Fete.

I ate as often as I could in the kitchen—more fun than sitting in the formal dining room—and it was in Louis’ kitchen that I tasted my first partridge. For reasons I forget, my parents and sister went visiting an aunt, leaving me behind, along with a half dozen birds that had been hanging in the cool of an October larder for three days and were ripe to eat. It was an unusual feast for the help, and because of the uncharacteristic nature of the windfall, the meal developed into a fete.

Other than me, then eleven years old and still shooting the 6 mm, the dinner included Chef Louis and George, the handsome black-haired butler/handyman who would teach me about guns; Vera, an old, warty, and always angry Polish maid; and Yolande, her young soft-skinned, credulous helper. Louis served the roasted partridge, barded and trussed with pork fatback on top of squares of lightly fried bread, to which he had added the birds’ mashed livers and hearts and minced shallots. The side dishes were green beans and double-fried potato chips that, on their second visit to the oil, filled like magic with air and became as light as the breath of the young maid Yolande, whose lips resembled Sophia Loren’s.

I was given two glasses of what I knew, from being witness to the general hilarity, was some of my father’s better claret, cut with water. Louis carved my bird at the plate and told me to pick up the legs with my fingers. If the term terroir can be applied to birds, red grouse and gray partridge qualify. The minerals that grow cereals, the decomposition of vegetable and animal matter back into the soil, clean rain, filtered sunlight (and heather, in the case of grouse), grow flavorsome birds, wine, first-class Scotch whiskey, and in France, lovely women.

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