For a few weeks now I’ve been dreaming of making a proper cassoulet at work, and after a bit of planning and a few conversations with my butcher I’m happy to say that I managed it this week, and very good it was too. The butcher had no duck legs, so I confited some mallard instead, in some very good lard from Westcombe Dairy in Somerset. Otherwise my cassoulet was fairly traditional, and I was pleased to say that I cooked it in the requisite earthenware pot. A recipe follows for paid subscribers, and below, an abridged version of an essay on cassoulet from my latest book. Enjoy!
The below text is extracted from my book Frontières: The Food of the French Borderlands. Here’s a link to it if you fancy! (I notice that this retailer is currently offering 50% off at the moment, in case you’re in need of a Christmas present for someone. Ahem.)
“There is more fuss made in southwest France about how to cook cassoulet than there is about bouillabaisse in Marseille or paella in Valencia. Cassoulet is emblematic of the cuisine of this part of France and all its rustic charms but – despite its celebrity status – the dish is at heart a peasant one, with as many versions as there are cooks, although it must be said (or whispered) that it would seem that not all of these are good: I have eaten a few special cassoulets and more than a few sorry ones. In the right hands this is one of the world’s great dishes, but it does require an alchemy that not everyone possesses.
Observers have classified three main schools of cassoulet, from three towns in what has become known as the Cassoulet Belt: Toulouse, Castelnaudry and Carcassonne. Prosper Montagné, a famous chef of Carcassonne origin, and the creator of Larousse Gastronomique, described in his 1929 Le Festin Occitan a Holy Trinity of cassoulet: ‘Cassoulet is the God of Occitan cuisine… the cassoulet of Castelnaudry is God the Father, Carcassonne God the Son, and Toulouse the Holy Spirit.’ For French food critic Maurice Curnonsky there were not three cassoulets but four – like the musketeers: Castelnaudry with its confit goose or duck; Toulouse with its eponymous sausage, a little tomato and some mutton; Carcassonne with its pork ribs and partridge in season; and, further south in the Corbières, salted pig’s ear and tails. In practice it seems that the most common constants are white beans, confit duck or goose, Toulouse sausages, pork rinds and some kind of pork, but the variations are myriad and all delicious if prepared with care.
This is a dish as rich in history as it is in animal fats. Most people interested in the origins of the dish have heard the story of the siege of Castelnaudry during the Hundred Years War. Depleted of their reserves, surrounded by the Black Prince and the horrible English, the besieged townspeople cobbled together an enormous cauldron of what they had left: dried (broad) beans, sausages, and salted and confit meats, and the first cassoulet was born. Nourished and inspired by their hearty creation, the defenders charged the panicked English and drove them from the city walls and the Lauragais region. This lovely story reminds me slightly of Asterix’s village drinking the magic potion before attacking the Romans, which most probably has no real basis in fact, but it cannot be disputed that Castelnaudry is the spiritual home of the cassoulet.
Nowadays much fun can be had in arguing about the one ‘true’ recipe (one of my favourite pastimes). Paula Wolfert writes with great verve about cassoulet in The Cooking of South-West France, and includes an impeccable recipe which is surely the definitive written word on the subject. The recipe is not one from any of the restaurant chefs she met along her journey, but from a home cook – Madame Pierrette Lejanou, the wife of a potato broker and descendant of an old Toulouse family – ‘a charming woman, effervescent in her approach to food, generous in the tradition of the Languedoc, she feasted me and instructed me until I was overwhelmed. The secret of her cassoulet, I thought, was that it was made with love.’
Wolfert’s observation is important. I mentioned earlier that a good cassoulet requires some degree of alchemy. Many arguments among cassoulet afficionados are about what meats should or should not be included, or what specific variety of bean is best; these arguments are all well and good, but many of the things that turn a cassoulet from merely good into something sublime are a little harder to articulate. A good cassoulet has a shimmering power to it, a glorious bubbling potential just underneath a perfect crust.
This is a matter of a million fine points of cookery. Of course, we should ensure that we are using a proper earthenware cassole (I hope you agree if you’ve read this far), but there are many other questions to answer: have you lined the pot with couennes (pork skins) and, if not, what are you afraid of? More to the point, how much fat has been left on the rind, and how long have you boiled them before use? A cassoulet should be rich, of course, but also have enough aromatics to cut through and enough lightness that the eater can finish a hefty portion. What was the texture of the stock in which you have cooked the beans – does it have enough gloss, enough body, and did you skim sufficiently? Is your combination of meats harmonious, and how is the texture of your sausages? Have you timed the meats and beans correctly so that as the meats start to fall off the bone, the beans are creamy but hold their shape? Have you used breadcrumbs to help to form a crust, or are you relying on the beans to do the job? Are you breaking and reforming the crust, and if so, how many times? Has your crust coloured evenly, or have one or two beans coloured too darkly? Is the ratio of crust to bean correct? Is the bean broth wet enough? Is there just enough fat to make your lips smack? How is the acidity of the broth, and is it enough to balance the richness?
Thus cassoulet is a dish that is in a fine balance with itself. To make a really good one there are a lot of elements that must align; plenty of details that must be correct simultaneously, for, without balance, a cassoulet is just a pile of boiled meats and beans with breadcrumbs on top. There is no one true recipe, of course, for a rustic dish like this, but the humbleness of its origins can be transcended through careful attention to detail - a big part of what we cooks like to call ‘cooking with love’. I think that a proper cook should interrogate their cooking to the extent that they realise that this kind of perfection is near-unattainable.
Can the perfect cassoulet really exist? In theory yes, perhaps, and on the pages of a book, certainly. In practice, merely gathering all the requisite ingredients in perfect health requires a degree of determination, let alone cooking the blooming thing. I’ve cooked a lot of cassoulets, and honestly, I can really say that I’ve never really come close, although that is not to say that I don’t enjoy trying. I’ve been a restaurant cook for more than a decade, but professional experience matters little for this kind of cooking: in my experience making a dish like a cassoulet in a restaurant setting only makes things more difficult. This is real country cooking, and should not be attempted in stainless steel kitchens, for the soul of thing resides elsewhere. In a farmhouse somewhere, lost in time, sits an enormous heavy clay pot, bubbling slowly over a scratchy wood fire, the plump beans rich with melting pork skin, bursting with joints of pork, confit goose and fat garlicky sausages.”
Below, for paid subscribers, follows a recipe for a cassoulet. I can’t promise it’s the perfect one, and I’m not sure what Paula Wolfert or Madame Pierrette Lejanou would think, but I thought it was a jolly good effort for a lad from Birmingham, even if I did make it in a stainless steel kitchen.
Cassoulet
Serves 4
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