My wife Nancy had a bad night’s sleep and wasn’t feeling great so she slept in and spent the morning at the hotel. I went to a nearby Carrefour Express market and bought her some breakfast items and drinks.
The other three of us rented a car at the train station, located just a block from our hotel, and drove to the town of Samatan in the department of Gers, in the region of Gascony (Gascogne in French).
This region is known for production of foie gras and Samatan has an Halle au Gras, literally “Market of Fat” i.e. a foie gras market, on Mondays. As food adventurers, we had identified this town as worthy of investigation.
It’s not yet on the YouTube circuit and mobbed with tourists like the Tokyo Fish Market. I was thinking that this blog post probably isn’t helping that cause, but then I saw how few subscribers I had and I don’t think the citizens of Gers have to worry about that anytime soon. On the one hand, I feel the responsibility to document. On the other hand, I wanted to refrain from taking photos.
But others have. Here’s one.
Here is a video maybe produced by a local tourism board or something.
And the video captures pretty much exactly what we saw: duck farmers selling fresh butchered ducks and duck livers to the public. I assume the interviewer only coincidentally doppelgängs this guy.
They know what’s good for them
What’s different about France is that pretty much everyone we met makes eating really good food a priority. And in Gers it’s especially so. I have been told this region creates most of the world’s foie gras, and has the world’s highest per capita consumption of foie gras.
I think I read in this book that the Gersois admit to eating foie twice per week on average. How much more they eat in secret is anyone’s guess. I saw the term “gourmand” bandied about pretty liberally on menus in Southern France. I suspect the Google Translate definition, “glutton,” loses something in translation, but I get the sense that it is a term generally indicating appreciation for good food and more generally the good life. In any case, this is not the France of fashion models. I feel like the term “moderation” isn’t used around here much.
There is also a regular French village street market on Mondays in Samatan, with vendors selling all kinds of foods and household items. My first order of business was to buy a hat. Then we continued through the street market, which pretty much covers the entire business district of the town.
We met a friend of a friend, Jenine, who lives further east in Gascony and operates a food/wellness tourism business, TasteOfGascony.com. Check out her website, and you can stay in her B&B.
After walking through the Halle au Gras and getting the price for a duck liver (33 € iirc) and a whole duck (28 € iirc – maybe that was everything but the liver?) we walked through more of the outdoor Monday market and grazed and shopped for lunch.
Curiously, the one thing that none of the street vendors sell is foie gras. Animal treatment ethics notwithstanding, we didn’t think it would be appropriate to visit Samatan and not get foie. So we stopped in a (the?) shop to buy some.
I bought 2 jars of mi-cuit (half-cooked) foie gras, one goose and one duck, for 9€ and 12€ respectively.
We spent a lot of time at a cheese stand. This cheesemonger gave us samples of several of his wares and knew he had hooked a couple of whopper Americans with money to spend.
One of their more interesting cheeses was a brie that they buy and slice in half, and add a fruit spread to.
We bought some cured salami-type meats including a duck sausage from a very charismatic and charming vendor, whom I regret not photographing as he was quite the character. We also got some gratons, pieces of deep fried duck skin, which as I wrote this I learned translate to English as duck cracklings or quacklings. I took a few bites of them but they are just a bit too rich for my taste.
We also tried some local Armagnac from a vendor, whose taste I immediately identified as a cross between whisky and Manischewitz wine. I preferred it as a spritz from the night before, but I could see acquiring a taste for it.
Earlier on the way into town, we had spotted a picnic table under a tree next to a parking lot. It wasn’t obviously part of a park and might have been on a private lot, but we went back there to enjoy our picnic and nobody seemed to have a problem with it. It was a beautiful spring day and we enjoyed our lunch. Check out that dapper hat.
We tried to open the jars of foie gras but they were sealed so tight that we couldn’t even pry it open with the knife we had bought. Ultimately I gave it to our hosts at the Bed and Breakfast house we stayed in later in the week, who served it to us for dinner.
We had way too much food. We brought it with us but we clearly overbought. It was too much of a good thing, and there were so many different things that we needed to eat over the rest of the week. I’m embarrassed to say that we ended up throwing some of it away.
It was nice to meet our new friend Jenine and we will definitely be back to see her and explore more of the Gers region.
An Evening in Toulouse
Later we drove back to Toulouse and picked up Nancy. We walked around town and stopped at a café.
Nancy and I wanted something lighter than French food, whereas our friends came to France for French food, so we went our separate ways for dinner.
After a few false starts, Nancy and I found a Lebanese restaurant nearby and shared two mezze platters, one meat and one vegetarian. Lebanese food is always a winner in our book and this was more than enough for the two of us.
Total $53.23 USD (about 45.50 €) including a couple of soft drinks
After dinner we walked by the Irish pub we had noticed earlier, and the sign said they were having a trivia quiz night that evening. I asked the bartender what language it was in, and he said it was bilingual. So we had our entertainment for the evening.
We did pretty well on the general information rounds. There were a few questions where I was close but didn’t have the exact answer, and got credit for them anyway. For example I answered that USB stood for Universal Service Bus, whereas the correct answer was Universal Serial Bus. One question was how many time zones there are in the United States, excluding Guam. I answered 7 but he said the answer was 6. I maintain it’s 7: Alaska, Hawaii, Pacific, Mountain, Central, Eastern, and Atlantic (for Puerto Rico). Whatever. We made it to the final round, whatever that meant, and blew it because the questions were all about pop music, of which as olds, we knew only those from before 1998. We left before the final round was tallied, since we didn’t care about the prize, which was free booze at the pub in the future, and the bar was getting pretty crowded.
We had an interesting conversation with one of the bartenders, a young American woman from Sacramento, where we had lived for many years. I was surprised that she could legally work in France. She had come as an au pair and was now a student in Toulouse, and she said that her student visa allows her to work up to 20 hours per week. I asked her how salaries compare to the US and she said she makes 13 € (about $15.21) per hour, which is a few dollars less per hour than my 18-year-old son makes working at a parking lot, and of course it is not typical to tip in France. But she said she was fine with the pay; her rent and food are inexpensive and she has health care.
And that mostly wraps up our too-short visit to Toulouse. It’s a nice, low-key, medium-sized city and it’s the kind of place I wouldn’t mind staying for a month or so sometime soon.