T A B L E_T A L K

Places you hate: Remember them in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk

R E C E N T L Y

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BY MELINDA BERGMAN BURGENER | It is 45 minutes to dinner. My husband, Arnold, and I are standing ankle deep in French muck -- beige and runny like potter's slip-glaze, but startlingly acrid to our noses -- confronting a moral dilemma. Our host, Madame Etchegoyan, has just removed her feeding funnel from duck No. 13. She is persuading her flock to turn their brown, normal livers into pale, engorged, exquisite-tasting giants -- the very same ambrosial, melt-in-the-mouth foie gras that we had sampled at her dinner table the evening before.

That's when we had arrived, unannounced, at 6 p.m. looking for lodgings outside the dot-sized Basque town of Arhansus. Unruffled, she showed us a room on the first floor, at the back of her large farmhouse, then asked us not whether we wanted dinner, but at what time. We liked her at once; here was a woman who understood from our ravenous but droopy appearance that we needed large quantities of good food but didn't want to go searching to find it. She wanted only to verify our foreign palates: Foie gras? Garbure? Confit? A oui to each segued into a nationalities guessing game: Were we Anglais? Allemands? Irlandais? Her teenage son offered Australians? Then they ran out of countries. Américains had never visited this remote spot in the Pyrenees before. Astonished but delighted, she welcomed us into her home.

At the family dinner, we were launched into food lover's heaven on the first sublime morsel of fattened duck liver. It was difficult, even with faltering French and full mouth, to curtail our praise. Monsieur Etchegoyan beamed and boasted, "Maison fait!" -- made right there, by Madame. We quit raving about the foie gras only long enough to devour the rest of the meal: rich regional vegetable soup, preserved duck with tiny fried potatoes, baby garden salad, farm cheese, crêpes -- everything "maison fait," everything delicious. While we stuffed ourselves, we fielded questions about hamburgers and handguns and interrogated them on foie gras making. How was it done? How could anything as common as a duck's liver taste this exalted? Their vague responses succeeded only in conjuring up visions of Madame E. endlessly dipping into her apron and tossing zillions of handfuls of corn to exceptionally hungry, exceedingly lucky ducks.

Dinner done at midnight, with bellies bursting, we were unconscious within moments in our room facing the chicken coops. But the fowl noises and smells must have contaminated some echoing snippets of our mealtime conversation, producing for me a vivid and unsettling dream. I saw my own mother -- her Bronx accent eerily French -- metamorphosed into a Basque harridan who nudged and crammed her skinny ducklings with more than they could possibly hold. She began softly, with encouraging coaxing, clucking noises. When that failed, she cried out -- how often I'd heard this --"Babies are starving all over the world and you do not like my cooking?" This guilt trip worked magic on the dream ducks, just as it used to on me: Willingly, they ate and they ate until their little livers puffed and ballooned and began to explode, like dried corn in a hot pan, in front of my closed eyes. I opened them -- smiling with relief when I heard only the chickens clucking and pecking outside our windows.

The following morning, Monsieur E., his teenage son and his farmer brother joined us at the breakfast table. Innocently, we opted for the same meal the men were served daily -- an option that has since replaced the word "continental" with "monumental" whenever I think of French breakfasts. We each ate a fried farm egg, house-made Bayonne ham (rubbed with local peppers from nearby Espelette), house-cured bacon and an entire baguette (which the Basques held against their chests to slice). A carafe of strong coffee was placed between my husband and me, alongside a juice pitcher of boiled raw milk. The men also had large pitchers in front of them, but these contained red wine, which they polished off, one juice glass at a time.

N E X T+P A G E+| What ducky appetites!

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