Mort Report Extra: It Ain’t Chopped Liver

PARIS — Our world is awash in crises as the holidays approach, but spare a thought for André Daguin, the chef whose gastronomic gift of foie gras chaud lifts my spirits even when a despot-in-waiting and craven senators try to turn America into an unprincipled boobocracy.

Daguin died this week at 84 in Auch, the ancient Gascony town west of Toulouse he made famous with creations in his Michelin-starred kitchen at the Hotel de France. He is known best for magret de canard, sliced rare duck. But his warm foie gras was hardly chopped liver.

Caesar famously noted that Gaul is divided in three parts. It still is today: butter up north, olive oil in Provence and goose grease or duck fat in the southwest. For celebrated Gascon plats de resistance, duck is the fowl of choice. And Daguin was the duke of duckdom.

Finishing university, he headed to Scotland to study law. But as often used to happen among old-school French restaurateur clans, he was soon back in Auch spending 18-hour days in local markets and his kitchen.

Daguin took over the family's hotel-restaurant in 1959 back when duck was a bit player, mostly potted in confit de canard. He grilled succulent breasts like steak, thin and rare. After he added his green peppercorn sauce in 1965, international foodies beat a path to his door.

He could get fancy, skewering foie gras with sea scallops or serving it with langoustines. He made flash-frozen prune and Armagnac ice cream with liquid nitrogen. He earned a Michelin star within a year and then a second one a decade later.

But he stuck to his roots. “Mr. Daguin,” Patricia Wells wrote in 1982, “is becoming a sort of idol among southwestern housewives, who are proud to see him popularize the simple dishes they have cooked for generations in farm kitchens all over the sparsely populated southwest.”

Daguin retired in 1998 and sold his restaurant. His acolyte daughter, Ariane, had gone to Union, New Jersey, to open D'Artagnan, bringing duck delicacies to woke Americans. I made a pilgrimage to Auch, researching “A Goose in Toulouse,” but missed him. He was off on a routine commute to Paris on his tireless crusade to protect French cuisine.

I found him at the hoteliers' union near the Elysées Palace, girding for battle in a serious suit behind a desk flanked with buzzing phones. Chefs in tall white toques were about to hurl eggs at the National Assembly until riot police drove them back with tear gas.

“It's these petty bureaucrats and their stupid tax inequities,” Daguin fumed. “French cuisine would be in fine shape. What is killing it is government tax policy. Every year 3000 restaurants go bankrupt, usually to be replaced by fast-food joints.”

This was the Big Mac Attack. Restaurants had to add 20 percent tax to diners' bills. Meals in a sack paid six percent. A worse scourge would follow later. France adopted a 36-hour work week, a crushing blow to an art devoted to time-consuming elaborate simplicity.

For Daguin, this was not ideological. “Look,” he said, “I'd rather have a sandwich at McDonalds than a blanquette de veau where they don't know how to cook.”

Two decades on, some of his worst fears have materialized. Yet plenty of young chefs and some old ones keep at it across France. Happily, there is plenty of foie gras chaud, without stuff like dark chocolate sauce and bitter orange marmalade that Lutéce served in New York.

Like most French masters, Daguin was fetchingly modest about his creations. “When you invent a dish,” he told me, “you don't really discover something, but rather you put something together in a new way, according to circumstance.”

Instead of serving an entire liver the old way, requiring a table to share an imposing lump, too crisp on the outside and too red inside, Daguin prepared small escalopes in coarse salt and pepper. He dribbled them with a touch of sweetness, like quince compote. Words fail.

Once, ducks and geese were equally numerous in France. By 2000, farms produced 300,000 geese and nearly 20 million ducks. “I'm not going to say one is better than the other,” Daguin told me. “People have their preferences. The taste of goose liver is more compact, and duck has a more marked flavor.”

For producers, stuffing a long-necked goose is a slow delicate job, and it irritates animal-rights people no end. Ducks eat voraciously, almost stuffing themselves. Chefs prefer duck livers, with differently shaped lobes that are easier to steam, sauté and scallop.

Only weeks before Daguin died, New York City decided to ban foie gras in 2022, duck along with goose, as cruelty to animals. For many, that is illogical overreach in a country where chickens and beef are raised as inanimate blobs in close confinement.

It's a personal call. I'm on the side of ducks allowed to stuff themselves at will to a noble purpose. If anything beats chili crabs in Singapore or cheese enchiladas and beans in a Tucson hole in the wall, it is foie gras chaud by a Gascon chef who knows how to do it right.