France: November 9 -- Pure Passion

Most of Thursday was pretty lazy. This was largely due the fact that we drank far too much wine the night before. Funny how you don't always notice that as the night progresses. Thankfully, however, our next meeting was not until 5 in the afternoon, so we had plenty of time to take a break. The past three days had been full of new impressions and it can actually be a bit tiring to take all that in at once. I spent the morning writing Wednesday's blog entry, and then we decided to head off for a worker's lunch.

We climbed in the car a few minutes after 12 and made our way to Quatres-Routes (du-Lot to be precise -- there are plenty of places called Quatres Routes simply because it means "crossroads". The imagination involved to name a place such! They must have had too much wine the night before as well...) Our goal was a little café called "Café de France" (another original name) in this tiny village where we had eaten the year before. This café fills up with workers from the area, people who by the look of their clothes are carpenters or have other professions where they work with their hands. Lunch is served family-style, at long tables, and you just help yourself to the 5 courses put in front of you in the course of the lunch before passing food and wine around to the others at the table.

However, we arrived there far too late, 25 minutes past noon, and the place was already jam-packed. We stuck our heads in the door, and experienced every single person turning around to see who these strangers were (tourists in November?) before closing the door again and deciding to find somewhere else. We would try again the next day.

We drove to Vayrac, a village close by, parked by the church in the center of town and wandered down the hill where there was another lunch place. This also had the 11 euro 5-course lunch menu, though it was occupied more with pensioners and families, and not so full. We settled down and made our way through vegetable soup, a cheese tart with something similar to camembert, a huge plate of roast pork with mustard cream sauce and french fries, cheese, and walnut cake for dessert. The food was good but the portions could easily have been half the size they were, and we were full after the appetizer (cheese tart). Despite many big meals on this trip this was the time I think I was most stuffed.

We started to drive around in the afternoon to take photos of a couple of cute signs we had seen, but headed first to the village of St. Denis-les-Martels which, according to a sign I had seen in another place, had tastings of one of my favorite local wines, Vin Paillé de Corrèze. This is a sweet wine made the traditional way (before noble rot) by letting grapes dry on straw mats, the same method used in Jura and sometimes I believe in Jurancon. There isn't much wine made in this region except some light table wine (served at 11 euro lunches), so this winery is a bit interesting. We didn't find it however, and had just decided to drive back home when I made a wrong turn. Looking for a place to turn around, we suddenly saw the sign for the winery in front of us. Serendipity! We drove in and talked to a lady hanging out of the 2nd storey window of her house, who explained in a slightly embarrassed manner that all her wine was sold out, and that she was bottling more on Sunday. So no wine tasting or buying after all, but at least I know where it is now, and the place is properly entered in my GPS TomTom for next time.

Now we really just wanted to go home and take a nap, so we did, until it was time to go our meeting with the foie gras producer Conserves de Puy-Lambert. This would be our 3^rd and last foie gras producer, and it would be interesting to compare the visit with the last two. We drove down the windy road to a little village called Gignac and greeted a young woman and an older man and woman in the showroom/store.

Puy-Lambert is where the whole concept of the company of Sarrazac started. I have been familiar with their products since I met Malcom and Nicole who own the house in France, since it was their favorite producer. I recall the first time I tried to buy some of it myself when I was with my then girlfriend and headed off to a local butcher, but discovered that there were many sorts of and producers of foie gras, and the kind we bought was not nearly as good. Eventually we found Puy-Lambert at the market in Brive, and stocked up for bringing things back home in Norway. Every time I have visited this corner of France, I have bought lots of patés at Puy-Lambert. So the idea of importing it came naturally to me.

Puy-Lambert used to be a farm, raising its own birds, when it was started in the 80's, but in the mid-90's it was bought by Joël Marty who had come back to the country after working in Paris for a while. This young man had experience as a butcher, a cook and a pastry-maker, as well as having worked at another major foie gras producer in the area. He bought the farm but found that the conditions were not good enough, and decided to rebuild the production facility from scratch. In the process, he started sourcing ready-slaughtered ducks and geese from a couple of local cooperatives, so he could focus on the production process. Nowhere else had we seen anyone so intensely focused on quality, on details and on complete control over the entire production process. Mr. Marty was truly the most passionate man we had met thus far.

The "factory" was a small square building 500 meters from their shop. The old man and women we had met there were Mr. Marty's mother and father, who were obviously very proud of their son. The father took us to the factory where Mr. Marty began our tour. The reason we had been asked to come as late as 5 was obviously to not intrude on the production. This became obvious when we saw that there were only 3 employees there, including the owner himself. As opposed to La Campagnoise's 14 employees in the production hall (which was not much bigger), this came as a bit of a surprise. Mr. Marty explained to us that he wanted to be integral in every stage of the production, from inspection to canning and shipment, so that not a single can or jar which fell into the hands of a customer had not been inspected by himself. Quality control was, if possible, even stricter than we had experienced before. This bolstered my confidence in his products to an even higher lever than I had had previously.

The entire facility was U-shaped, so that the raw materials came in one door, and the finished products left out the other next to it. The raw materials were first inspected and sorted. Here he uses 4 rather than 3 categories of foie gras quality. We also saw the lab where he tests a can or jar from every finished batch, putting it in an oven at high temperatures for several days to check for any possible bacterial contamination. The raw meat and liver were kept in big refrigerated rooms until needed in the production hall. Here everything was done by hand. Even the livers were seasoned by hand and not by machine in order to maintain their delicacy. As we came in the employees were meticulously scrubbing down. We saw a couple of small machines for mixing "bloc", a smoked duck breast slicer, and the cutting tables. Moving along, we came into the cooking room where confit was cooked. As we have seen before, this was done in the more traditional way, being cooked carefully in fat rather than a more typical production line for a large-scale producer. Further, we came around the bend of the "U" shape for sterilization, canning, washing and storage of the final product. By now this equipment was starting to look familiar to us. We learned of some improvements for the next year which would improve the look of the labels and packaging (thought the product itself would remain as tasty as ever), and saw an exciting new product.

When I first ate foie gras from Puy-Lambert I suppose I had an idea that old ladies in the kitchen in the back were doing all the preparation with their own pots and pans. So in a way I was disillusioned to see the production in a white, sterile, "factory"-setting. But I am at the same time reassured that safety and quality are the utmost priorities, so that every time a customer buys a product it will meet the same high standard. Mr. Marty is very careful to use "artisinale" methods, processing ingredients gently by hand, and using no preservatives. So when I look back I think one gets the best of both worlds here.

We rounded off the visit with a trip back to the store, where we bought a foie gras "mi-cuit", which is cooked at a lower internal temperature to better maintain the fresh flavor of the liver. (Some call this "pasteurized" foie gras, a not inappropriate term.) Mi-cuit is canned or store in sealed jars, but at the same time needs to be kept in the refrigerator and has a shorter self-life. Unfortunately I cannot import this now as I don't have the proper storage facility for cold goods. So it was fun to buy a sample and test it at the house. We had been so stuffed for lunch that we settled for eating only the foie gras for dinner. It had a lovely texture, firm but not crumbly, a pale pink color, and a taste which was a little more peppery and meaty that the fully conserved version. It was fantastic with a little toasted country bread, salad, and onion compote with Sauternes.