Deep France (19 page)

Crush the bay leaf to powder and mix with lots of salt and some finely ground pepper. Sprinkle some of this mixture into the bottom of a casserole, put in the pieces of duck and sprinkle on more
salt mixture. Turn the pieces once or twice to make sure they’re salted all over, cover the casserole and leave overnight for the salt to draw out moisture and lightly cure the meat.

Render the fat from the rest of the skin and the carcass. Cut the skin into small pieces and pull out any fat from the body cavity. Either put the skin and fat in an ovenproof dish into a very
low oven, or simmer them in water in a saucepan on a very low heat. After about 90 minutes, all the available fat will have run out. Strain this carefully into a container. You will be left with
the
graisserons
, a luxurious advance on
pork scratchings. Add any scraps of meat left over, sprinkle with salt and brown in the oven before cooling and keeping for
aperitif time.

Take the duck pieces out of the casserole and rinse off the salt mixture under running water. Pat them dry with a cloth. Wash out the casserole, dry it, and pour in the duck fat. Set the
casserole over a low heat until the fat is warm and liquid, then add the duck pieces. There should be enough fat to cover them completely. If there isn’t, cook them in instalments using the
same fat. Simmer the pieces in the fat for about 3 hours.

Turn off the heat and leave the duck pieces to cool in the fat overnight. In the morning, wash out your containers with boiling water, dry them and put a little salt in the bottom of each to
sweeten any juice that runs from the meat. Pick out the pieces and pack them loosely into the jars.

Reheat the fat remaining and strain off and keep the clear layer which will rise to the top, leaving the meat juice and the cloudy fat behind. (These will not keep long, but you can use them to
enrich gravy and for general cooking.) Pour the clear fat around the pieces of duck in the jars until they are completely covered. Tap the full jars gently on the work­top to get rid of air
bubbles. Leave to cool, making sure that none of the pieces touches the side of the jar (one reason to prefer a glass container).

If you intend to eat the
confit
within a month, you can now lay a circle of greaseproof paper on top of the fat and put your containers in the fridge. If you want to go the whole nine
yards and let your confit mature for up to a year, add the circle of greaseproof paper, seal the jar tightly and sterilize in boiling water for 30 minutes, before cooling and storing.

Traditionally, jars of confit were often sealed with a layer of lard, which is denser and more air-proof than duck fat,
covered with a piece of cloth which was tied down
tightly and kept in the cool room adjacent to the kitchen, called a
chambre obscure
because no ray of sun was ever allowed to warm it. If your home is centrally heated, the only sensible
place to keep your confit may be the fridge.

When you want to use some pieces of confit, leave the jar in a warm room until the fat is semi-solid and you can withdraw the pieces easily. If you have to speed things up, warm the jar in a
saucepan of simmering water. Don’t even think about the microwave.

Let the fat drip off the meat, helped by very careful scrap­ing if you’re in a hurry. Put the pieces on a roasting rack and reheat them in a slow oven for about 40 minutes to an hour.
If the skin is not crisp after this, either turn up the heat in the oven or pop them under the grill. If the skin still isn’t crisp, it’s likely that you bought the wrong sort of duck.
In this case, the cheat’s way forward would be to sizzle the portions briefly in a pan, in a mixture of duck fat and olive or nut oil.

While you are reheating the duck, you can also brown some cubes of parboiled potatoes in a little duck fat, with some garlic, sliced shallot and thyme or rosemary. Quite often,
confit
is served with nothing more. However, the Gascons, like the English, see an affinity between duck and green peas, and sometimes serve
confit
nestled into a dish of peas cooked with baby
onions, herbs and cubes of Bayonne ham. A piece of
confit
is also essential to finish a
cassoulet
or a
garbure

Edmond Rostand, author of

Cyrano de Bergerac

The termites hatched out in the middle of the Queen Mother’s funeral. I had two guests with me, two old friends, both called
Penny. ‘Tuppence!’ cried Roger joyfully, when I asked him to dinner to meet them.

The Pennies are two of my oldest friends, and have cus­tody of those precious domestic bits I’d have been mad to trust to my tenant. Penny B lives around the corner from me in London,
works for the BBC and is looking after my Vic­torian terracotta urn with its topiary box ball. Penny C lives in Somerset and teaches children with learning difficulties; she and her husband
have custody of the Brayfield collection of art deco ceramics.

My landlady’s sofa, by that time, had been tastefully draped in antique linen sheets. We had finished dinner and were sitting by a glowing fire watching the television on which, thanks to
la parabole du Sky
, we had enjoyed highlights of the proceedings in Westminster Abbey from the first tolling of the bell to the last skirl of the pipes. It was when I got up to make the
coffee that I saw dozens of black insects crawling up the back of the sofa.

Termites look like small flying ants. They crawl about with a horrible determination while their wings unfold and dry out, then they fly off and pursue their termitey way of life outdoors, until
they lay eggs. When the eggs hatch, the termites can reduce a house to rubble in a couple of years by
burrowing under the walls and eating their way up through the
woodwork.

Softwood – pine, as in floorboards – is what termites like best, but they won’t turn their noses up at hardwood, like oak Béarns. By the time they are ready to swarm
they will have reamed hundreds of channels inside a solid plank, hollowing it out to the extent that the householder will be able to push in the surface with an ordinary kitchen fork.

Year one, the skirting boards. Year two, the level of a light switch. Year three, almost at the ground-floor ceiling. Year four, into the ceiling but, if you’re lucky, they won’t
take out a whole oak Béarn. Year five, if the house is still standing, they’re approaching the roof. By year six, the house can be nothing but a heap of stones.

Termites create a peculiar dry smell which a person with sensitized nose can detect as soon as he or she walks through the door. Sandy and Annabel had both been warning me for months that I was
in for a nasty surprise in the spring. After watching the termites for thirty seconds, I could see the little beasts were hatching out of the kitchen door frame.

Fortunately there was a good supply of insecticide in the house. The Pennies were intrepid and a short episode of shrieking and spraying took care of the first infestation.

When we came down in the morning, another few hun­dred had hatched from the door frame between the sitting room and the hall, and were crawling all over the floor and up the walls. For the
rest of the hatching season, I took to getting up early and having a good spray before my guests appeared.

With the termites came a moral dilemma. Gascony is probably the termite capital of France. Its humid climate is just what they like. Officially, termites are considered so deadly that their
presence must be notified to the
mairie
. It’s illegal to rent out an infested house, and if a house is sold,
as Sandy-and-Annie had just discovered at a cost of
€5,000, the seller has to provide a certificate proving that any possible termites have been exterminated.

I took advice. Possibly, my landlady had been told about the termites by the previous tenant, but was in total denial, terrified of the expense of treating them. Annabel, who had a vision of
billions of termites crawling intently up the hill to La Maysou, licking their tiny chops at the sight of her gorgeous Béarnais roof, voted for going straight to the
mairie
. I
preserved a few specimens in a jamjar as evidence and decided to wait until the landlady visited in May, feeling sympathy for a woman on a fixed income faced with a crippling house-repair bill, and
not wishing to find myself suddenly homeless either.

Everywhere I went that week, perfect strangers, hearing my English accent, put their hands on my arm in sympathy and said, Ah, you’ve lost your Queen Mother.’ Some of the shops even
put a picture of her in their windows.
Paris Match
, on the other hand, took a few pages out from its normal coverage of starlets and psychopaths to give the Frenchwoman’s view of the
courtship of that scheming hussy Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon by the great plonker, the future King George VI,
dit
Bertie.

At the time, the young aristocrat had only one aim, to cosy up to the royal family. She made friends with one of the princesses of the blood and, cunningly playing on the relationship,
penetrated the circle around the Prince of Wales. Later he would sum her up as “a frigid little bitch”, something to bear in mind when recalling her bottomless loathing for him and
Wallis Simpson . . . Bertie fell madly in love with her, but Elizabeth snubbed him. Lumber herself with this timid great oaf, neurotic, ulcerated, mad, addicted to whisky and, on top of it all,
with a stammer? She
who was the idol of London, courted by princes, for whose forget-me-not-blue eyes a famous Scottish seducer had just broken his engagement? She had higher
hopes.’

Later on, the writer noted that this ‘Mrs Windsor’ went on to be praised by de Gaulle and to do lots of heroic war work, but that just proved what a calculating two-faced minx she
was.
Ah, oui
.

The First Chapter Is Always The Worst

Mister Fabulous and Friends
is still on my desk. It was time to get some fresh minds on the subject. In London, when I needed feedback, I just handed the problem text
to whoever walked through the door and asked for reactions. There seemed no reason not to do the same in Orriule. I printed off five copies of the most recent redraft and handed them out to the
Pennies, Willow, Andrew, and Sandy-and-Annie.

Ex-pats are massive readers. They find books far more comforting than people who are surrounded by their own language and culture. They may have TV, but the hour’s time difference makes it
much less compelling to an offshore audience, and people quickly lose their feel for the grain of life back home, so that soap operas and reality TV are just incomprehensible to them. I suspect,
also, that people who choose to leave their native country to live in rural France are also choosing to reject
EastEnders
and everything it stands for.

My instant workshop responded gallantly to a writer in need of a reaction. Willow said she was confused. Andrew never found the time to read it, which is the most eloquent way that anyone can
tell you that you’ve failed to grab their attention. Sandy-and-Annie looked terrified and said
nothing. Penny B was far too polite to tell her holiday hostess anything
she might not want to hear.

Penny C, however, was characteristically analytical, and gave me a good idea what I needed to fix. In literature as in life, I’d picked the wrong man. She just plain didn’t like
him.

Mister Fabulous
is an ensemble piece about five men of fortysomething, and I’d started by introducing the nicest of them. Big mistake. Nice guys, in literature as in life, finish
last. You can have a nice guy in a book but he can’t carry the plot. Same goes for a nice girl. I am not the first to try making narrative water run uphill in this way. After all, when
Margaret Mitchell wrote
Gone With The Wind
, she actually intended her heroine to be Melanie Wilkes.

Mister Fab
was really about men and their friendships, something women find eternally mysterious since we can’t understand how people can have a friendship when they avoid talking
about anything that matters and only com­municate in grunts. However, to get my readers into this book, it was unwise to pick on the gentlest of them. Much better to have all five together and
looking damn butch. Since they were all still bonded by the band they’d formed in their student days, the opening scene was obviously the band on stage.