Black Diamond

warm, the thick stone walls holding the heat pumped out by the woodstove. He climbed out of bed, opened the door to let Gigi in to smother him with doggy affection, turned on Radio Périgord and began the usual routine of exercises he’d learned in the army. The second item on the news was a fire at an Asian supermarket in Bergerac. This was getting worse.
    He made coffee and began toasting yesterday’s baguette for breakfast. He’d better start on the venison casserole for Hercule’swake. Gigi looked hopeful at his feet as Bruno took down the large ham that hung from the beam that supported the kitchen roof. He sliced off some of the dense fat with the meat, chopped it into lardons, tossed them into his big casserole dish and lit the gas. He pulled down six shallots from the string that hung from the beam and began to peel them. The toast was ready, and he and Gigi ate slice and slice alike before he began cutting the venison into rough cubes. He stirred the lardons and judged whether there was sufficient fat. Not quite, so he added more from the ham and put the shallots into a separate pan to fry them with duck fat. He put more duck fat into the casserole and threw in the venison to brown.
    Radio Périgord had started to play music so he tuned to France-Inter for the news and the newspaper review as he sipped his coffee and began turning the chunks of meat so they browned on all sides. From his larder he removed a large glass jar of the mushrooms he had dried in September. Then he began to peel heads of garlic. When the venison was well browned, he sprinkled flour onto the meat to soak up all the juices and then tipped in the shallots and added half a dozen cloves of garlic, salt and pepper. He took a bottle of the Bergerac red he bought for everyday drinking and poured a splash into the pan where the onions had been and grated what was left of the baguette into the glaze. He then took a fat blood sausage, made from last year’s pig, squeezed out the rich, black contents from its skin and added them to the pan, crumbling the sausage meat that would help thicken the sauce, and then scraped the result into the casserole. He added the rest of the bottle of wine, added the dried mushrooms and closed the lid.
    Now for the dessert, he said to himself. He had decided on crème brûlée with truffles and began by taking a jar of trufflescraps and trimmings and tying them firmly into a small bag of doubled cheesecloth. Then he poured three quarts of heavy cream into a saucepan, turned on the heat and dropped the bag of truffle trimmings into the thick liquid. As it heated, he began—with thanks to his chickens for their fecundity even this late in the year—to crack two dozen eggs, tipping the egg halves quickly back and forth over a bowl so that the whites slithered out and the yolks were left in their half shell. In a separate bowl, he mixed the egg yolks with a dozen tablespoons of sugar until they were thickened and had turned pale yellow.
    The cream was about to boil, and the heady scent of truffles began to fill the kitchen. He turned down the heat, poured in the egg yolks and whisked until the mixture began to steam. Careful not to let it boil, he tested it with a wooden spoon to see if it would coat the wood, and once it did he poured the mixture through a sieve into his largest soufflé dish. He chopped one of the black truffles he had been saving into the mix and set it aside to cool. He’d leave it in the refrigerator throughout the day to set, and then all it would need would be a layer of sugar on the top and a minute with a blowtorch to melt it. The result would be a dessert fit for royalty. No, better than that, fit for a hunters’ feast. Fit for Hercule, he thought sadly.
    He turned to the sink, washed his bowls and cleaned the kitchen, put on his boots, winter jacket and woolen cap and took Gigi out for their predawn walk. The night was cold and the stars brilliant, throwing enough light to gleam on the white frost at his feet. From his barn came the soft hooting of an owl, and somewhere far off in the woods a fox barked. Bruno took a flashlight from his pocket and checked his chicken coop, and at the sound of his footsteps his cockerelgave the usual hesitant crow of a winter’s morning while the hens stayed sound asleep, heads tucked under their wings so they looked like balls of feathers. The coop was secure, and the wire netting around the chicken run was intact. That fox had better look