eatDordogne: The diary of a summer

This summer's first visitor has just left. And packed his sheets to take with him. He said he was a poet. He seems to have been a thief. He came shrouded in one of those family names from the lesser known Stans where groups of consonants are joined by a single 'y'. The prime attraction of the wife stowed at home may have been her own nation's lenient immigration policy. The village is now speculating what would have been behind this wanton act. Perhaps he's assessing the thread count by candlelight in the town on the freer side of the mountains backing up to his Stan to gauge how many nimble fingers can be put to the copying.

At least they weren't a pair of the antique monogrammed linens. Before the advent of cheap air fares out of the UK and the Netherlands, you used to be able to pick these up at flea markets for less than the cost of a polyester set. Should I send him a bill? Perhaps they'll come back through the mail, laundered, packed into soft tissue and tied in raffia...

His visit meant the first of the summer's duck feasts. If you stay long enough in the Dordogne, you will leave with webbed feet.

This is the heart of duck-raising country. The Périgord, as the Dordogne is known locally, produces 80 percent of all the duck products in France. Restaurants serve salads of confited duck gésiers (gizzards), foie gras in a terrine or flash fried, its richness tempered by an acidic sauce made by melting down its crusty cooking residues with a jolt of vinegar swept round the smoking pan. They offer magrets of duck breast and confits of duck legs. Try Confit de Canard à la Rhubarbe.

If duck were 'bécasse' - woodcock - they'd also serve the heads, offered like bony lollipops. Hold the beak held between fingers and crunch down through the thumbnail-thin membrane of the skull to reach the tasty brain inside.

Animal rights activists protest that fattening ducks and geese by the 'gavage' method of running a stream of corn down their throats through a funnel is cruel. Artisan foie gras producers will explain that ducks and geese don't have the muscle that causes the gag reflex. They point, besides, to the manner in which their flocks run to them across the fields as soon as they appear with their three-legged stools and buckets of grain. They'll remind you, too, their methods are not the same as in mass production factories where the birds are packed into cages.

I would say, let's attack mass production battery chicken farms before we take aim at duck farms. Foie gras producers serve a luxury industry whose size barely shows up against a graph illustrating the amount of chicken we consume because battery farming makes that poor suffering bird so cheap to eat.

Ducks cooked to date: 2 pots of duck rillettes.