The Book of Salt - Monique Truong [36]
The figs and the port I will place in an earthenware jug "to get to know each other," as my oldest brother would say. Anh Minh, though, did not teach me this recipe. He has never even seen fresh figs. He has never walked the markets of Marseilles and counted the last centimes in his pockets. He has never had to learn that in that city figs, oranges, and dates are cheaper than bread. That hunger is magnified by a steady diet of sour and sweet. That a man can thirst for a bit of meat, a stomach-calming slab of savory. He has never dipped a handful of orange peels into the sea and licked away a soothing slick of salt. He has never met a stranger's glance dead-on, followed him to his hotel room, worked there in the dark. Anh Minh has also never dined on a meal costing twenty whole francs, exorbitant even if the menu boasted in a curvaceous hand of roast duck with figs and port wine, exorbitant and foolish even if I did eat my weight in bread, sopping up flavors that the dishes did not know that they had to offer. The remaining five francs, all that was left of my night's labor, sat in my hands and bemoaned the loss. I had emptied my pockets to line my stomach, relinquished my body to keep it alive, nourished my hunger, famished my soul.
"Robbing Peter to pay Paul," the Old Man clucks, like an old biddy, an old Catholic biddy at that. As he aged, the Old Man became more womanish or rather just less of a man. His skin came loose. It hung from his bones, giving him a deflated, soft look. He wore his thinning white hair in a small bun at the nape of his neck. He was prone to sudden attacks, which made him clutch his chest as if he were a breathless girl. He wore his rosary there like freshly cut blooms on a silken cord. "You are still the same idiot that your mother gave birth to! Your oldest brother would have taken that twenty-five francs and bought himself a decent suit, a place to sleep for the night, and he would have gotten himself a real job by now," the Old Man reminds me. Age and now the afterlife have had, regrettably, no effect on his feelings toward me.
"Robbing?" That is not the word, Old Man, that I would use to describe what I did that night with Peter or Paul or whatever his name was. Shall I describe it to you in detail, from the café where we met, to the money that he stuffed in the pocket of my pants before shoving me out of his hotel room? That, Old Man, should return you to your grave, the only safe place for you now, the only place where my shame cannot find you.
Twelve hours will be sufficient for a long and productive meeting. By then the figs will be plump with wine, and the wine will be glistening with the honey flowing from the fruit. The port is then ready to be poured onto the duck, which should sit in a clay dish, the insides of which have darkened from years of sustained use, preferably for the sole purpose of roasting ducks in port wine. Such a vessel, I have heard, requires no soap in its washing. Only water is needed. The residues have to be removed but not the flavors, forged as they are by heat and habit. The duck is then placed in a hot oven for one hour and basted, every ten minutes or so, with spoonfuls of port that have grown heavy with drippings and concentrated sugars. Before the wine reduces to nothingness, the figs are added, and just enough stock to evaporate and moisten the heat in the final moments of cooking.
Rice, coated with butter, threaded through with silver-green sage, will serve as a fine accompaniment. "Indeed, a fine accompaniment," Anh Minh would surely concur, offering as he always does reinforcement and congratulations for a lesson well learned. Anh Minh had taught me that rice, for the French, is never worthy of a solo. "Remember, it is never served alone and rarely is it plain," he had cautioned. Butter sauces, saffron and peas, onions, truffles