Soule T. Bitting

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Twenty Seven Year Old Soup
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mmmnIt happens once a year on one day in the early spring in Rouffignac, a very small isolated French village located in the rolling southern high country of the Dordogne, that a festival takes place. It is, at first glance, a pig roast. But to the locals and those representative of the gourmet branch of the intelligentsia there is something else. The owners of pigs in and around Rouffignac feed them by a secret timetable a mush of champagne and high grade sweet corn. Not all the pigs, only the young sows and the their piglets. Not all of them either, that would be far too costly, so the sows are numbered in comparison to the expected annual turnout for the big day, that begins early in the morning and lasts in to the wee hours of the night. No one knows, actually, how this tradition and its festival came in to existence, yet it’s been going on since anyone can recall otherwise. If you happen to be there any story you hear about it from a red nosed local late in the afternoon of the big day will satisfy your curiosity.
mmmnThis year, at around midday when the first of the sweet fed piglets were about to be carved, it was also happening that a man in a rented car was speeding toward Rouffignac, alone, while his stomach growled and hints of drool wetted the corners of his lips. His name was Norbert Swallowsworth , an American, a gourmand and a very well known writer in the circles of gourmet magazines, always contributing highly amusing as well as concise articles about such matters. Now he was on assignment, rather two assignments. One was for a magazine he would take a commission from to cover the pig roast in Rouffignac and the other, that was to his allegiance to his personal carnal appetite. He was bald, rotund and, now, late because of getting lost as he thought he neared Rouffignac, late and afraid he would miss it all, or at any event arrive when things were settling down some after the initial celebrations.He was also late because wherever his path led him it had been raining profoundly, yet he had no idea that it was gorgeous weather up in Rouffignac.
mmmnHe sped onward, climbing into high country, imagining the scented smoke of the champagne and sweet corn fed sows and piglets rising off the coals into his flaring nostrils. Washing it down with the local wine, not as well known as the festival to him, but known; it was somewhere among his notes that were in his briefcase next to him.
mmmnHe made another serpentine on the wet two lane highway, fishtailing some which told him to slow down some, he’d get there, it was only a few kilometers now, but he sped on, recklessly, the senses of his line of work and of his own life driving him, a drooling gourmaniac.
mmmnComing out of a turn he saw the highway flatten out, a straightaway, and swore to himself that Rouffignac lay up in the higher ridge of hills ahead of him where he could see sunbeams shining through the breaking clouds, but what he didn’t see was a flooded dip in the road that when he entered it he lost all control of his car. He also lost consciousness.
mmmnHe had gone off the highway into a shallow, then flooded, ditch on his side of the road. When he drifted back to consciousness he had no idea what had happened. He realized the position of his rented car but couldn’t figure out… Next thing he knew there was a man, a big man with a great mustache opening his door and asking him in a barely understandable French dialect if he was alright. Norbert poked and patted himself and told the man that he seemed to be alright. The man, who got through to Norbert that he was a farmer and that Norbert was now in between the highway and his land, told him he hadn’t seen Norbert go off the road; it had only been then, now, when he was riding his tractor back to the barn to call it quits after a long rainy day that he saw Norbert’s car in the ditch. Norbert looked at the farmer, looked out the windshield at the weather; it had cleared and it was getting to be dusk.
mmmnIt was then that he remembered the pig roast in Rouffignac. Would this farmer take him there? He saw the farmer’s tractor on the side of the highway, idling, just in front of them. Could the farmer perhaps pull him out of the ditch and then he could be on his way? Even while he thought these thoughts they were coming out of Norbert in a form of French the farmer had never heard before, yet, with the simple wisdom of a man of the soil he understood. He told Norbert to forget it. All the pigs were eaten and by now everyone who wasn’t sober was drunk, making the closed fist, thumb to nose, rotating gesture meaning just that.
mmmnUnder his breath Norbert swore and then slammed the steering wheel of his rented car with his fist.
mmmn“Look,” the farmer said to him, “We can pull you out of the ditch and then we’ll see. First things first. D’accord?”
mmmnThe farmer had the small car out of the ditch in no time flat, as if he did this kind of thing everyday. Then he rigged it so its nose was off the ground close to his tractor, motioned for Norbert to get up on it with him, knowing but not really caring that it might be Norbert’s first time on a tractor and aimed the whole show toward home which wasn’t too far down the highway.
mmmnArriving, the farmer swung into the yard, made a half circle and came to a halt. He gave Norbert a hand down off the tractor and with the car up he climbed under it and began examining the rear axle with the help of a flashlight he had taken from a waterproof box under the seat of the tractor.
mmmnBy the time he came out from under the car the farmer’s three tall, handsome, burly and weathered sons had come from the barn and were circling the car, speaking to Norbert and listening to their father under the car.
mmmnThen he crawled out from under and said to them all, looking at Norbert, “Just as I thought. You got a bent axle. When we were towing your car back here I felt an odd rhythm the way it was moving along with us. It’s bent and there’s two things for sure: One, you missed the pig roast and two, you’re not going anywhere tonight. And maybe a third.”
mmmn“What’s that?” Norbert wondered, circled close by these big country rough looking country folk and as the sky over them was black as coal.
mmmn“The weather’s s’posed to get worse by tomorrow. Best you can do is stay the night with us and we’ll see what we can do tomorrow. There’s a bed for you, a bath and you will certainly join us at our table.”
mmmnNorbert gulped. His taste buds shed a tear. His gourmet’s body and soul got the dry heaves thinking of what he had missed and now, now to eat, to eat with, what could he call them? Was peasants the right word, he wondered? He wasn’t sure. He was damp and chilly and it was dark and from that dark sky the rains began again. He seemed to be at their mercy.
mmmnAs a matter of fact, he was!
mmmnHe was led into the mud-room off to one side of big kitchen. The men, except for Norbert, took off their work boots and changed into thick soled slippers. Then, after washing their hands, including the gourmand, at a sink they stepped into the kitchen, where the farmer’s wife was setting a long wide table for the evening supper. It was at this time that Norbert got around to learning his host’s name, his wife’s and those of his sons and they all, in turn, found out Norbert’s. He was given a chair at on one side of the table next to the eldest son and the wife who sat at the end of the table close to the working end of the kitchen.
mmmnEveryone seated, Norbert found his right hand being held by the woman’s left hand and his left in the huge and tough right hand paw of the eldest brother and realized that everyone’s hands were holding their neighbors, creating a circle around the table. Norbert was dumbstruck, but it didn’t matter because it was the father who said grace, yet not dumbstruck enough to say his amen in unison with the others. During the short, warm blessing of the meal he was trying to recall the last time he’s done this in company before a meal and could not.
mmmnBefore him, his place setting, like the rest of his host’s, was a quite large soup bowl, a wine glass, a fork, a big soup spoon and an Opinel, a famous name in folding knives, was open and locked, the blade about four inches long. There were two good sized flasks of red wine at either end of the table, two baskets of rough homemade bread and nearer to the woman of the house sat a huge lidded steaming pot of, what Norbert soon saw, soup. As the guest, his bowl was ladled out first. Looking in to, he wondering with some trepidation just what kind of soup it was. When his wine glass was filled he wondered again just what sort of wine it was. He was used only to drinking wine from bottles that had labels on them, being, besides a gourmand he was also a connoisseur of wine. The bread was passed and it looked passable to him, though he found the cut pieces to have apparent differences as to their freshness.
mmmn“Bon appetite!” Norbert heard someone say, still looking into his soup, wondering if he could eat it. “Sante!” he heard from somewhere else, looking at the wine, like his soup, wondering if it would be drinkable. He took a nip of it and he had to admit to himself that it was good.
mmmnNow for the soup. The sons were leaning over their bowls, spooning up with much gusto the soup and the bread they had tossed into it. Their father, their mother, were spooning the soup as well, but not quite as ravenously as their sons. As yet, Norbert hadn’t touched his but he knew he must and finally, with great inner courage, he took a hesitant spoonful, telling himself not to taste anything. But that was not so easy, because like the wine, the soup was quite tasty. He wanted to say “delicious”. No matter, that came with the second spoonful. His third became “outstanding”, his fourth, trying to discern the varied flavors and textures became “absolutely marvelous” and the fifth, the fifth Norbert could not find any words of description.
mmmn“You like the soup,” his host remarked to him.
mmmn“Oh… Oh… very much so, very, very much so,” Norbert replied and asked his hostess for another steaming bowlful of it, which he went at it not unlike the three brothers.
mmmnFinished, fending off yet another serving, wishing to have room for the cheese and fruit that was placed on the table, he took his wine glass up, stood and said to the farming family, “The soup you have served me is the best, absolutely the best soup, I have ever eaten!” Then turning to his hostess, he told her, “I must, I absolutely must, be given the recipe. I will come, if you permit me, with a photographer and I shall publish an article in one of any of the gourmet magazines I contribute to about all of you and most importantly in praise of this simply indescribable soup. Yes. That will come, but now, it is of the highest importance that I can learn the recipe. Please, if you…” Here the exuberance of his voice began to falter, slowing down into cut syllables when he realized everyone seated around him was looking at him with jaws dropped, a look in their eyes as if Norbert had suddenly gone into a fit.
mmmnA second of silence. He flopped back down into his chair, looking at them all wondering what he had said. Had he said something wrong? An insult? What was it?
mmmnThe father, the head of the farm, calmly explained to Norbert that he couldn’t be given the recipe.
mmmn“Why is that? For what reason? Is it a secret? A secret recipe?”
mmmn“I assure you monsieur Norbert” his host continued, “it is not a secret, not at all. If it has a secret it is this: Every scrap of meat, of fowl, piece of rice, noodle, as well as every bit of uneaten legumes from every meal at this table goes into that great caldron you see sitting at the back of the stove. And that caldron has been kept warm on the stove ever since my family and I took over this farm and that was, let me think, yes, that was twenty seven years ago.”
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