Contemporary Authors

• Duck Season: Eating, Drinking, and Other Misadventures in Gascony—France's Last Best Place ( (memoir)) Harper (New York, NY), 2017
• Blue Dog Love Stewart, Tabori & Chang (New York, NY), 2001
• Duck Season: Eating, Drinking, and Other Misadventures in Gascony—France's Last Best Place ( memoir) Harper (New York, NY), 2017

1. Duck season : eating, drinking, and other misadventures in Gascony -- France's last best place LCCN 2017302448 Type of material Book Personal name McAninch, David, author. Main title Duck season : eating, drinking, and other misadventures in Gascony -- France's last best place / David McAninch. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York, NY : Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, [2017] Description viii, 276 pages : illustrations, map ; 24 cm. ISBN 9780062309419 CALL NUMBER TX637 .M394 2017 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 2. Blue dog love LCCN 2001032828 Type of material Book Personal name Rodrigue, George. Main title Blue dog love / [George and Wendy Rodrigue] ; edited by David McAninch. Published/Created New York : Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 2001. Description 99 p. : col. ill. ; 27 cm. ISBN 1584790881 CALL NUMBER ND237.R69 A2 2001 FT MEADE Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 3. A Blue Dog Christmas LCCN 00041299 Type of material Book Personal name Rodrigue, George. Main title A Blue Dog Christmas / by George Rodrigue ; edited by David McAninch. Published/Created New York : Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 2000. Description 1 v. (unpaged) : col. ill. ; 20 cm. ISBN 1584790202 CALL NUMBER NE539.R547 A2 2000 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms CALL NUMBER NE539.R547 A2 2000 FT MEADE Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• Chicago Tonight - http://chicagotonight.wttw.com/2017/03/13/chicago-author-s-memoir-details-8-month-duck-season-rural-france

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  CULTURE

  Chicago Author’s Memoir Details 8-Month ‘Duck Season’ in Rural France
  Nick Blumberg | March 13, 2017 2:19 pm

  A place where ducks outnumber people 20 to 1 might not sound like somewhere you’d want to move with your wife and young daughter. But that’s exactly what one Chicago author did, spending eight months in the most rural part of southwest France.

  The new book on his excursion is called “Duck Season: Eating, Drinking, and Other Misadventures in Gascony – France's Last Best Place.”

  “(The book) was sort of born of desperation,” says author David McAninch, whose day job is features editor for Chicago magazine. During a bleak Chicago winter a few years ago, McAninch’s mind kept wandering to Gascony, an isolated and rural part of southwest France he’d been to twice before on assignment.

  “The people there enjoyed food in a way that I thought was really soulful. And this was at a time in my life when I was too busy, working too hard, and was kind of contenting myself with a Whole Foods salmon fillet thrown under the broiler for dinner and then doing emails while I’m eating,” McAninch said. “I had a revelation that I wanted to do a bit of a retooling of the way I look at food and meals. So I started developing this book idea and made the decision to move my family over to Gascony for the better part of a year to see what we could learn – not just about the food of the region but the way people live and the way people include food and wine in their everyday life.”

  A pan-seared duck breast David cooked while living in Gascony. (Courtesy David McAninch)A pan-seared duck breast David cooked while living in Gascony. (Courtesy David McAninch)
  Amandine Belmonte, Plaisance's cheesemonger, whom David befriended. (Courtesy David McAninch)Amandine Belmonte, Plaisance's cheesemonger, whom David befriended. (Courtesy David McAninch)
  David in the bodega clubhouse of the village social club, which went by the name Les Esbouhats. (Courtesy David McAninch)David in the bodega clubhouse of the village social club, which went by the name Les Esbouhats. (Courtesy David McAninch)
  David's then-6-year-old daughter outside the village school. (Courtesy David McAninch)David's then-6-year-old daughter outside the village school. (Courtesy David McAninch)
  The converted water mill where David, his wife Michele, and daughter Charlotte lived in Plaisance du Gers, Gascony. (Courtesy David McAninch)The converted water mill where David, his wife Michele, and daughter Charlotte lived in Plaisance du Gers, Gascony. (Courtesy David McAninch)
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  McAninch, his wife Michele, and their then-6-year-old daughter Charlotte moved to a small town called Plaisance du Gers for eight months, renting an old mill on the edge of town. Despite having the advantage of speaking French and having visited the region before, McAninch still had some adjusting to do.

  “Commercial life shuts down completely between noon and 2:30 p.m. as people turn toward sacred rituals of lunch. Early on, we got caught short many times because we hadn’t done our morning shopping, and the options were limited,” he said. “Meals became the organizing principle of our life.”

  The dominant role of food (and wine) in the family’s life mirrored that of their Gascon neighbors. It’s a place with deeply rooted culinary traditions and a reverent attitude toward cooking elaborate meals and enjoying them in the company of friends.

  And despite the stereotype of the French being unfriendly to outsiders, McAninch says Gascons are welcoming and inclusive – though their inclusivity sometimes contributed to the misadventures referenced in the book’s subtitle. During his time in Gascony, McAninch became an honorary member of Plaisance’s social club.

  “It was an all-male cooking club that met every Friday. I expressed some interest in cooking wood pigeon slow cooked in wine, a classic Gascon dish. They responded to my interest by inviting me the very next day to go on a pigeon hunt,” McAninch said. “We spent the day (in a treehouse) shooting migratory wood pigeons. I insisted on not handling a firearm, but toward the end of the hunt my pal Basso handed me his 12-gauge when a couple of pigeons had alighted in a nearby tree. I completely screwed up. I fired too late. You’re supposed to fire on a count – if you don’t, the pigeon flies away, and it’s illegal to shoot a pigeon while it’s in flight in France. I not only broke the law, I broke the ultimate protocol and etiquette in the hunting blind. … I acquitted myself in the end, but kind of made an ass of myself in front of all of these French hunters.”

  Despite some misfires (literal and figurative) McAninch writes warmly of his time in rural France, especially of the bond he formed with a widowed villager named Nadine, who became something of a culinary mentor. Once a meticulous, extremely organized cook, McAninch says his time in Gascony forced him to slow down and loosen up.

  “There’s an expression that Nadine used frequently. In French it was au bout du nez, which means ‘the tip of the nose’ – idiomatically it means cooking from the gut. That was something I had to learn to do. It took time, but I came away with better cooking instincts and more confidence in myself.”

  Meet McAninch at a reading and signing at The Book Cellar in Lincoln Square at 7 p.m. Thursday, March 16.

  Below, an excerpt from “Duck Season.”

  l'D BEEN A CARD- CARRYING FRA NCOPHILE 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 VOMIR-"No 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 hitch­ hiking 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 habitue of cheap, chalkboard-menu bistros. I fell in whole­ heartedly with the French conviction that meals should be long and relaxing, that they were the day's 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 master's degree in French literature. I honeymooned in France with Michele. I started cooking cog 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 else's 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 don't recall precisely when Gascony slipped onto my radar-I'd passed through the region a few times as a tourist, not pausing long enough to really see or taste the place-but 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 I'd 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 king-four 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 bird-the breasts, the legs, the wings, the neck, the feet, and, of course, the fattened liver-and they cooked its flesh every which way: They grilled it, roasted it, sauteed 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 didn't occur until the last day of that duck-filled visit, after a string of rich meals that included, in no particular order, Armagnac-flambeed duck tenderloins, skewered duck hearts with chanterelles, duck carpaccio, and a duck-confit shepherd's 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 wasn't what I'd had in mind, but, my God, was it good.

  Once back home in Chicago, I immediately started angling for another Gascony assignment, and within a few months I got one: to cover a wine festival in a village called Viella . On the first night of my trip, the founder of the wine cooperative, a genteel older man named Andre Dubose, invited me to a dinner at the home of a matronly widow named Nadine Cauzette, who was the president of the Friends of Pacherenc Society-Pacherenc being a little-known white wine made in this particular sliver of Gascony. The meal started in a sitting room with duck rillettes, duck sausage, and glasses of chilled Pacherenc; progressed to the dining table with pan-seared foie gras, duck confit, cabbage-and-white-bean soup, potato gratin, wine­braised wood pigeon, several bottles of inky Madiran, four kinds of cheese, and a sheet-pan apple tart; and wound down, several hours after it began, in front of the fireplace with chocolate truffles and snifters of very old Armagnac. Every dish brought to the table had been made from scratch, including the sausage, the confit, and the truffles. It was an excessive, magnificent meal. I was sure Monsieur Dubose had put Nadine up to it, insisting she pull out all the stops for a visiting journalist. And yet, toward the end of the evening, when I said something to the effect of "Nadine, you really shouldn't have," she flashed me the same perplexed look I'd received from the hotel waiter-as if to say there was simply no other way to do things.

  The dinner at Nadine's upended whatever notions of balance and restraint I'd hitherto associated with French cooking. And yet there was something about the over-the-top-ness- the sheer mare-ness- of that meal, and of the other meals I'd eaten in Gascony, that appealed to me in a deep and emotional way. Here was a cuisine that modern gastronomic trends-Nouvelle Cuisine in the 1970s, the diet crazes of the '80s, the small-plates fad of today-seemed to have passed over completely. Whereas in other parts of France, the sacred institution of the two-hour lunch was in decline and bottled water was overtaking wine as the midday drink of choice, in Gascony nothing much had changed. The Gascons I met drank wine with lunch every day. They ate what they craved. They always ordered cheese or dessert and often both. They sang a lot. On my trip to Viella, I went to a winemakers' lunch where everyone was calmly eating their soup one moment, and the next they were standing up, waving their nap­ kins in the air, and belting out a song in the old Occitan tongue: "Qu'aimi Zou men austau, las bias e la Zana I Quand baulha Zou Baun Diu, aquiu que maurirei." -- "How I love my home, its fields and vines I When God sees fit to take me, it is here that I shall die."

  What's more, people in Gascony seemed more open-minded than many of their compatriots. I never once heard a Gascon complain about "freeloading immigrants" or witnessed a Gascon throw money back at an American tourist who offered the wrong bills. The Gascons were French through and through, and yet not-there was a hint of the Spaniard about them, an easy warmth and hoisterousness.

  On top of it all, Gascons lived a long time-longer, in fact, than the residents of any other part of France. The Gers had more than twice as many men over the age of ninety as the national average. Gascons were the paradox within the French Paradox.

  They had their duck and ate it, too.

  Soon, I was reading everything I could get my hands on about the cuisine of this tremendously fertile patch of France-at one time a duchy and now a fuzzily bordered cultural area. To my surprise, there wasn't much out there, especially when compared with the glut of cookbooks and culinary memoirs about Provence, to Gascony's east. What few books I could find-most of them in French-tended to be small-press publications of the "recipes from my grandmother" variety. Elizabeth David, the British-born gastronome, dipped into southwestern France, if not Gascony in particular, in her now-classic 1960 omnium gatherum French Provincial Cooking. Some twenty years after that, Paula Wolfert gave Gascony's signature foods lengthy consideration in The Cooking of South-West France, alongside specialties from the Quercy, the Languedoc, the Bordelais, the Limousin, and Basque Country. A towering achievement of culinary scholarship and recipe sleuthing, it remains the only definitive English-language cookbook-and the only truly exhaustive and authoritative book I've been able to find in any language-on the cuisine of the region.

  I took from those books what I could, and over time a clearer picture began to emerge. It depicted a land moored fast to tradition, populated by cooks at once overflowing with generosity and yet resistant to change, painstakingly creating dishes of immense depth from a limited palette of local ingredients that hadn't expanded in generations and, with the exception of a dab of Iberian influence, seemed impervious to intrusions from other countries or even neighboring regions.

  I grew fascinated with the old farmhouse practices that still underpinned Gascon cooking: confit making, first and foremost, but also the annual tue-cochon, or pig slaughter, and gavage, the ancient technique of force-feeding ducks and geese in order to engorge their livers for foie gras, and to generate more precious fat. I studied the history of Armagnac, Gascony's aged grape brandy, which mellows in casks of Gascon and Limousin oak, sometimes for many decades. I read about Madiran, the Southwest's blackish, tannic wine (and drank it whenever I could find a decent bottle). I learned about peasant dishes like garhure (the confit-studded cabbage soup that is still a Gascon staple), long-braised stews known as civets and dauhes, and tangy sheep's-milk cheeses, fermented at high elevations by Pyrenean shepherds and sold in every outdoor market from Agen to the Spanish border. Other peculiarities intrigued me, too: Spanish­ inflected dishes like piperade and paella, brought into the Gascon fold by the neighboring Basques; age-old preparations for obscure game birds and wild boar, hunted in the remnants of Gascon forests; rustic cakes and tarts, like croustade and gateau a la hroche, that required the better part of a day to make.

  As curiosity sometimes does, mine blossomed into an obsession. This hilly region of duck farms and vineyards began to shimmer in my imagination like France's Last Best Place, a kind of Brigadoon. The unabashedly rich food, the long meals, the fanatical devotion to tradition, the indomitable joie de vivre-not only did these things intrigue me as a writer, but I began to believe they might be an excellent cure for some ills in my own culinary life. Which, suffice it to say, was no longer living up to the spirit of my youthful Francophilia. An insidious expediency and-even worse, at least from a Francophile's perspective- abstemiousness had crept into my cooking and eating. So had a certain jadedness. I'd grown weary of urban food trends, of chefs' obsessions with novelty, of strenuously artistic dishes that were more titillating than satisfying-what Paula Wolfert had called "front of the mouth food"-to say nothing of the theatrical repackagings of traditional comfort-food cuisines: Alsatian brasserie! Japanese izakaya! Italian enoteca! Jewish deli! It had all started to feel slightly ridiculous.

  Gascon cuisine was immune to trends. It relied on simple preparations and ingredients. It defied shortcuts. It insisted on slowness. It adamantly required wine. In short, it was like the concentrated essence of all the pleasures that had caused me to fall in love with France in the first place. Even better, the entire Gascon way of life was, as far as I could tell, predicated on the belief that those pleasures were nothing less than a right-a right to be exercised not just on special occasions, but every day.

  One evening, after a late supper of broiled salmon fillets devoured in front of the TV-see above about expediency and abstemiousness- I picked up Wolfert's The Cooking of South-West France again and happened on a passage I'd skipped over. Halfway through the introduction, the author remarks, "One could write a rich and anecdotal book about the region, the people, and the land, the sights and smells and moods."

  It felt like a personal call to action.

  After convincing Michele that moving to rural France would be both doable and life-changing-in a good way-I made a four-day house-hunting trip to the Gers. After visiting a dozen summer rentals lost in the hills, I made a handshake deal on Plaisance's old water mill, enthused by the idea of living above a river and being able to walk to the bakery in the morning. The principal of the village school informed me that enrolling Charlotte in classes would be as simple as filling out a few forms-and assured me that she would pick up French in no time. Soon, the other puzzle pieces started falling into place. I obtained visas and residency permits. I found renters for our condo. Michele got a sabbatical from the music school where she worked-the director happened to be a Francophile, too, and a sentimental one at that. Michele and I went over our budget again and again-sometimes, perhaps not wisely, while drinking wine­ and determined we could pull off a sojourn of half a year or so.

  In the end we decided to give ourselves eight months, from May to December. This way, we'd avoid the coldest and rainiest part of the year-this wasn't the Cote d'Azur, after all-but still get a taste of all four seasons. We'd arrive when the best spring produce was hitting the markets and stay through summer's village festivals, the fall harvest, and the early-winter rituals of gavage and confit making. We promised Charlotte we'd be home by Christmas Day.

  I had every hope that this would give me enough time to immerse myself in the Gascons' art de vivre. At the very least, I had to believe some Gascon-ness would rub off on all of us, one way or another.

  DUCK SEASON: Eating, Drinking and Other Misadventures in Gascony—France’s Last Best Place by David McAninch. Copyright © 2017 by David McAninch. Reprinted courtesy of Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
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• The Daily Meal - https://www.thedailymeal.com/cook/cookbook-week-duck-season-david-mcaninch

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  Cookbook of the Week: ‘Duck Season’ by David McAninch
  Apr 27, 2017 | 2:20 pm
  By
  Daisy Nichols
  Editor
  David McAninch moved his family to Gascony to discover the ‘last best place’ in France
  Duck Season by David McAninch
  David McAninch
  “I discovered a land where duck is king… Cooks in Gascony used every part of the bird … and they cooked its flesh in every which way…”

  “I discovered a land where duck is king… Cooks in Gascony used every part of the bird … and they cooked its flesh in every which way…”

  Duck Season, by David McAninch, the features editor at Chicago magazine, is not a cookbook in the traditional sense. There aren’t any photographs throughout the book, and the recipe section is the shortest chapter. The bulk of the narrative is devoted to the story of McAninch’s move to Gascony along with his daughter and wife — subletting their condo in Chicago and relocating to a two-hundred-year-old former textile mill by a river.

  A self-proclaimed Francophile from a young age, McAninch says that moving to rural France felt like a call to action. After convincing his wife that the move would be “doable and life-changing — in a good way” it was a matter of a four-day house-hunting trip, a handshake deal to secure the house above the river and a quick conversation with the principal of the local school, before the necessary visa and permits were obtained and the family made the move.

  Once in France, McAninch delved into Gascon life, learning old farmhouse practices, studying the history of Armagnac (and drinking it too), cooking peasant dishes, and discovering ancient preparations for wild boar and game birds. Throughout the book McAninch learns the lessons of a region where locals eat what they crave, drink wine at lunch, spontaneously burst into song, and always order dessert — a region where, when one asks for a side salad, one is presented “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.”

  Recipes in the book include:

  — Confit Duck Legs

  — Daube de Boeuf

  — Seared Duck Breasts with Armagnac-Blackberry Sauce

  — Nadine’s Cabbage and White Bean Soup

  — Pan-Seared Foie Gras

  — Poule au Pot

  David McAninch
  McAninch was kind enough to answer a few of our questions about his philosophy and his approach to food. Continue reading below for the interview.

  Click here to purchase Duck Season.

  The Daily Meal: What is your philosophy of cooking (and/or eating)?

  David McAninch: Three words: Slow it down! If living in Gascony taught me anything, it's that the most memorable meals aren't the product of fast-and-furious kitchen theatrics like what you see on TV cooking shows. The best memories are made when you, say, spend an afternoon slow-roasting potatoes in duck fat and gently braising chunks of brisket with aromatics in red wine — ideally while drinking what's left in the bottle. Cooking should relax you, connect you with the ineffable, not give you performance anxiety. That said, flambéing duck legs in Armagnac is really fun — and quite theatrical.

  How did it inspire the recipes you chose to include in this book?

  You might say the recipes in Duck Season are the result of a personal transformation. Before Gascony, I was a pretty uptight cook. An impatient one, too. I favored fast, high-heat methods, the kind that can quickly turn a tender cut of meat into a charred ruin if you get distracted. All that went out the window when I started trying to master Gascon classics like daube, duck confit, and poule au pot. These are dishes that require lots of time, intuition, and TLC, not fancy equipment or tricky à la minute techniques. And they can be gloriously messy to make.

  What is your favorite recipe in the book and why?

  The recipe I keep going back to again and again is garbure, the peasant soup of salt pork, white beans, cabbage, and usually a bunch of other things, depending on which Gascon village you happen to be in. I love garbure for its versatility. Can't find jambon de Bayonne? Just use a smoked ham hock instead — and suddenly the garbure has this lovely smoky dimension. Can't find haricots tarbais? Use great northern beans. Can't find savoy cabbage? Throw in some kale. A friend just texted me a picture of a garbure he made from the Duck Season recipe, with shredded roast chicken swapped in for duck confit!

  David McAninch
  What are some of the foods you can’t live without?

  I don't like imagining life without oysters. I have not experienced a bad mood that can't be chased away by a few briny Pemaquids or Wellfleets. Also: the Chicago hot dog. The sport peppers, the emerald-green relish, the pickle, the celery salt, the snappy-skinned wiener, the soft poppy-seed bun — it's a textural and gustatory triumph, a handheld pleasure-delivery system, a chapter of America's urban immigrant history written in cased meat. It was one of the first things I ate when I got back from Gascony.

  Would you rather dine out or cook at home?

  When I'm given the choice, the home-cooked meal almost always wins out. I'm not saying I cook better than a professional chef, or that I'm not amazed by what chefs are doing today. I'm just saying that (a) I'm cheap, (b) meals at home are more relaxing and the fun tends to last longer, and (c) my hackles go up every time I hear the words "Have you dined with us before?" because they are inevitably followed by an earnest disquisition on the sharing of small plates. Living in rural Southwest France — where folks have immense appetites and little patience for frippery — only reinforced my prejudice in this regard, I'm afraid.

  What is your favorite go-to meal or drink?

  A very large kir (white wine with crème de cassis) followed by a grilled hanger steak seasoned with immoderate amounts of cracked pepper, served with halved summer tomatoes that have been roasted for a few hours at a ridiculously low temperature under a layer of breadcrumbs, herbs, and olive oil until they've almost melted. Plus a glass of something French and red that tastes of earth, dark fruit, and age.

  How do you hope readers will use this book, what do you hope they take away?

  I'd love for readers to take a page from the Gascon playbook and discover that rich and satisfying meals can be a part of everyday life, not just a way of celebrating special occasions. And like any food or travel writer, I long for readers to taste and imbibe the same things I did — I long to turn my personal experience into a collective one. I got home from Gascony and told everyone, "You've got to visit this place!" Now, at least, I can propose a more affordable option: Buy my book!

  Is there anything else you’d like to share?

  My first week in Gascony, I tried to grill a couple of handsomely fat-rimmed magrets de canard over a too-hot fire. I stepped away to refill my wine glass and returned to find the duck breasts incinerated, having been engulfed in a duck-fat-fueled inferno. Thus was imparted the cardinal rule of duck cookery: Manage the fat.

  David McAninch
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  Chicago magazine has hired David McAninch as features editor to replace the departing David Bernstein. McAninch has served as a contributing editor for Rodale’s Organic Life, deputy editor and editor-at-large at Saveur magazine, and assistant managing editor at National Geographic. He has also contributed features to The New York Times’ travel and city sections. Follow his new work and keep up with what’s hot this summer on the Third Coast by following on Instagram.

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• The New York Times - https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/15/travel/gascony-food-restaurants-france.html

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  Cover PhotoVineyards striped with other cultivated crops are common in Gascony, “the other South of France.” Credit Andy Haslam for The New York Times
  Is Gascony the Most
  Delicious Corner of France?
  Even a week or so spent eating and drinking your way around this rural
  area of southwestern France is enough to spark a lifelong love affair.

  By DAVID McANINCHMARCH 15, 2017
  This week, we roam France, sampling three regional cuisines: the richness of Gascony (below), the earthy pleasures of Médoc, and the new vibrancy of Bordeaux. Also check out the Food section’s guide to French cooking and our survey of five classic specialties, from bouillabaisse to galettes.

  Look closely at a map of southwestern France and you’ll notice it: a blank spot just west of Toulouse where the place names thin out and the train lines and expressways veer away, like a stream flowing around a boulder. That blank spot is Gascony, one of the most rural regions in all of France. Gascons are for the most part proud of their provinciality, and many of them have developed the curious habit of describing their bucolic land in terms of all the things it doesn’t have: big cities, mass tourism, traffic, urban stress, high-speed rail service, autoroutes, soaring real estate prices, hordes of Parisians snapping up summer homes and so on. I spent most of a year there to gather material for a culinary memoir and can confirm the absence of all those things.

  One sometimes hears Gascony referred to as “the other South of France” by boosterish types mindful of the immense popularity of Provence and the Côte d’Azur, which lie some 250 miles to the east. And to be sure, if you plant yourself on a restaurant “terrasse” on the main square of Auch (pronounced OWE-sh) — Gascony’s historical capital — in, say, late September, you might easily convince yourself you’re in Mediterranean France, what with the date palms and the nice-looking people in sunglasses sipping rosé and talking in the bouncy accent of the Midi.

  But then your meal arrives, and the illusion vanishes faster than a cold pastis on a hot day. For Gascon food is richer than the sunny cuisine of Provence. It is unabashedly, defiantly rich. Duck fat, not olive oil, is the local currency. Everything gets cooked in it: potatoes, sausages, eggs, and — in the case of confit, that pillar of Gascon farmhouse cooking — duck itself. Gascons consume foie gras, which is made on family farms all over the region, with casual regularity, and consider the delicacy about as decadent as a pork chop.

  For those needing further convincing that they’re not in Peter Mayle’s South of France, I will suggest simply sticking around Auch for a few more of those autumn days. It would eventually start to rain. And if you hop in the car, the traffic will disappear and you will find yourself in a decidedly un-Mediterranean landscape: undulating fields of corn and rapeseed, vineyard parcels intercut with lush grazing pastures, hedgerows of broom and honeysuckle, tidy groves of oak and hemlock, emptied-out villages and, around almost every curve, signs advertising farm-made foie gras and duck confit. Eventually you will probably get stuck behind a tractor.

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  EXPLORER
  Médoc, From Grand Cru to Country Cooking MARCH 14, 2017

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  Celebrating Food and Wine in Bordeaux MARCH 15, 2017
  RECENT COMMENTS

  cheryl April 18, 2017
  Trying to rent the village there for my wedding. Can't seem to connect with anyone?
  Jacques Saint-Pierre April 12, 2017
  What a lovely and well documented article. Mr McAninch shows with great accuracy its knowledge of the Gers region and its love of Gascony. I...
  David Clay April 3, 2017
  We have lived in the area for 10 months now and we recognise the picture that has been painted. It truly is a wonderful area. We can...
  SEE ALL COMMENTS
  Photo

  Duck breast is paired with fig and spelt at the Hôtel de France in Auch. Credit Andy Haslam for The New York Times
  Gascony is not merely distinct from Provence and the Côte d’Azur. It is, in my estimation, better. Gascony is more open, more soulful, more deeply French, and, in its un-self-conscious devotion to tradition, more pleasurably frozen in time. Its cuisine is arguably less sophisticated than Provence’s, and yet it is more firmly rooted in the land it sprang from, and it is, I put to you, enjoyed with lustier abandon.

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  You don’t have to live in Gascony for many months, as I did, to discover these truths. Even a week or so spent eating and drinking your way around the Gers, the 60-mile-wide département that constitutes Gascony’s heartland, is enough to spark a lifelong love affair.

  The Gers is not very big, but it gives travelers room to breathe. Only 840,000 tourists visited the département in 2015. (By comparison, a staggering 11 million visited the Alpes-Maritimes, which includes Nice and Cannes.) Though the Gers is not France’s most sparsely populated district, it is the most agricultural, with more of its land under cultivation than that of any other French district. Humans in the Gers are vastly outnumbered by livestock, especially ducks.

  Also — interesting fact — the humans who do live there live a long time. The administrative region encompassing the Gers boasts one of the country’s highest rates of life expectancy at birth, and its residents have fewer heart attacks than almost any other regional population in France.

  Both those facts tend to be met with incredulity by visitors encountering Gascon cooking for the first time. It is a cuisine best eased into — perhaps at the Hôtel de France in Auch, a grand old dowager on the main square that has recently been given a face-lift. The hotel is the onetime fief of Gascony’s most famous chef, André Daguin, who is no longer at the stoves but still lives down the street. In the postwar years Mr. Daguin vociferously promoted Gascon food and wine all over France, and the Hôtel de France menu still reflects the touchstones of the cuisine: roasted magret, duck confit with Tarbais beans, a salad topped with cured duck breast slices and confited duck gizzards, a terrine of foie gras.

  The wine to drink with this fare, indisputably, is Madiran. Made from tannat grown along the Gers’s western fringe, the wine is dark and tannic and tastes of earth and cooked plums. With dessert: a late-harvest Pacherenc, Madiran’s white counterpart, a sweet wine of a depth and structure to rival that of Sauternes. To wind things up: a snifter of Armagnac, Gascony’s barrel-aged grape brandy, and perhaps some chocolate. Even a casually upscale Gascon meal, it must be said, requires a certain fortitude.

  Photo

  Signs advertise foie gras and duck confit made locally in the Gers, the most agricultural district in France. Credit Andy Haslam for The New York Times
  Gascony — unlike Paris or the Loire Valley, say — is not a popular destination for bucket-listers seeking grand chateaus, opulent palaces and soaring basilicas. The region’s patrimonial treasures are often tucked out of sight, as if waiting to be given their moment. Take Auch’s cathedral. Just down the street from the Hôtel de France, the 16th-century Cathédrale Ste.-Marie is a fine enough specimen, with its handsome twin bell towers and restored stained-glass windows. But its pièce de résistance lies hidden in a vaulted-ceiling choir entered via an internal doorway that admits visitors for the price of 2 euros ($2.12).

  Arrayed along the choir’s perimeter are 113 thronelike “stalles” of intricately carved oak. Comprising thousands of painstakingly rendered figures and scenes depicting the life of Jesus and other biblical episodes, some of them in gruesome detail, the stalles constitute the most jaw-dropping feat of woodworking craftsmanship I have ever seen. According to what little literature on the cathedral I have come across, the names of all but one of the carvers, an artisan from Toulouse named Dominique Bertin, have been lost to time.

  Most of the Gers’s other guidebook-approved attractions — and touristy restaurants, what few there are — are concentrated north of Auch, along a well-beaten trail that stretches between the picturesque hilltop town of Lectoure and the fortified village of Fourcès. The route also encompasses the popular medieval bastion of Larressingle and the imposing 14th-century cloister at La Romieu, as well as the prosperous village of Montréal du Gers, where, at an inviting restaurant called L’escale, you can have a swank al fresco meal of roasted capon in a foie gras and morel sauce while seated beneath the graceful arcades of the town square.

  Those destinations are certainly worthy ones, particularly on a weekday between October and May, when you will have a decent chance of having them nearly all to yourself. I especially like Lectoure, with its single thoroughfare that arcs over a high ridgeline, turning every side street into a picture frame for the rolling Gascon countryside far below. Most tourists move on after paying a visit to Lectoure’s small cathedral and its handful of gift shops, or they book a room and a table at the fancy-ish Hôtel de Bastard, which serves an excellent appetizer of foie gras accompanied by slices of Lectoure melon, a variety of cantaloupe for which the town is famous. But to my mind Lectoure’s singular point of interest, its very raison d’être — and why I go back again and again — is the Café des Sports.

  This is, unequivocally, my favorite bar in France. The high-ceilinged, slightly gone-to-seed establishment is festooned with rugby ephemera — the sport being as sacred to Gascons as duck fat — and is furnished with a long wood bar, a couple of rickety barstools, and, teetering slightly on the beer-stained wood-slat floor, a dozen or so zinc-topped tables. On any given evening a mix of thuggish jocks, crusty-looking paysans, well-heeled retirees, urbane day-trippers from Toulouse, teenagers and children can be found tucking into cheap entrecôtes and duck legs.

  At the bar’s far end, an ancient-looking glass-and-wood partition protects a private meeting space that could well have been the origin of the expression “back-room deal.” On one recent visit, I could see a dozen men seated around a banquet table, plotting who knows what. On another visit — and this is an anecdote that speaks volumes about Gascons’ trusting nature — a stranger in a rugby shirt nonchalantly deposited his kindergarten-age child at the table I was sharing with my wife and then-7-year-old daughter. “You don’t mind watching her for a minute?” he said, and dashed out. Before I could worry too much, he was back. Seeing that his daughter and mine were getting on fine, he lingered at the bar to chat with some friends.

  Photo

  Gascon salad of sliced duck breast with eggs, salad leaves and tomatoes at Le Divan. Credit Andy Haslam for The New York Times
  The Café des Sports aside, Lectoure is a typical prim and prettified French village, and in this respect is an anomaly in the Gers. The principal towns of the Gascon heartland are for the most part unprepossessing: gritty market hubs that, on the face of it, hold little appeal for the tourist. And yet they offer the patient and curious visitor a chance to tune in to the rhythms of a rural lifestyle that is dying out elsewhere in France. To spend a market-day morning in, say, Fleurance, Mirande or Nogaro is to witness old-fashioned Frenchness in a very pure distillation — a collective affirmation of the things the French hold most sacred: fraternité, gastronomie and, to a lesser extent, morning drinking, cigarette smoking and cheek-kissing.

  To wit: Mirande’s Monday market. Held in a covered hall, the marché brings this drab burg of 3,500 souls to crackling life. The vibe is like that of a small county fair, except with much better food. A tour of the stalls offers a crash course in Gascon cookery: confit duck legs nestled in chilled rendered fat, putty-colored fattened duck livers, goose and pork rillettes, pâté de tête, Basque chorizo, immense rounds of tangy Tommes des Pyrénées cheese, fresh brook trout, all manner of nuts and dried fruit, gariguette strawberries, greengage plums, and on and on.

  The real education, though, is to be found in the gusty banter between vendors and customers — a uniquely Gascon admixture of chops-busting, gossip, rugby talk and, almost without fail, recipe swapping. Nowhere outside Gascony have I had to summon more patience while waiting in line at a rural market. The conversations, as a rule, are supercharged by lots of coffee and, often, lubricated by glasses of wine, beer or Floc (an Armagnac-spiked aperitif) purchased at the buvette, or drinks counter — a fixture of any respectable Gascon market.

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  The procuring of provisions always concludes with lunch. Virtually every substantial Gascon town has its bustling, market-adjacent chalkboard-menu joint. Mirande’s is called, prosaically, Le Grand Café Glacier. On my most recent visit there, a wine-braised pork cutlet with haricots verts and a gratin dauphinois set me back 8 euros; a half-carafe of the house red cost a few more. The meal bargains to be had in Gascony’s no-frills market cafes — the Café du Centre in Maubourguet, the Café du Centre in Fleurance (no relation), Le Divan in Éauze — harken back to a bygone era, as do the menus, which on rush-rush market days frequently consist of the plat-du-jour and little else. Often, the only question asked by your harried server is which color of wine you want.

  Gascony is fundamentally a rural place, and to imbibe its true essence you have to leave the towns behind and venture deep into the countryside, preferably on foot. This is an easy thing to do, for the Gers is laced with thousands of miles of walkable farm roads and hiking trails, making village-to-village jaunts an appealing proposition. Such excursions are in my opinion the best possible way to work up your appetite.

  The French divide hikes into two categories: grandes randonnées and petites randonnées. The former are for the type of person who thinks nothing of carrying a 50-pound pack up a mountain and can discuss at length the wicking properties of various synthetic fabrics. The latter are for dabblers, like me, who get kvetchy when an outdoor activity starts to eat into the dinner hour. Though the Gers does have one grande randonnée route — a multiday loop that starts and ends in Auch — the département is a paradise for day hikers.

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  Photo

  Duck breast salad at the Café des Sports in Lectoure, France.
  Credit Andy Haslam for The New York Times
  I’ve hiked many petite randonnée routes in the Gers, using the magnificently detailed TopoGuides, published by the Fédération Française de la Randonnée Pédestre; or, when hiking with my daughter, the slim but excellent family-oriented trail guide “Les Sentiers d’Emilie dans le Gers.” Most marked trails in the Gers are loops of under 15 miles, many much shorter.

  One of the loveliest plunges into the deeply corrugated terrain north of Lupiac, which happens to be the birthplace of Charles Ogier de Batz de Castelmore, better known as D’Artagnan, by far the world’s best-known Gascon and a man of large appetites. The trail follows easements through ancient family farmsteads and bisects a shady wood, a remnant of the Gascon forests that served as hunting grounds for local feudal estates. Another terrific hike starts in the village of Maumusson-Laguian and weaves through the vineyards of Madiran. From the hill crests, on a clear day, you can see the Pyrénées, and in summer the air is filled with the smell of hay, wild grasses and damp earth.

  I’m particularly fond of the latter hike because if you start right after breakfast, you can be done in time to have lunch at the nearby Ferme Descoubet. This family-run duck farm will, if you call ahead, prepare a real-deal Gascon home-cooked meal and serve it to you in a low-ceilinged farmhouse dining room alongside an ancient-looking stone hearth. On my last visit, the farm’s owner presented me with an entire, perfectly medium-rare duck breast, its fatty skin crisp and just shy of charred. The juicy magret had been grilled, cut into quarters, and arranged around a bed of fried potatoes with a deep, roasted flavor that could only have come from a communion with hot duck fat.

  Ferme Descoubet lies at the far western edge of the Gers, near where the dense hills of the Gascon heartland flatten out into the alluvial plain of the Adour River. This is sleepy Gascony’s even sleepier hinterland. Here, I have experienced a level of solitude that is hard to find anywhere in mainland France, and I have often been overtaken by the pleasant sensation of coming unmoored from the here and now. It is a feeling that is easy to achieve in Gascony.

  One of my favorite spots in all of France is a remote settlement deep in the Adour River valley called Mazères. It consists of nothing more than a few houses gathered around a towering, fortresslike 12th-century church that looks way too big for its back-of-beyond surroundings. To visit the church you have to walk across the road to the house of the “gardien” and ring the doorbell, which is an actual bell hanging from the home’s old stone gate. If he is home, the white-haired man, possessed of an impressive knowledge of the church’s history and, more important, a key to the place, will show you around the cool, dark sanctuary and point out the room’s marble reliquary, which looks like a creepy dollhouse.

  Then, in typical Gascon fashion, he will probably engage you in a conversation about the weather and, by way of parting, tell you where you should have lunch.

  Photo

  Much of the produce offered at the street market in Lectoure is destined to be cooked in duck fat. Credit Andy Haslam for The New York Times
  If You Go

  Most visitors to Gascony arriving by air fly into Toulouse, an hour-and-a-half drive from Auch, the region’s main city. Auch has a well-staffed tourism office (3, place de la République; en.auch-tourisme.com) that sells “TopoGuides” to the Gers.

  In Auch, the venerable Hôtel de France (hoteldefrance-auch.com) offers a range of reasonably priced rooms (starting at 75 euros, about $79). Its casual restaurant has a small terrace overlooking Auch’s main square and serves many of the region’s greatest hits. The hotel also has a grande salle, where fancier (and much pricier) fare is served.

  The Hôtel de Bastard in Lectoure (hotel-de-bastard.com) has a sleeker, more updated feel, and offers a somewhat lighter version of Gascon and traditional French dishes.

  Simpler meals can be had for a pittance at many of Gascony’s bistros such as the Le Divan (10, boulevard du Général de Gaulle) in Éauze and the Café du Centre (restaurant-maubourguet.fr) in Maubourguet, or at unpretentious cafe-bars like the often-raucous Café des Sports (73, rue Nationale) in Lectoure.

  Fancier, if still perfectly Gascon (and perfectly affordable), cooking can be found at L’escale (lescale-gers.fr) in the picturesque village of Montréal. Ferme Descoubet (ferme-descoubet.com) serves ultratraditional Gascon farmhouse fare in an actual farmhouse; be sure to call at least a day ahead.

  Weekly village markets are a great entry point for delving into Gascon foodways. Éauze has an excellent market on Thursday mornings just off the ring road encircling the medieval town center. Mirande’s covered market, held on Monday mornings, is equally lively. The town of Aire-sur-l’Adour has an even bigger covered market, held on Saturday mornings, with a busy buvette, where many a marketgoer can be seen enjoying an early-morning aperitif.

  DAVID McANINCH is the author of “Duck Season: Eating, Drinking and Other Misadventures in Gascony, France’s Last Best Place,” published this month by Harper Books.

  A version of this article appears in print on March 19, 2017, on Page TR1 of the New York edition with the headline: The Other South of France. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe

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11/12/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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Print Marked Items
McAninch, David: DUCK SEASON
Kirkus Reviews.
(Jan. 1, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text: 
McAninch, David DUCK SEASON Harper/HarperCollins (Adult Nonfiction) $28.99 3, 7 ISBN: 978-0-06-230941-9
A debut memoir about eight months of French culinary delights.In 2012, food writer and Chicago Magazine features
editor McAninch was sent on assignment to Gascony, a fertile agricultural region bordering the Pyrenees in southwest
France, to write a piece about duck. Although he had passed through the area on other visits, this time the "cardcarrying
Francophile" was smitten. Everything about Gascony entranced him: the amazing food, wines, customs, and
people, who "seemed more open-minded than their compatriots," importing from Spain "an easy warmth and
boisterousness." Forgoing trendiness (no nouvelle cuisine here), cooks created "dishes of immense depth from a limited
palette of local ingredients that hadn't expanded in generations." Following a plot that has now become familiar,
McAninch became obsessed, imagining Gascony as "a kind of Brigadoon," and conceived the idea of writing about a
region that he believed had been overlooked in favor of the more picturesque Provence. Soon, he, his wife, and young
daughter were installed in an old water mill in the village of Plaisance, where they would experience all the blessings
Gascony could offer from May to December. McAninch tells a charming but predictable tale of abundant meals
prepared by fabulous cooks in their own kitchens or modest restaurants. The author enrolled in cooking classes and
private lessons, practicing his new skills in his rudimentary kitchen. Meals, he writes, "became the organizing principle
of our daily life." Besides garbure (cabbage and white bean soup), poule au pot (chicken in a pot), duck confit, foie
gras, seared duck breasts, and cream-filled tarts--recipes included--wine and beer flowed at every event, morning, noon,
and night. "Glasses were filled, emptied, and filled again," could serve as the book's refrain. As in most such memoirs,
the visiting Americans encounter kindly, sometimes-eccentric, always colorful, and voluble characters, such as the
taciturn cheese maker who sometimes, but not always, manages to bring his wheels of cheese to market. Warm
recollections to please fellow Francophiles.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"McAninch, David: DUCK SEASON." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Jan. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA475357282&it=r&asid=0e494a5d35aa49b652f79ea1a533e788.
Accessed 12 Nov. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A475357282
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McAninch, David. Duck Season: Eating,
Drinking, and Other Misadventures in Gascony--
France's Last Best Place
Linda M. Kaufmann
Library Journal.
142.2 (Feb. 1, 2017): p94.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution
permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text: 
McAninch, David. Duck Season: Eating, Drinking, and Other Misadventures in Gascony--France's Last Best Place.
Harper. Mar. 2017.288p. illus. maps. ISBN 9780062309419. $28.99; ebk. ISBN 9780062309426. trav
This historic area of Gascony, France, is best known for its hearty culinary delights and rural traditions. Chicago
magazine features editor and food writer McAninch, who likes to cook as much as he likes to eat, takes his wife and
young daughter to the small Gascon town of Plaisance du Gers for eight months, where he spends his time cooking,
eating, and drinking with the often colorful locals. Fie herds sheep; hunts pigeons; joins the local, all-male cooking
(and drinking) club; and works in a vineyard. He learns to make several local dishes with his Gascon friends, including
duck confit, a traditional soup called garbure, and gateau d la broche, a cake made on a spit in front of an open fire.
Several classic Gascon recipes are included. McAninch's knowledge of Gascony's history and traditions provides
plenty of interesting background to this story of mouth-watering dishes and new friends. VERDICT An informative
and amusing memoir in the style of Peter Mayle's A Year in Provence. Francophiles, foodies, and armchair travelers
will want to pack their bags for a taste of this distinctive part of France.--Linda M. Kaufmann, Massachusetts Coll, of
Liberal Arts Lib., North Adams
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Kaufmann, Linda M. "McAninch, David. Duck Season: Eating, Drinking, and Other Misadventures in Gascony--
France's Last Best Place." Library Journal, 1 Feb. 2017, p. 94. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479301303&it=r&asid=192b9195fe6ba447246c747e6d3dce1b.
Accessed 12 Nov. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A479301303
11/12/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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Duck Season: Eating, Drinking, and Other
Misadventures in Gascony, France's Last Best
Place
Emily Brock
Booklist.
113.11 (Feb. 1, 2017): p8.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text: 
Duck Season: Eating, Drinking, and Other Misadventures in Gascony, France's Last Best Place.
By David McAninch.
Mar. 2017. 288p. Harper, $28.99 (9780062309419). 641.5.
Readers should prepare to be hungry for the duration of this book. McAninch uprooted his wife and daughter from a
stable life in Chicago to live in a cold, damp mill in rural southern France for a year. The goal was to experience life in
Gascony as a native. McAninch is a food writer and lifelong Francophile who fell under the spell of the distinct
lifestyle and cooking of the agricultural region. The primary crop? Duck. Filled with descriptions of food that will have
readers' mouths watering, this book is a heartfelt foray into an often-overlooked area of France, filled with jocular
characters and charming anecdotes. Fortunately, McAninch includes a few choice recipes at the end of the book for
those who dare to tackle some of the delectable, traditional French cooking. Overall, McAninch's ode to the people,
food, and culture of Gascony is a travelers delight. Readers will be nearly as sad for McAninch's journey to end as the
author himself was, and ready to hop on a flight to France.--Emily Brock
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Brock, Emily. "Duck Season: Eating, Drinking, and Other Misadventures in Gascony, France's Last Best Place."
Booklist, 1 Feb. 2017, p. 8. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA481244701&it=r&asid=0f276c8c8c09f36f53de44603f08cf85.
Accessed 12 Nov. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A481244701
11/12/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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Duck Season: Eating, Drinking, and Other
Misadventures in Gascony, France's Last Best
Place
Publishers Weekly.
264.5 (Jan. 30, 2017): p193.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text: 
Duck Season: Eating, Drinking, and Other Misadventures in Gascony, France's Last Best Place
David McAninch. Harper, $28.99 (288p) ISBN 978-0-06-230941-9
In this story of an American cooking his way through France, McAninch does not just go through the motions in order
to check his experience off some professional and personal bucket list. He moves his family to the rural area of
Gascony for nearly a year and harmoniously integrates himself with the locals; he pays respects to deeply rooted
traditions, and falls in love with the area in beautiful and unexpected ways; and he educates readers about hunting and
cooking duck. While living in a historic mill, McAninch, his wife, and his young daughter, are at the mercy of every
challenge of French living. Among minor language barriers, ancient plumbing issues, and maze-like markets, the
seasoned food writer gains a valuable education. McAninch discovers which ducks (mullard vs. mallard) are for
cooking; he learns more about the treasure, and staple, that is foie gras; and he observes the subtleties of welcoming
guests or offering directions in an area uncharted by Google Maps. Most importantly, through McAninch's warm and
fluid delivery, readers come away with a taste and respect for a regional commodity, a handful of enticing recipes, and
a new appreciation for friendships unfettered by origin or boundary. (Mar.)
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Duck Season: Eating, Drinking, and Other Misadventures in Gascony, France's Last Best Place." Publishers Weekly,
30 Jan. 2017, p. 193. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA480195234&it=r&asid=a203a4c1350d9d120adcd43703c9f043.
Accessed 12 Nov. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A480195234

"McAninch, David: DUCK SEASON." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Jan. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA475357282&it=r. Accessed 12 Nov. 2017. Kaufmann, Linda M. "McAninch, David. Duck Season: Eating, Drinking, and Other Misadventures in Gascony--France's Last Best Place." Library Journal, 1 Feb. 2017, p. 94. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479301303&it=r. Accessed 12 Nov. 2017. Brock, Emily. "Duck Season: Eating, Drinking, and Other Misadventures in Gascony, France's Last Best Place." Booklist, 1 Feb. 2017, p. 8. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA481244701&it=r. Accessed 12 Nov. 2017. "Duck Season: Eating, Drinking, and Other Misadventures in Gascony, France's Last Best Place." Publishers Weekly, 30 Jan. 2017, p. 193. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA480195234&it=r. Accessed 12 Nov. 2017.

• The Christian Science Monitor
  https://www.csmonitor.com/Books/Book-Reviews/2017/0306/Duck-Season-follows-a-Francophile-on-a-quest-to-live-life-deeply-in-rural-France
  Word count: 1148

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  BOOKS BOOK REVIEWS
  'Duck Season' follows a Francophile on a quest to live life deeply in rural France

  Food and travel writer David McAninch moves to rural France, in search of a unique, authentic experience in a foreign land.
  By Jackson Holahan MARCH 6, 2017

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  When most Americans conjure up dramatic European vacations, images of the Louvre, the canals of Venice, and the ruins of Rome come to mind. Not so for David McAninch, a frequent food and travel writer and the features editor at Chicago Magazine. He had other plans when he decamped, along with his wife and six-year-old daughter, to Gascony, a province in southwest France best known as the home of Bordeaux. McAninch’s yearning for the path less-travelled would not lead him to Bordeaux, however. He settled in a mill house, bifurcated by a meandering stream, in a small town in the Gers, the most rural of France’s 100-plus départements, where ducks outnumber people 20 to one.

  Like a culinary Kerouac, McAninch’s spiritual quest is driven by a keen desire to understand Gascony’s places, people, and traditions by covering as much ground, both physical and cultural, as possible in eight months. His adventures and misadventures are chronicled in Duck Season, which is equal parts travelogue and personal diary.

  McAninch sets out to solve the age-old conundrum of the traveler: how to have a unique, authentic experience in a foreign land in a finite period. Short of relocating to Gascony permanently, he does as fine a job as nearly anyone could in eight months. He encounters Nadine Cauzette, a widow from the neighboring town who serves as a constant and willing mentor for every hallmark Gascon dish (duck confit, poule au pot, and pigeon ragout) that he seeks to cook, often successfully. Les Esbouhats, a local fraternal cooking (and drinking) club, similarly welcome McAninch into the fold, which results in many a late night, often punctuated by fine local wine. This group acts as a social nexus within the town, and its members readily include McAninch in their many Gascon traditions.

  Recommended: How much do you know about French literature? Try our quiz!
  Amandine, the most popular cheese merchant at the local market, obliges McAninch’s entreaty to lead him into the Pyrenees for an overnight at the mountain cabin of Marcel, a Basque cheesemaker who tends to his summer sheep flock some 8,000 feet above sea level. This harrowing journey involves a nighttime all-terrain vehicle ride on the lip of a cliff, as well as the requisite amount of cheese, ham, bread, and eggs that such a trek merits.

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  WHAT ARE YOU READING?Tell us about the book that's currenly on your bedside table.
  McAninch writes honestly and joyfully about his myriad encounters with the true Gascon culture throughout. The fact that he speaks French fluently offers him an essential advantage, but McAninch’s true charm is his ability to inject himself headlong into the quotidian happenings of a rural town.

  We all should be so lucky to have a bit of the fearless traveler within us. Oftentimes, work commitments and other practical considerations render the choice to relocate one’s family a bit beyond reach for many. Nonetheless, it is impossible to read "Duck Season" and not consider devising at least one adventurous, authentic excursion. While he chose rural France, McAninch’s writing is steeped in the notion that one need not go far to truly experience a place, its people, and its oddities.

  McAninch is well-served by a curiosity, happiness, and lack of pretension that makes it all the easier for those around him to regard him as a local, and less as a stranger. One of the crowning achievements of his time in Gascony is when McAninch throws a winning dinner party, noting that, “to do so in a far-flung place where you have moved with your family at considerable effort and expense, and with more than a little uncertainty as to how the whole thing is going to turn out, feels especially good.”

  Hosting a successful dinner party in rural France sounds great, but until you arrive there, look no further than the appendix of "Duck Season," where McAninch shares the recipes for eight Gascon staples. An adventure in your own kitchen can be the best kind.
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• Eat Live Travel Write
  https://www.eatlivetravelwrite.com/2017/07/summer-reads-duck-season-eating-drinking-and-other-misadventures-in-gascony-frances-last-best-place/
  Word count: 1408

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

  by mardi michels on july 17, 2017 in book review, france, travel
  Welcome to Summer Reads 2017 where I’ll be reviewing a series of “not just cookbooks”.

  Duck Season Eating Drinking and Other Misadventures in Gascony France's Last Best Place byDavid McAnich on eatlivetravelwrite.com
  Today for Summer Reads I’m excited to introduce you to Duck Season: Eating, Drinking and Other Misadventures in Gascony, France’s Last Best Place by David McAninch. McAninch is the Features Editor at Chicago Magazine and the book tells the story of the eight months he lived in rural Gascony with his wife and young daughter. McAninch and his family lived in the Gers, the neighbouring department to the Lot-et-Garonne where our little maison de la fontaine is situated so the story is one that is close to my heart.

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  The Southwest is a little bit overlooked when it comes to the tourist trail in France (this can be a blessing in a way – you really feel like you are in uncharted tourist territory sometimes! – but it also feels like a shame – more people should know about this magical corner of the country!) and, like many, McAninch wasn’t really familiar with the region until he was travelled there to research a story about duck (a less-common ingredient in North American but a Gascon staple) for a food magazine. A “card-carrying Francophile” for most of his life, McAninch had fallen in love with the language in high school, spent a year in the South of France as a student, then another year teaching in Paris. He went on to study French at university, obtaining a Master’s degree, then honeymooned in France but Gascony hadn’t been on his radar until that assignment. While he was writing that story, he was enchanted by the people, the food (and Armagnac!) and the lifestyle and knew he needed to know more.

  On returning home, McAninch tried to secure another Gascony-related assignment so he could get his fix and was lucky enough to be sent to cover a wine festival (tough job, huh, but someone’s gotta do it!) in the small village of Viella which fuelled his obsession even more. McAninch started reading everything he could about the region, the food, the people.

  As curiosity sometimes does, mine blossomed into an obsession. This hilly region of duck farms and vineyards began to shimmer in my imagination like France’s Last Best Place, a kind of Brigadoon.

  It was a passage in Paula Wolfert’s classic The Cooking of South-West France that spurred McAninch to do something about his obsession:

  One could write a rich and anecdotal book about the region, the people, and the land, the sights and smells and moods.

  Convincing his wife, Michele, to make the move to Southwest France was swift. A four-day house hunt in the Gers saw him making a handshake deal on an old millhouse. Other pieces of the administrative puzzle seemed to fall into place quickly too and in early May, the McAninch family saw themselves transplanted to the Gers for what would be eight months of French immersion of the best kind.

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  Duck Season tells the tale of the McAninch family’s immersion in the Gascon art de vivre. It’s a delicious tale of discovery – not just of the region itself but also of a whole different lifestyle – the epitome of what the “slow living” movement is all about. McAninch learns to respect time as an important ingredient in the preparation of really good food – the Gascon way of life is anything but fast. “Moderation” isn’t a word typically associated with Gascon food (it’s rich and heavy) and McAninch notes that folks in the Gers ate and drink “what they craved. They always ordered cheese or dessert and often both. They sang a lot.” It’s joie de vivre at its finest and proof that a little excess has a place in the everyday. The life expectancy of people in this region is higher than any other in France (with twice as many men over the age of ninety as the national average), so they much be doing something right! It’s an enchanting look at everyday life in rural France which will, in fact, make you want to jump on a plane immediately and seek out this lesser-known corner of France for yourself. I can say with the utmost confidence that McAninch’s declaration that this region is France’s “last best place” is pretty darned accurate. Read the book and see for yourself!

  Read McAninch’s fabulous article in The New York Times: Is Gascony the most delicious corner of France?

  Duck Season Eating Drinking and Other Misadventures in Gascony France's Last Best Place byDavid McAnich on eatlivetravelwrite.com

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  Buy Duck Season on Amazon (this link should bring you to the Amazon store in, or closest to, your country) or for free worldwide shipping, buy from The Book Depository.

  _________

  Please note: This post contains product links from Amazon and The Book Depository which are affiliate links, meaning if you click over and purchase something, I will receive a very small percentage of the purchase price (at no extra cost to you) which goes towards maintaining eat. live. travel. write. Thank you in advance!

  ________

  Disclosure: I received a copy of “Duck Season” for review purposes from the publisher. I was not asked to write about the book, nor am I being compensated for doing so. All opinions 100% my own.

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  book review, David McAninch, Duck Season, france, Gascony, Gers, Summer Reads, travel

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  2 Responses to Summer Reads: Duck Season: Eating, Drinking and Other Misadventures in Gascony, France’s Last Best Place

  Tami July 18, 2017 at 01:47 #
  A very fitting post – I am currently in the middle of watching Rick Stein’s French Odyssey 🙂

  Episode for me last night featured Canal Lateral a la Garonne and duck in red wine. Not to mention his visits to the markets of Nerac and Cadillac and believe it or not – Prune And Almond Tart flavoured with local Armagnac!!!!!

  REPLY

  Mardi Michels July 18, 2017 at 02:37 #
  Amazing! I need to look out for that one and take a look!

  REPLY
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