coals. It was a cook’s kitchen, basic, but with real style. In fact, Rick Stein, the British TV food personality, had just finished shooting a segment there. I couldn’t wait to get my hands on everything in the room.

During a walk along the canal, with its long, looping bends, Kate and I came to an agreement. We’d stuff as much of the Gascon cooking experience as we could into three days, visiting the markets and farms so that I could see where everything came from, while making the most essential recipes, the ones that defined the region, except for cassoulet, which would have kept us from doing much else. The Saturday-morning market was in Nerac, where we would buy most of what we needed. She had invited friends for Sunday dinner and expected me to collaborate on every dish we prepared.

“I’ll teach you as much as I can, all my trucs,” she sighed, sketching out an approximate schedule. “You’re not going to learn a whole world of cooking here in two or three days, but what you will get is a consciousness about what we have here and how to apply it to food—the Gascon sensibility, which contributes to the cooking, the rusticity, the honesty.”

Kate had adopted that lifestyle as her own, studying the conditions that defined its specific personality: the soil, the weather, the seasonal harvests that dictate the regional cuisine. “This valley is the most fertile in all of France, with a climate very similar to that of northern California,” she said, explaining how major flooding several times a century subjected the Garonne estuaries to the overflowing of its banks, depositing rich layers of soil with which to nourish the crops. “It’s the terroir that’s the secret to Gascon cooking.”

The terroir. The farmers of western France uttered that word with exaggerated reverence. The terroir—the earth, its sense of place, and the characteristics it imposes on its output. Its essence. Hearing it expressed as a postulate was like listening to rabbis justify ancient doctrine: because it is written. The Bordeaux oenologists, especially, worked the term to death. “Got terroir?” It hadn’t come to that…yet. Still, the terroir governed everything that eventually reached the family table. That is why in Gascony, where the soil is tilled by farmers who measure weeks in nutrients and seasons in crop yield, every ray of sunshine and hit of fertilizer can seem as important as a breath. As a result, Gascony provided most of the produce to all of Western Europe.

We walked the perimeter of Kate’s next-door neighbor’s land, where they farmed about a hundred acres of kiwis, apples, plums, berries, and pears, as well as green vegetables and roughage, the cabbages and lettuce. Adjoining them was a cattle rancher, and beyond him a hog farmer. Kate got invited to their homes, saw how people cooked for their families using the food they produced “in a rustic, simple way,” and it drove her into the kitchen to master the Gascon specialties.

We sorted out a few menus over lunch at the Café de la Paix, an old hotel in the poky village of Bruch. A young woman had bought the place and turned it into a kind of working man’s pub. The food was nothing to write home about—you ate whatever they put in front of you—but, after all, that wasn’t why the place was jammed at noon. It was jammed because of Sandrine, an insanely sexy French pixie with a battleship of a body and a French attitude to match, so that you knew she ran the joint. She swept through the ugly bourgeois parlor like Miss Kitty in the Gunsmoke saloon, drawing everyone’s eyes in her wake. And when she leaned across the table to slam a bowl of soup down in front of Kate, I had to struggle to keep my hands in my lap.

I was heartened by this twitchy attraction to Sandrine. On top of everything else, she came with her own legend. “She was raised here and went away to school,” Kate said. “Somewhere along the way she got married, but she came back with a daughter and no husband. So every guy in this place wants to fill that vacancy. You, too, pal—I can tell by the weaselly look on your face.”

It was determined that I would reserve my passion for the cooking on our agenda, which began almost immediately upon our return to Camont. While we were gone, Kate’s assistant, Andy Losh, a pale, slight, bearded man with ghostly eyes, had staged the kitchen for the upcoming dinner menu. Several cutting boards were laid out with a selection of knives at each side. A variety of vegetables picked straight from the garden lay gathered on the counter, next to an uncorked Côte de Gascon, the thin, white local wine that hadn’t been traffiqué, as the French say, with sulfites or sugar. It was a safe bet that we would run through the bottle before our entrée hit the oven. Dupont folded himself on a pillow next to the fireplace and hardly gave us a second look.

“This is the first thing I learned how to cook here,” Kate said, pulling a freshly killed rabbit out of a bag in the refrigerator.

Uh-oh, I thought, looks like the family pet.

“I’m going to show you how to cut it up, then we are going to fricassee it in a prune sauce, which we’ll serve over polenta.”

Without any fuss, she lopped off the head, and I felt my gorge rise. I put my hands firmly on the counter and leaned all my weight against them, steadying myself. Chicken, I told myself…looks exactly like chicken.

She pushed the cutting board across to me and signified a knife with her chin. “Let’s take off the hind quarters next,” she said, like a medical-school instructor.

Chicken…chicken…chicken….

I lifted one of the legs and made an incision close to the bone, pulling it toward me gently as the knife sliced through the connecting tissue and cartilage. The next leg came away with the same degree of ease. My handiwork was first-rate, and I preened a bit…until I realized exactly what I’d done. For some strange reason, the front legs got short shrift. We’d use them to flavor the sauce, along with the rib cage, but they weren’t considered the noble pieces that wound up on the plates. Instead, we concentrated on the saddle, which we hacked into three equal sections, then seasoned and dusted them with flour before putting the meat aside to rest.

The remainder of the preparation was similar to a coq au vin. We browned a chopped onion, some shallots, a couple of cloves of garlic, and a handful of lardons in an obscenely large spoonful of duck fat, bringing it along slowly to guard against burning, until the vegetables were nicely caramelized. Then we moved everything to the side of the casserole in order to brown the rabbit pieces lightly, just enough to get the meat juices into the pan.

Kate had me peel and cut carrots and celery into large chunks. They went into the casserole, along with a chubby bouquet garni, a bottle of sturdy red wine (minus two glasses for the cooks), and two leeks chopped into half-inch rounds.

“Here is the best part of the recipe,” she said, reaching for a glass canister on a high shelf behind her, near the lights. It was two-thirds full with a dark-amber liquid, and I could see a dozen or more shriveled black walnut-size orbs floating in it. If these were bunny organs, let me assure you, I was on the next train out of Agen. “Try this,” she said, plucking one out and steering it toward my mouth.

There are defining moments in one’s culinary education that set the course for everything that follows: making vinaigrette, preparing risotto, bringing a steak to a perfect medium-rare. I’d survived oysters and sweetbreads in my time, developed a fondness for escargots. There wasn’t anything in the manual about swallowing bunny eyes or testicles or whatever slimy grotesquerie was pinched between Kate’s fingers. I took a deep breath, convinced that I might be able to do this quickly, without thinking, although I was equally certain that deep down I could not. Even the chicken mantra wasn’t going to bail me out this time. I was going to be sick.

There was a look of dreamy expectation on Kate’s lips. But she laughed suddenly, harshly, like someone coming late to a joke. “Don’t tell me, you thought these were….? A-ha-ha! You thought I would….”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, holding an innocent stare.

“Oh, that’s a good one.” She continued chuckling at my obvious discomfort. “Look, you don’t have to worry about eating anything against your wishes. And, anyway, I wouldn’t do that to you on the first day.”

In spite of her assurances, I still gave that black thing a long, hard stare.

“Here’s looking at you, kid,” I said finally, taking her offering like Communion, in one chomp.

I don’t know what I’d been expecting, but it certainly wasn’t the upshot. My mouth filled with an alcoholic burst of ripe fruit that set off every taste bud I owned, like a package of Chinese firecrackers. It was so unexpected I had to laugh. A concentrated sweetness emerged from the alcohol and seeped over and around my tongue. There was a faintly toasty aftertaste, but it softened, with a fine finish.

“Prunes steeped in Armagnac,” Kate said, ending my speculation. “No cook here is ever without a supply.”

Making them, I discovered, was a cinch.

PRUNES IN ARMAGNAC

1 lb. pitted prunes

water to cover

½ cup sugar

Armagnac or brandy

Boil enough water in a saucepan to cover the prunes. Add the prunes and immediately turn off the heat. Let the prunes sit in the water 10 minutes, just long enough to plump (rehydrate) them. Drain, reserving the liquid, and store the prunes in a Ziploc bag until cool.

Make a simple light syrup by boiling the sugar and the reserved water. Place the prunes in a jar and add enough syrup to fill the jar halfway up the fruit. Top with Armagnac or brandy. The prunes can be stored this way for months—or years. Use as needed.

No fewer than a dozen prunes went into the casserole. Then we brought everything to a good rolling boil before covering the pot and simmering it slowly, as long as an hour and a half, giving the protein a chance to bond so that the meat became tender.

I’d eaten rabbit before only out of courtesy, for reasons not worth mentioning. Buying one was problematic enough, but here in Agen and all along the Gascon valley, they dangled in store windows, as common as Christmas lights. The sight took some getting used to, especially the floppy ears and fur. Perhaps there was a windup switch in the rear, or a place for the puppeteer’s hand? The odds were good that an invitation to dinner anywhere within the area might lead to a tangy rabbit stew.

Our lapin aux pruneaux was, in a word, amazing. It was thick and rich, with a jammy, old-fashioned flavor that let the vegetables exert their influence without being overly persuasive. Kate’s polenta, moistened by the sweet meaty juices that collected on the plate, served as a slightly chewy counterpoint to the fricassee.

Dessert was simple but delicious, and very satisfying after such a rich, wintry meal. Kate merely put a slab of ripe Tomme, the ubiquitous cheese from the Savoie, on a plate along with a spoonful of fig jam, nothing else. It was perfect, just a mouthful of the cheese accented by the fruit. I especially loved the jam, which Kate had made earlier in the week—enough for six jars.

FIG JAM

3 ½ lb. fresh Black Mission figs

2 lb. sugar

1/3 cup water

1 vanilla bean

½ tsp. ground cinnamon

juice of a small lemon

Rinse and dry the figs and remove any stems. (If the skin is very thick, you can partially peel it back without bruising the membranes.)

Combine the sugar with 1/3 cup of water and heat in a medium saucepan, stirring frequently, until sugar dissolves. Bring to a boil and let syrup cook until it reaches 210 degrees on a sugar thermometer, then remove pan from stove. Scrape seeds from the vanilla bean and add to the sugar solution, along with the cinnamon. Add the lemon juice and combine well.

Add the figs one by one, gently sliding each into the pan. Cook 1 hour at a slow simmer, skimming frequently, just until the figs are translucent. Remove from heat.

Remove the figs from the syrup with a slotted spoon and place in prepared jam jars, distributing them equally. (If you prefer a more blended jam, as opposed to a fig confit, break up the figs with an immersion blender.) Return the syrup to a boil and pour it over the fruit in the jars. Refrigerate and use within a week. For longer storage, refer to one of the many published guides for the proper procedure for canning.

Makes about 3 small jars

Probably the most intense cooking I did was with Kate Hill at Camont. She and I scavenged the market in Nerac the next morning, after breakfast in her crowded little kitchen, having decided that for all our compatibility at the stove, the greatest gift was that we were on the same wavelength. A balance had been struck. It might have bored most amateur cooks like me to focus specifically on duck recipes, as we’d decided, but there were so few opportunities to cover that ground with the thoroughness it deserved.

The region around Nerac had become the focus of the British Invasion, those “heathen northerners,” that began at the end of the last century. Every weekend brought new friends of friends of friends. Even the recalcitrant French had become accustomed to the phenomenon; over time, they encountered an alien neighbor or two whom it was agreed they would tolerate, maybe even invite for a meal. The settlement of streets directly off the central canal was referred to as Little London, and the Saturday-morning market served as the official meeting spot.

I suppose it was like an outpost of Portobello Road. Most of the itinerant weekenders walked into town along an access road over the bridge across the Baïse River, sweaters thrown just-so across squared shoulders. As they greeted fellow countrymen, the murmur of cheerios and tas resonated like the chorus of a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta.

Kate had misled me about the region’s economy. Parking, not agriculture, seemed to be Nerac’s most precious commodity, and the competition for a space on market day was as fierce as a local football match. The curbs had been filling up since the crack of dawn, with cars parked nose to nose and wedged into clearances not large enough for a scooter, while latecomers patrolled the fringes around the market with the vigilance of commandos.

Kate had her standby spot in an alley beside the church. We sailed in like VIPs and took a shortcut around the magnificent château that Henri IV had built for his mistress. The sovereign from Navarre, had left an imprint on the town. Despite centuries of siege, the castle remained impressive, its tower walls as sleek and beautiful as the day it was built. Just as constant, perhaps, was Henri’s knavish reputation, which was still alive in Nerac. One of the king’s teenage victims, depicted in a stone carving in the park, was full of desperation and innocence. “Here lies Fleurette ravaged by Henri IV,” said an inscription beneath the prostrate figure. “She gave him her life; he didn’t even give her one day.”

We bought a whole fatted duck, along with ten legs, right off the bat. Then we found a box of nice-looking duck crépinettes, little finger-shaped cylinders of chopped duck meat mixed with prunes, Armagnac, and herbs, all bound with an egg and wrapped in caul fat. We planned to sauté these as an appetizer. According to Kate, it was traditional to serve a crépinette with fresh oysters, so we selected a dozen beauties from nearby Arcachon Bay. We also picked up a whole foie gras for a terrine, and tons of duck fat for our confit.

“The duck here comes from an economy of scale,” Kate explained as we cruised the stalls, selecting reedy stems of rhubarb for several tarts. “These small farms had to feed their own families from the basse-cour—the barnyard. My neighbors, the Sabadinis, are a perfect example. They raise beef cattle and piglets for other producers, all handled rather crisply by the father and the son, while the mother and daughter take care of the small animals—the game hens and the rabbits. But the duck, unlike those small animals, could be put up and preserved for the whole year in its own fat.”

Annette Sabadini preserved thirty-six to forty ducks at one time. Her ducklings were born in the spring; they free-ranged behind the barn through the summer, growing and developing, and often at the end of the year she would force-feed, to fatten (or gavé) them for two weeks, so that by December they would be ready.

“So here was a food crop that took very little care and provided a good, wholesome meal for the rest of the year, whether you made confit or garbure or cassoulet. All you had to do was to take out a duck leg from the preservative and be creative. Economy of scale. Voilà!”

Making duck confit was a two-day affair, so we intended to begin the preparation as soon as we got back.

The church carillon tolled twelve bells. Most of the farmers began to break down their stalls as the crowd dispersed for festive lunches in nearby cafés, with terraces that opened like steamboats onto the river. The flushed-faced Brits overran those places, and sometime before the first tray of food arrived, they launched a sing-along of those awful pub songs—“Mrs. Brown” and “Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps” and anything else that showed they were united and strong.

Kate, Andy Losh, and I headed toward the park with a basket full of market treasures and an unlabeled bottle of vin de pays for an impromptu picnic. Andy sliced up a rustic sausage (made from the Gascon black pig) that we had bought from an admirer of Kate’s named Kakou, whose green T-shirt boasted: “Here we sell what we like.” There were the fattest prunes I had ever seen and olives cured in sweet fennel oil and ripe, juicy peaches and several cheeses, including Salers, a sharp sheep-milk variety from the Massif Central whose two-inch crust was used to flavor soups. There was a baguette, too, as crusty and honest as they came, which we slathered with a chunky roasted artichoke tapenade. It was one of the most satisfying lunches I had eaten in France. After downing some wine, I reached into my pocket, unfolding a grease-stained paper, and offered to show Kate something that I had been wrestling with throughout the morning.

It was Bob Ash’s version of duck confit that we had made at Rue du Lac a few weeks earlier, and I already knew, while she scanned it, the type of reaction it would elicit.

Kate looked up gently at me. “Well,” she said, “this is meaningless to me, you understand. It is a recipe for a restaurant chef made to resemble confit, but the only thing familiar in it is the duck leg, nothing else I’m afraid.”

I tried explaining that Bob’s version respected the French basics and, if nothing else, coaxed as much flavor out of the duck as possible. It sounded good as I said it, but Kate shook her head with inflexibility.

“First of all, you’d be laughed out of Gascony,” she said with sincere fervor. “I don’t know why you’d use pork fat to make duck confit. It compromises the whole flavor. When you poach the duck, it has to be in its own fat. That’s the essence of Gascon cooking: flavor on flavor on flavor. By ‘confit-ing’ the duck in its own fat, you are doubling the flavor. Your English chef just tweaked the flavor with a bay leaf, thyme, and some garlic. But the traditional way to make confit is with just salt and pepper. The duck delivers the flavor all by itself.

“And why would you put it in the oven for six hours when it takes forty-five minutes on the stove?” she demanded. “We don’t do it for speed or economy, but to preserve the duck for the rest of the year.”

I tried to argue on Bob Ash’s behalf, for his honor, but Kate would have none of it.

“You’ll see,” she said with a dismissive wave, tabling further discussion of the subject.

Later I read, with some satisfaction, that an authentic confit could be simmered in duck, goose, or pork fat. A few ardent supporters of French cuisine admitted that, in a pinch, they even baked their duck legs in a slow oven, as Bob did. And no less an authority than Jacques Pépin offered a sharp one-hour abridgment. But, of course, these recipes were playing to palates attuned to white zinfandel and bottled mayonnaise. The essence of Gascon cooking didn’t lie in the details; it was not a collection of recipes, not even a place, but the overall spirit: a cook’s state of mind.

Everything I encountered there started to creep up on me: doubting, questioning, second-guessing. Who was the ultimate judge when it came to cooking a particular dish? Who was entitled to set restrictions concerning a preparation? At the moment, I was growing anxious about the oysters in Kate’s market bag. They’d been stashed in there for several hours, indifferent to the blazing heat, and all the tales of toxic-shellfish emergencies started to shake my sense of well-being. It must have been obvious, my jumpy eyes darting toward the bag a dead giveaway, because Andy eventually pulled me aside and asked whether something was bothering me.

“We’ve got to get those oysters into the fridge,” I whispered, “or at the very least on ice. Even then, I don’t think they are going to make it.”

“You can relax,” he said with a good-natured laugh. “They are fresh and alive. We can leave them in the shed for three or four days without worrying about them.”

Sure, I thought, but they’re going to smell like dead squirrel.

I also worried about the eggs sitting on Kate’s shelf since the morning I arrived, and the block of butter in her cupboard. The French know how to cook like nobody’s business, I thought, but their habits, in regard to sanitary matters, reminded me of the reptile house at the Bronx Zoo. Hadn’t these people read about salmonella? If Andy chose to eat an oyster that had been festering all week in a shed, my feeling was, “Good luck and good night, M’sieur.”

The show began in earnest when we arrived back at Camont. Kate was eager to get to work on the duck almost as soon as we climbed out of the car; there was so much she wanted to teach me in our remaining time together, and it seemed necessary, as each hour passed, to sacrifice another objective or two. A duck mousse with truffles and port wine was scratched, as were graisserons, the leftover scraps of confit that yield fabulous hors d’oeuvres. Still, from where I stood, we were primed for a veritable duck orgy.

“Here is what I propose,” Kate said, as she and Andy prepared the mise-en-place. “We’ll do the découpage, the cutting-up of the duck. Then we have an additional ten legs that need careful salting. After we finish that, it will be necessary to cut the fat and render it. Then, we’ll cook the magret for tonight’s dinner, and if time allows we’ll devote some attention to foie gras.”

It was decided that I would do the honors with the découpage, which was no small feat, considering that the duck was a hefty seven pounds. Kate instructed me on how to score it along both sides of the backbone, pulling away the meat with my left hand while the knife descended deeper along the bone. The difficult part wasn’t in the surgery so much as it was leaving the outer skin intact. I removed the entire manteau, separating it gently from the ribcage, and then split it in half so that each portion contained a breast, a wing, and a leg. While the meat rested, we cut the excess skin into fine dice and rendered it in a pan over slow heat.

The word scraps, as I discovered, does not apply to a fatted duck. Everything served a purpose. Even the skin around the neck cavity received a special treatment—dredged with salt and pepper and tossed in a flaming-hot pan, where it crackled and jumped like popcorn.

“It’s customary to nibble on the gratons while you make confit,” Kate said, scooping them into a bowl once they were browned and curled like little chips. She sprinkled on more salt.

I looked at the fried fat with suspicion. “My internist is going to have a stroke if I put one of those in my mouth.”

“Then let’s not tell him.”

She held out the bowl with playful readiness. Chicken…chicken…chicken…. It wasn’t working this time. The French could call them gratons or anything else and pass them off as a delicacy, but cracklings—for that is what they were—held no appeal for me. I lumped them in the same category as beef jerky and scrapple. Still, I had to admit they smelled absolutely heavenly, with just enough meat to suggest the smokiness of bacon, yet saturated with the aromatic succulence of duck. The Goofy with horns and a trident was hovering nearby, murmuring, “What are you waiting for, chump? The whole cholesterol business is a medical-establishment conspiracy. Go on. It won’t kill you. Dig in. Dig in!”

Addiction isn’t one of my vices. I’m not compulsive when it comes to drinking wine or Champagne, both of which I love, and I’ve never been tempted by online poker. Smoking repulses me. There is a particular type of candy that I crave more than once or twice a week. Other than that, there are few weaknesses from which I have to protect myself. But if I am ever sent to the Betty Ford Clinic, rest assured it will be for gratons dependency.

The first one melted on my tongue like a pat of superfatted butter, leaving an exquisitely salty sweetness in my mouth. The second and third sent me into a lightheaded swoon, and after that, there was no turning back. I’d been corrupted. I tore through the bowl of treats like a junkie. I couldn’t get them into my mouth fast enough. I tried to be discreet, pacing myself, but it was a NASCAR-type pace, nearly two-fisted and certainly off-putting to any spectator. And when Kate turned her back, I snatched another handful, smoothing out the top layer so that she might not notice how many were gone. I fantasized knocking over a butcher shop and stealing a dozen duck skins.

I felt gratified and contented about my discovery, and I turned my back smugly on any thought of what the gratons might do to my arteries. Men shouldn’t be slaves to their self-preservation, I decided. Life was too short. There was plenty of wiggle room in my diet.

I gorged myself guiltlessly while Kate salted the duck legs with a scant tablespoon per leg, pressing the granules into the meat and skin with just enough pressure so that they adhered. Afterward, we put them into a glass casserole large enough to hold all the legs in several layers, then turned them skin side down so that the skin formed a sort of cradle to hold the moisture in each piece. She draped a tea towel overtop before placing them in the fridge for an overnight maceration.

Kate stirred the rendered fat and turned down the flame on the stove. “Before we start dinner, let’s do a quick foie gras preparation, shall we?” Why even cook it, I thought? I’ll just slather it on my thighs.

Without waiting for an answer, she ducked into a pantry adjoining the kitchen, where rosy globes of fresh liver sat on the edge of a crude stone parson’s sink. She had me sever the vein connecting the two lobes, gently pulling them apart and just coaxing the vein with the tip of a knife so that it would give itself up like the roots of a plant. The foie gras was smooth and creamy, with the consistency of modeling clay.

“We’ll sear another one tomorrow afternoon, to go with a salad,” Kate said, which suited me fine, because there were few foods I found more hedonistic than seared foie gras, and I had been eager to learn how to prepare it properly, without panic or undue awe.

The method she had in mind right now took absolutely no work at all. It was called foie gras au torchon, which meant literally duck liver served in a tea towel, where it “cooked” naturally in a little crust of salt and pepper while it hibernated in the freezer. I’m not sure about the specifics of the chemical process. To a secular mind, it didn’t make any sense at all. There was no reference, other than to say the foie gras was as delicious and well-cooked as any I’d ever eaten. And the simple presentation was just as unassuming as they came.

FOIE GRASauTORCHON

1 whole foie gras, deveined

1 ½ tsp. sea salt

freshly ground black pepper to taste

1 tea towel

kitchen string

crusty bread, for toast pieces

Salt and pepper the insides of the lobes, then put them back together, making a presentable package. Spread out a standard-size tea towel, salt and pepper the inside of the towel, then place the foie gras in the towel and roll it up to form a nice oval shape much like a jelly roll. Tie the ends in an attractive way, using kitchen string or ribbon. Place the package in the freezer for 6 to 8 hours.

Defrost the towel and its contents in the refrigerator overnight and bring to room temperature, making sure the liver doesn’t get too warm and melt. Open the towel, slice the foie gras, and serve it directly from the towel, along with the pieces of toast. (After defrosting, it will keep in the refrigerator for 4 or 5 days.)

Serves 6–8

Making it was a cinch. There wasn’t much advance work necessary for our dinner, either. The magret recipe promised to be a fairly straightforward sauté, with a tangy “double wine” reduction that Kate would walk me through as we made it. In the meantime, I cornered Andy and asked him to give me a lesson in opening the oysters, that is, if they hadn’t already turned to shit in the shed.

Incredibly, the oysters smelled as fresh as when we’d bought them, with the breath of the sea still on the shells.

“Opening them is a breeze,” Andy said, pulling out the kind of knife that inmates whittle from spoons and call their “shiv.” It had a stumpy wooden handle that fit perfectly into his palm and about a three-inch blade, punished by use. “You just have to be smarter than the oyster,” he said, “and the oyster is not very smart.”

I watched the way Andy found the opening to the shell with his knife, wiggling the blade deep into the crevice in the same way you force a spoonful of puréed asparagus into a baby’s mouth. All the time, he kept twisting it with his wrist to separate the top shell from the oyster, and finally cutting away the muscle until it settled with a little plop in the adjoining halfshell. It was like a wrestling match, with the satisfaction of knowing you were going to win. Those suckers put up a good fight, too. I gave it a try, fussing clumsily with the knife, and cracked a few shells in the process, an outcome that might have been acceptable had I been opening bluepoints; using Arcachon oysters was like practicing one’s corkscrew technique on a case of Château Petrus. Bits of shell floated conspicuously in the spoonful of brine around the muscle. I threw Andy an apologetic grimace, but he was busy slurping down an oyster with unmitigated gusto.

He studied the empty shell appreciatively. His eyes were large and captive.

“There’s nothing like it for pure pleasure. Volupté, as the French call it, a bursting sensuality.” He laughed at the pitch of his glibness. “You’ll have to excuse me, I’m getting a little carried away.”

“You’re coming off an oyster high,” I said, smiling. “I’m more than familiar with the symptoms.”

I’d almost forgotten, until I slipped one of the oysters into my mouth. The incomparable taste immediately transported me to a skiff in Arcachon Bay. It had been almost twenty-five years since I climbed into its square stern with a handful of friends, on our way to a day tour of Cap Ferret. We had spent the cool, sentimental April morning conducting a barrel tasting in Bordeaux. None of us had had time to grab lunch before shoving off, and dinner, we’d been told, would come very late that evening. As we sailed past the monster dune, we moaned in harmony about our hunger.

“God, what I wouldn’t give for a plate of oysters,” said a buddy, eyeing a nearby trawler in the midst of pulling up its net.

Our captain, who spoke no English, understood the gist of what was said enough to give us a pitying shrug. He grabbed a misshapen metal-handled bucket and dipped it into the tide, letting it drag as we made sail across the bay, farther from the mainland. After a few minutes, he pulled it up and dumped the contents—eight or ten oysters—onto the deck.

“Voilà!” he said, grinning, showing a mouthful of gold.

His bounty caused a good deal of excitement on board, although a lot of good it did me. I had never put one of those slimy creatures into my mouth. Never would, I thought, if there was anything else fit to swallow. A little sushi every now and then was the extent of my flirtation with raw fish. As far as oysters went, there were those people who did and those who didn’t, and I knew damned well on which side of the halfshell I stood.

A crowd pressed around the captain as he began to pry open the shells. He had the most intuitive hands I had ever seen, and he used them with the skill of a mechanic handling something he understood perfectly. I watched, silent and entranced, while he loosened each mollusk with a flick of the knife. I felt a sense of exclusion as my friends cupped these unexpected treats in their palms and snarfed them down. It was the same feeling I used to have in college when my friends passed a joint. The first few times it happened, I casually waved it away, until it became my idiosyncrasy not to smoke dope at all.

“You don’t know what you are missing,” said Harvey, a columnist for the Globe, chucking an empty oyster shell overboard.

“I imagine you’re right,” I said, letting out an irresolute sigh. “Feel like giving me a quick lesson on the proper etiquette?”

Harvey’s eyes looked almost lascivious, as if he were turning on a virgin. “O-blah-dee, O-blah-dah,” he cried, passing me an oyster with uplifted joy.

It is difficult to describe the anxiety attached to eating one’s first oyster, just as it is difficult to describe the sensation of discovering its pure delight. Anyone who’s been there knows exactly how I felt. The entire boatful of oyster-lovers watched me with drunken anticipation.

“Yes, I’m very familiar with the symptoms,” I reassured Andy all those years later in Gascony, as I worked my way through opening the entire dozen oysters.

After the first few clunkers, I developed a nice little groove, wedging in the knife with a serious shove and delivering the coup de grâce: zip-zip-zip. My initial timidity had been tied to the odds-on chance that the knife would slip and rip a nifty gash through my hand, no small worry to anyone who prized his own flesh. But I solved that by using a dish towel to grip the oyster, giving me not only a better hold on the shell but also an inch or two of forgiveness.

The Arcachon oysters were meatier than those normally found on American menus, the Malpeques or Caraquets from Prince Edward Island and the Kumamotos from the Pacific, even brinier than the spéciales indigenous to Parisian bistros. For many, their density was prohibitive. But they had an ethereal, sweet, buttery finish not unlike a fine sauterne. And they exploded with a flavor that identified a region all its own.

“Try a tranche of Kakou’s sausage in between each oyster,” Kate suggested.

Not surprisingly, it gave the oyster experience a whole other dimension, as when two volatile weather fronts meet over a valley. As I washed it down with a sharp-edged floc de gascogne, I imagined a typhoon blowing through the small parlor, decimating it with…volupté.

Dinner was a more temperate affair, with the magret a well-matched foil for the voluptuous oysters. Kate was as good as her word when it came to guiding me through the preparation, and we effortlessly produced the dish in no time at all.

MAGRET IN DOUBLE-WINE SAUCE

2 duck breasts, ¾ lb. each

salt and freshly ground pepper

2 Tbl. unsalted butter

2 Tbl. shallots, chopped

½ cup red-wine vinegar

½ cup red currant jelly

Salt and pepper the duck breasts on both sides. Cover loosely with a tea towel and allow to stand 2 hours.

Place a scant tablespoon of butter in a saucepan over medium-low heat and sauté the shallots gently until they are translucent but not brown. Add the vinegar and the salt and pepper to taste, and reduce the liquid to half. (If the flavor is too intense, add 2 to 3 tablespoons of water while reducing.)

Add the red currant jelly, stirring until it is entirely melted, and turn off the heat until ready to serve the duck.

Sauté the magret in a dry, nonstick hot pan until the meat is medium-rare (about 6 minutes per side). Finish the sauce with the leftover tablespoon of butter. Slice, spoon sauce over the duck, and serve.

Serves 2

“I started cooking duck the moment I landed here, and I don’t think I’d ever eaten it before,” Kate said, as the breast smoked slightly in the hot butter. “As far as I knew, ducks swam in ponds.”

“And devoured stale bread,” I said. “Eating one seemed inhuman. The closest I came to duck was in the window of a Chinese restaurant. It looked diabolical the way they hung there like mistletoe. The work of heathens. You couldn’t have convinced me to prepare one at home.”

“What did we know? The great thing I discovered is that it’s a rich meat, without being fatty or marbled like beef. Besides, it is very high in iron, and it’s delicious. A little goes a long way.”

The simplicity of the dish required an equally homespun accompaniment, so Kate showed me how to caramelize a mélange of white and sweet potato chunks in two tablespoons of duck fat (or lard) with a sprinkling of sugar, cooking them ever so slowly, so they formed a good crust without drying out. It took us about thirty or forty minutes of persistent cooking until the potatoes obeyed, but it was well worth the effort. The sweet potatoes tasted almost candied, and they balanced out the much blander whites, soaking up the fat and releasing their own earthy perfume.

Through all of the cooking, Kate was the eye of the hurricane, calm and comforting despite our apparent scramble to coordinate these recipes. She remained unruffled even when it seemed that things were swerving out of control, and as I watched her orchestrate the seemingly endless steps and maneuvers in an organized, matter-of-fact way, I began to draw on her relaxed pace to counterbalance my normally agitated approach. I let her instincts guide me. “Think…Bing Crosby,” I remembered from early media training. The mantra here seemed more suited to a long, deep ommmmm. I let my body ease into it, let it overtake me, inhabit me. It felt almost like taking a Valium. Somehow, all my countertop anxiety got displaced, moved over there, where it couldn’t touch me. I felt capable of doing any number of tasks without rushing them and being overcome by adrenaline, which had always been my downfall. I hooked right in to Kate’s even-handed tempo. Her manner was mild and irresistible. Her motions were fluid, her hands nimble; they struck a nice, easy groove: Buddy Rich with the brushes.

Up to this point, Kate seemed invulnerable to me, mainly because it was so obvious that the world she inhabited suited her so well. She genuinely loved Gascony and seemed fulfilled by her role here, by the scope of the cooking, which she did with a kind of chastened amusement. She enjoyed having visitors, especially those who came as students, some of whom had talent, some only enthusiasm. Even the food writers, she said, had their own plodding charms. I envied her genial resilience, her freedom to plow through recipes and people in search of that harmony. She was free in a way that other people weren’t. From what I could tell, she was perfectly content.

Still, there was something about Kate, a shadow within her, that I couldn’t put my finger on. Perhaps it was the alienation, the price of living alone, on a barge, in a provincial corner of the world. An enchantment—or a mistake?

Perhaps it was too close to issues I was wrangling with. Where would everything leave me when I got back home? What was in store ahead? One option was for me to lead a lonely life dedicated to my art—my writing, my music, my cooking. Would that be enough to sustain me? I doubted it.

Over dinner, I prodded Kate about her passage to western France, which I assumed had an interesting and perhaps melancholy story attached. There was a hesitation, but only momentary, during which it seemed she was making up her mind whether to give me the standard CliffsNotes version or to reveal something else. Andy looked the other way; nothing puzzled him, there were no mysteries. The length of the indecision betrayed Kate’s reticence; despite our developing camaraderie, perhaps I was nothing more than a stranger after all.

“I didn’t leave the States to be an expatriate,” she began, choosing her words with care. “But I had been in Africa for a year, traveling extensively, and I didn’t want to return to the States so quickly that I would forget everything I saw on that continent.” Instead, she drifted to Holland, joining its community of itinerants lost in the warp. Somewhere during that interval a boyfriend materialized. “We bought a barge together and sailed off with a lot of dreams. I don’t really know what happened to him, but the dreams…” She smiled inwardly and laughed. “I’ve been sailing ever since, mostly around the Canal Latéral à la Garonne. And somewhere along the way, this became my home.”

Kate shied from the ghosts. It was clearly an abridgment meant to keep me at a safe distance, which I accepted graciously, although her eyes clouded with memories. They stayed with her for a few minutes, intruding on her grin and producing a faint tremor, which, admirably, she did not try to hide. She sat at the table, folding and refolding her napkin and asking distractedly if I’d like more magret or if I was ready for dessert. I mumbled something about the dinner and being stuffed.

A transition was needed to move us away from the bone. I stepped up to the plate: “The cooking couldn’t have been something you learned on the spot.”

“Hardly,” she said, with an appreciative smile. “I owe it all to the Skyline Truckstop Diner in Kingman, Arizona. My parents bought the place after my father retired from the navy, and I got a ready-made education serving my mother’s food. She was Italian, so there was a touch of foreign influence, but my interest didn’t peak until I arrived here. I was so close to the source and could see the food coming right out of the ground. I lost all connection to the restaurant aspect of food; it became a way for me to communicate with the earth and nature.”

To make ends meet, she started European Culinary Adventures in 1991, at a time when only a handful of cooking schools catered to foreign travelers. There was Lorenza de Medici in Tuscany and Anne Willan at La Varenne, but few others, aside from Kate. She created a getaway that celebrated the cultural heritage of Gascony, evoking not only its food but also the atmosphere and splendor of the area.

Most people who came through were on holiday, not serious culinary students. They wanted to master a few recipes, but they also wanted to visit a winery and go into town and buy postcards and souvenirs. “You’ve got to cater to your constituency,” Kate said, “so I combine it with a barge trip on the canal, which makes everything so beautiful and accessible. And the food we make is always something that can be reproduced back home, specialties of Gascony that will impress friends but without being so difficult or impractical.”

It didn’t matter that I probably wouldn’t make the rabbit stew when I returned home. There were too many prejudices attached, although I knew my friend Craig would be game. I kept envisioning Friday-evening dinners at which my guests would eat foie gras from a tea towel while I hummed away in the kitchen, or popped a handful of gratons instead of cashews and olives. Not a week would pass when I wouldn’t be shucking a bushel of oysters for astonished friends. As for the variations of duck, you could count on their reappearance once I learned where to shop for it. It was exactly the kind of honest cuisine—and secrets of great cooking—that I had been searching for since arriving in Europe.

“Impress friends,” I said, laughing, delighted by the thought. “All right, you’ve caught me red-handed. Although it sounds as if you get something out of it for yourself.”

She opened her mouth to say something but reconsidered. Awkwardly, she looked toward the floor, at her shoes; a skirt of dried mud clung to the soles. An uncomfortably long time passed without a response.

“I’m very happy where I am,” she said. “I finally feel grounded. For someone who was born on an island and bounced around a lot and sailed for years, I finally have a home of my own. Food is only the catalyst, not the end product.”

That may be so, but in a way, I thought she was emblematic of other chefs who have given themselves so completely to their art. The process was consuming, and few people felt more at home than Kate in the confines of a kitchen, a plodding, solitary existence where attention to details and hard work often deterred cooks from having anything that resembled a normal lifestyle. I admired her focus, her total immersion in the atmosphere and bounty of the Gascon countryside, the spiritual effect it had on her.

Be that as it may, Kate seemed fulfilled by the cooking. It was her craft, her art, an ongoing adventure. Her pursuit of a perfect recipe, the synergy between flavors and ingredients, reminded me of a scientist determined to explore all the variables. As a writer, always searching for the right combination of words to express myself, I understood the process. There was always another verbal recipe to tease out more flavor. Of course, the solitary component of it was essential.

Could I find that same kind of fulfillment in cooking? I didn’t think so. For me, cooking for people was too important. I needed to share the food I prepared. I depended too much on the overall dining experience, a comfortable friendship at the table, hoping that my guests would be satisfied. The professional aspect eluded me.

I could echo her words—that food was the catalyst, not the end product. But we were talking about two different things.

Sunday morning, after a visit to the indoor market in Agen, we foraged through Kate’s garden, cutting small bouquets of herbs for our lunch. Thyme and chives were the featured flavors on our menu. Some silky leek shoots went into our basket as an afterthought, along with fourteen plum tomatoes we intended to use for an informal soup.

“Let’s also pick a few figs, just in case…,” Kate said.

“In case what?”

“…we get hungry later tonight and crave a rustic tart.” I watched her large, sure hands moving methodically, plucking fruit from the lower branches of a tree. “There are some good ones hiding around the bottom. We only need nine or ten figs.”

It seemed ludicrous, considering the menu she had planned. We were finishing the duck confit to accompany the tomato soup, a salad with seared foie gras, Kate’s trademark potato soufflé, and a selection of good cheeses, including a piece of Reblochon I could have smelled had I been in the next county.

As it turned out, Kate and I were very much alike. She couldn’t resist inviting lunch guests. It was part of her makeup. She was hard-wired for generosity, and visitors gave her an audience, an opportunity to cook, to feed people, without having to explain all the dance steps. With Andy and me, she was always deconstructing the food as if it were part of a greater lesson, but with guests—that is, anyone who wasn’t cooking or scribbling madly in notebooks—she was inclined to pull out all the stops.

It was a tradition, especially on Sundays, that friends drop by for an afternoon feast. Many of those who showed up regularly were neighbors, the farmers who had indoctrinated Kate into their customs, shared their recipes, and, over time, came to be regarded as her “adopted family.” Others were a nomadic assortment of travelers passing through, or drifters on barges, or friends and friends of friends with summer houses near Agen and Toulouse. In any case, the day was set aside for the kind of blissful rendezvous that revolves around gardening, cooking, and eating, with enough food from Kate’s kitchen to endow an emerging third-world country.

Before her friends the Hodges arrived, we fixed the duck legs, letting them come to room temperature, then we rendered five pounds of fat, enough to cover the casserole. Once the fat came to a boil, we wiped off the excess salt clinging to the legs before lowering them into the bubbling yellow ooze and brought the fat back to a burbling simmer. In forty-five minutes, as the meat began to pull away from the bone, the confit was nearly finished.

“We’re only serving four legs for lunch,” Kate reminded me, “which means we’ll have about six left over to preserve.”

The whole preserving business, I have to admit, was something of an anomaly to me. It brought up images of pinch-faced pioneer women with their hair up in buns, churning butter and tapping Bunyan-size maple trees.

“I don’t know, Kate. It’d be a lot easier to go to Le Cirque, don’t you think? This seems like an awfully big production for a bony duck leg.”

“Why waste your time at Le Cirque? There’s always your buddy Robert Ash. Or McDonald’s.” She stopped chopping the tomatoes to give me a look less of reprimand than disappointment. “All kidding aside, the confit is a farmhouse tradition, not a restaurant process. There are no shortcuts. You take your time preserving it, with love, in order to protect the character of the meat, so that when you take it down from a shelf two, five, or even fifteen months from now, it will have a moist, succulent tenderness that takes you back to the day it was cooked. It is impossible to appreciate what I am saying until one winter night when you are caught without dinner, and that jar of confit happens to catch your eye. To me, there is nothing as delicious. You’ll see.”

I continued to monitor the progress of the duck, feeling chastised. Every so often, I looked quickly over at Kate, wondering whether my attitude toward the confit had been too impertinent, that perhaps it might prompt another early exit, but she was blanching the tomatoes in a pot of water and whistling to herself.

Around noon the Hodges arrived, carrying a quart of Laphroaig, which made them instantly acceptable in spite of their tinny Lancashire accents. A good birdlike pair in their mid-to-late sixties, they lived on an old tobacco farm in Mont-Cuq, a tiny enclave of Brits in the hills on the other side of Agen. Cynthia, the chirpier of the two, recounted the events surrounding their recent retirement to France, insisting they had been just as happy living in the States, where Brian “did squiggles,” which I assumed was tied in some way to math, but I later understood it to mean a kind of computer hieroglyphics.

“Oh,” I said indiscreetly, realizing this was spywork of some sort.

Cynthia kept up a blistering dialogue about their peregrinations, while Brian sat there in a kind of stiff silence, with his legs stretched out and a tumbler of Scotch in his hand, staring off at a spot on the far wall, which must have gone toward solving a precarious programming glitch that none of us could comprehend.

The tradition on Sundays was for everyone to pitch in, with Andy and me doing most of the grunt work. Kate expected me to finish the confit, which amounted to nothing more than sautéing the legs in a knob or two of duck fat until the skin was nicely crisp, then turning down the heat and cooking the other side until the meat was warmed through. After I had finished and placed them in a warm oven for later, she sent Cynthia out to gather mesclun in the garden, and Andy to scavenge capers from a row of thorny bushes out back. Meanwhile, she rummaged through the refrigerator to locate the ingredients for the potato soufflé.

I sighed, recalling the soufflé debacle in Madame’s kitchen, and ran it down for Kate, including a fairly good imitation of Doug and Didi.

“Of course, you’d have to boil me in duck fat to learn the identity of the cooking school….”

“But I’m sure I could guess,” she said, rattling off a few names. “Aha, I can tell by your expression that I hit one on the nose!”

She looked at me, gloating. I shook my head without acknowledging since she had failed to mention Madame’s name.

“Those places are all alike,” she said, “—like fancy finishing schools, except they never really prepare the students for reproducing a dish at home. You might as well read a cookbook and save your money.” Kate pulled down a heavy earthenware bowl from a shelf. “Let’s remedy your bad experience with a soufflé that always comes out great.”

SOUFFLÉdePOMMESdeTERRE

10 large potatoes with waxy skins

5 large eggs, whites and yolks separated

5 Tbl. unsalted butter, softened

½ to 1/3 cup heavy cream

pinch of nutmeg

salt and freshly ground pepper

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees.

Don’t peel the potatoes, but if they are too large, cut them in half, trying to keep the chunks around the same size so that they cook evenly. Cook the potatoes in well-salted boiling water until they are fork tender, 15 to 20 minutes. Drain the potatoes in a colander and break them up a bit. Put the potatoes through a food mill or ricer. (The skins will stay behind and should be discarded.)

Whip the egg whites until they form soft but not stiff peaks, making sure they are not too dry. Set aside. Place 3 yolks in a large bowl, add the butter, cream, nutmeg, and salt and pepper. Combine, then add the potatoes, mixing gently with a wooden spoon. Taste and correct the seasoning, adding more cream or salt as necessary. Gently fold the egg whites into the potatoes all at once—gently, but making sure they are well incorporated.

Butter a porcelain or enameled metal casserole. Let the potatoes tumble gently into the casserole, being careful not to pack them in or tamp them down (peaks of potatoes are fine). Bake 25 minutes, until a golden-brown crust forms on the top of the potatoes. Serve at once.

Serves 8

Preparing the recipe, I hadn’t the slightest expectation for success. If a strawberry soufflé failed to puff and rise like a hot-air balloon, it would be stupidity to hope for such a result from potatoes. The vision I had was of the Hindenburg over Lakehurst.

In the meantime, Kate deveined another fat orb of foie gras for the salad, which Cynthia had collected in her apron. This preparation required even less fuss than the torchon method. It was so quick, in fact, that we had to plate the salad in advance so it would arrive at the table before the liver disintegrated into Silly Putty.

“It’s all in the timing,” Kate said, heating a pan just until a drop of water jitterbugged across it. “Everything has to be perfect—the temperature, the seasoning, the length of time on the fire.” She cut the liver into half-inch slices, sprinkling them with a fine dust of cornstarch to keep the delicate meat from scorching, and popped them in the pan until the fat they released broke a faint sizzle, a matter of a few seconds. Immediately, she flipped them over and then removed them after they’d barely touched the heat.

It seemed preposterous to believe anything could have cooked in less time than it took to sneeze, especially something as troubling as duck liver. I shuddered to think what kind of intestinal damage a raw hunk of it might cause. But both sides were perfectly seared, the liver trembled to the touch, and when a slice was pricked with the tip of a knife, its juices ran clear.

We rushed to the long table under Kate’s grape arbor, where Dupont lay sunning himself on a stretch of flagstone. A bottle of Muscat de Beaumes-de-Venise passed from hand to hand in order to tease the sweetness from the foie gras, and by the time it made the first circuit, the salad was already gone. It was the richest, most sensual salad I had ever eaten. My mouth was thick with honeyed fat from the liver, which had melted on my tongue like a pat of butter. Everyone had the same intense reaction. We nodded eagerly at each other, delirious with pleasure. The Brits were always amazed that an American could cook like a French farmer.

Of course, the duck confit was yet to come, and the potato soufflé neared completion. I sidled over to the oven and peeked into its dark yawn. Far be it from me to write a cooking tragedy here. That little bastard had puffed and risen like a contented adder. It smelled incredible, too, toasty and peasanty, with a slightly sour whiff of cream that flattered the overall fragrance.

The table conversation provided an aria for the food, which was lavish and delicious, and the floc de gascogne unburdened our souls. Even Brian, whose entire output was measured in words as opposed to sentences, fell victim to the magic spell. I noticed that his tongue loosened and he laughed hard, too hard, at his wife’s pithy remarks. The day disappeared, and our inhibitions along with it. I remember how we complimented each other with surprising fervor, toasting every contribution to the meal, especially Kate’s heroic effort, and how after our glasses were drained, more floc appeared, until the sun on my back and the lightness in my head conspired to carry me over a cliff.

I don’t know how long I sat there without saying anything, or how strange it must have seemed, but I was surprised to find everyone laughing at a story Cynthia was telling about serving steak-and-kidney pie to a family of Gascon farmers. Suddenly, I felt very grateful. I wanted to lean across the table and hug her, as if she had purposefully covered for me. We fortified ourselves with cheese and strong coffee. It was criminal to allow heartache to intrude on such a day.

The Hodges left around five. As soon as their car disappeared from view, Kate and I finished preserving the leftover duck legs, sterilizing the tall, liter-size Mason jars, filling the capsules with confit, and cooking them in a bath of boiling water until the meat was tender. Then, around nine, right on schedule, we rolled out the dough for a couple of rustic fig tarts. The recipe was a simple one, using a sweet, free-form pastry crust that folded over itself, with two different undercoatings for the perfectly ripe fruit: Kate chose slices of fresh goat cheese for hers; I slathered chestnut purée on mine. In either case, it demonstrated how easy it was to bake something rustic and delicious in no time at all.

While it cooked, Andy kept running back to the barge, where he got updates on the Sunday football games back in the States. He seemed especially disheartened by the downfall of his beloved 49ers, although any reference to San Francisco sent him into a discernible gloom. When he was fifteen, his father had died suddenly and his closest brother committed suicide. Andy escaped to cooking school with every intention of becoming a chef, but following graduation he knew beyond a doubt that his future would be elsewhere—anywhere, in fact, but a restaurant—so he took off for France, where he had been working for Kate on and off for two years. He was headed back to the States in another month, perhaps to law school, but…he wasn’t sure.

“Before you do anything,” I said, “go check out Sandrine at the Café de la Paix. A woman like that might throw your life a pretty powerful curve.”

He laughed, promising to write if anything developed on that front.

“You boys look hungry,” Kate said, presenting a tray brimming with thick slices of Kakou’s dry-cured sausages, a wedge of Manchego cheese, some shredded duck confit, and tall Kirs Gascons, those potent potions of crème de mûre and red wine, all of which we devoured with frightening gusto.

The amount of food we’d eaten was alarming. My belt was already a notch or two higher on the JumboTron. Andy looked as though he’d been gavé-ed like a duck. With stiff, distressed smiles on our faces, we grabbed slices from each of the steaming tarts, acting terror-stricken, positively bug-eyed, at the suggestion of à la mode.

Kate laughed appreciatively and just stared at us with a kind of maternal clumsiness, growing increasingly melancholy in the silence that ensued.

“You two better prepare yourselves for the good things that are headed your way,” Kate said. She turned slightly and stared at her reflection in a mirror that hung just beyond the fireplace. I was about to say something, to thank her, but then I realized she had gone to the same place I’d been to earlier that afternoon.

Andy and I looked at each other. With a shy, affecting shrug, he got up and left the kitchen, Dupont padding faithfully a few steps behind. I waited for another minute or two. Kate never moved from her position, nor said a word, not even a sigh. The stillness of her body established a tension that was impossible to intrude upon. In fact, aside from the hush of my own shallow breathing, there was no other sound in the room, although for a moment I thought I could hear her heart beating.

I wasn’t exactly surprised. In fact, I remember thinking at the time that we were all—Andy, Kate, and I—in some kind of weird emotional purgatory. I suddenly felt a strange camaraderie with them, as if a veil had been lifted.

Yes, we’re all in this together, I thought. Without a word, I threw a muslin scarf around my neck and went outside, another shadow in the night, walking by moonlight along the canal as it flowed toward the Garonne.