Duck Season: Eating, Drinking, and Other Misadventures in Gascony, France's Last Best Place

Summary (from the publisher): A delicious memoir about the eight months food writer David McAninch spent in Gascony—a deeply rural region of France virtually untouched by mass tourism—meeting extraordinary characters and eating the best meals of his life.

Though he’d been a card-carrying Francophile all of his life, David McAninch knew little about Gascony, an ancient region in Southwest France mostly overlooked by Americans. Then an assignment sent him to research a story on duck. After enjoying a string of rich meals—Armagnac-flambéed duck tenderloins; skewered duck hearts with chanterelles; a duck-confit shepherd’s pie strewn with shavings of foie gras—he soon realized what he’d been missing.

McAninch decided he needed a more permanent fix. He’d fallen in love—not only with the food but with the people, and with the sheer unspoiled beauty of the place. So, along with his wife and young daughter, he moved to an old millhouse in the small village of Plaisance du Gers, where they would spend the next eight months living as Gascons. Duck Season is the delightful, mouthwatering chronicle of McAninch’s time in this tradition-bound corner of France. There he herds sheep in the Pyrenees, harvests grapes, attends a pig slaughter, hunts for pigeons, distills Armagnac, and, of course, makes and eats all manner of delicious duck specialties—learning to rewire his own thinking about cooking, eating, drinking, and the art of living a full and happy life.

With wit and warmth, McAninch brings us deep into this enchanting world, where eating what makes you happy isn’t a sin but a commandment and where, to the eternal surprise of outsiders, locals’ life expectancy is higher than in any other region of France. Featuring a dozen choice recipes and beautiful line drawings, Duck Season is an irresistible treat for Francophiles and gourmands alike.

 

Review: I received an uncorrected proof copy of this book from HarperCollins.

 

In this memoir, food writer David McAnninch details the eight months he and his family spent exploring the regional diet of Gascony. An area of Southwest France, the region is deeply rural and largely distant from tourism, providing the author with a look inside regional cooking and eating practices of the region. While there, McAnninch explores numerous ways of preparing duck, herds sheep, witnesses a pig slaughter, participates in an hours' long preparation of a traditional cake, tries his hand at making various regional dishes, and is invited into the homes of numerous local Gascons.

 

This memoir explores the ancient food preparation techniques of the Gascon region, many of which are rooted in old farmhouse practices. The name is no misnomer; Gascons raise and consume a tremendous amount of duck annually and many of the recipes and dishes described in the book center on duck and duck fat. Despite the difficulty of describing a subject that is better experienced firsthand, McAnninch does an admirable job of vividly describing his culinary exploits as well as the finished product, including both successes and failures. Throughout, it is clear that the author's experiences and this resulting memoir were entirely dependent on the goodwill and hospitality of local Gascon residents, who seem to have gamely welcomed the author into their social clubs, dinner parties, kitchens, and pantries.

 

Many of the scenes conveyed in this book seem straight from the pages of an historical account. For instance, McAnninch is invited to a gathering of a fraternal cooking club where he was able to enjoy a meal fit for "country lords:" "We started with a coarse, peppery homemade pate de campagne, studded with soft fat. After that came a cold lentil salad with gravlax and fresh dill, as refined as the pate was rustic. There were pickled cherry peppers stuffed with brandade. There were chive-topped deviled eggs. And at last the duck steaks, seared on the griddle for no more than a minute a side, perfectly saignant" (69-70). I was also amazed by the author's description of the ingredients and process of making the "tall, conical, hearth-baked confection known as gateau a la broche, 'cake on a spit'" (144), which is made from "thirty-six eggs, three pounds of butter, three pounds of flour, three pounds of sugar, ten packets of vanilla-sugar, one cup of dark rum, one handful of pulverized roasted hazelnuts (preferably from your own hazelnut tree), a generous pinch of salt (preferably from an ancient tin salt cellar nailed to the kitchen wall), and six egg whites for the icing" (145). The result was a three foot tall vertical cake.

 

I do wish the author had provided a bit more comprehensive historical background on the Basque region early on to help provide context and understanding for the reader. Additionally, the first part of the book seemed to deal mostly with the author's preparation and consummation of (mostly duck-based) meals. I enjoyed the later sections, where he explores the process behind food production including herding sheep and pig slaughtering more interesting and more varied than the rather repetitive description of cooking duck meat.

 

Stars: 3.5