This is one of my favorite season heralds- a photograph taken by Tim Clinch a few falls ago for a magazine article I wrote.

It is a reminder of the Fatted Duck and all the bounty of the fall-to-winter harvest that lies ahead. It is a reminder of good work we have done and good work yet to come. It is a very good reminder of what makes Gascony… Gascony, and why I live and work here. Substantial, real and textured with age and passion, Gascon cooking is best appreciated when there is a chill in the air and an edge on your appetite. Now is that time!

Seasons roll around again and again. My kitchen at Camont stands a witness to literally hundreds of seasons of cooking and preserving food.  Those well-scrubbed terracotta tile floors are nearly 300 years old; beeswaxed plaster walls, 7-ft wide stone and brick fireplace, and a honey-colored comptoir from a forgotten boulangerie tell their own stories.  Basic in the way a well-used French kitchen is basic, Camont has enough pots and pans to cook for an army, 24 champagne glasses for friends, ironed serviettes and tablecloths and enough aprons for everyone.

But more than the historic building, my Kitchen at Camont is the mis-en-scene for an impromptu play of our own making. Summer friends come and go adding characters and distracting tangents to our kitchen stories like foreign spices. Now, as the days grow quieter, I return to the deep-planted roots of my being here, the French kitchen basics and the good Gascon food created by neighbors and friends- poule-au-pot, pot-au-feu, civet and daubes and other slow cooked delices. You’ll find those recipes appearing here as we cook them. New students will learn for the first time what it means to ‘listen to the simmering’ of a le creuset on the stove. Or taste the difference that enough black pepper means. Teaching here is not hands-on, but hand-to-hand. Yvette to Bridgitte to me to you.

We begin with a Duck. A simple farm raised duck. Although the original, official Camp Confit doesn’t happen until late January, I like to sneak up on my winter harvest of pates and terrines. It is when the potager is nearly bare, that the farms and markets of Gascony are a buzz with poultry, pork and all the fixings to make sausage, pates, terrines, rillettes, etc.  Some call it the ‘meat harvest’, I call it the ‘Keeping Kitchen’. The end of this month, a  few friends and guests join me to don our woad blue aprons and continue the centuries of harvesting and preserving good food in Southwest France. There is room for many in this kitchen which is an ever expanding gift. Come Taste Gascony – Sept 26-28 ’09.

Fall apprenticeships in butchery and charcuterie begin in November. Write for more information on Programs page.