Cassoulet -True to the French Spirit-In Your Own Kitchen

    Some foods come with a regional pedigree and an experience that can’t be replicated elsewhere. Hofbrau Dunkel beer tasted the best best when I was drinking it with two thousand raucous Germans at a beer garden in Munich. I’ve gone out for Middle Eastern food several times since returning from Iraq, but restaurant hobus (flatbread) has never had the mildly crisp outside, doughy interior, and slight smokiness of the bread that Iraqi women handed to us straight from their outdoor mud ovens.

    Sarah and I eat out to experience flavors that we can’t create at home, but our home cooking is the gateway to flavors--and a satisfaction—that no chef can give us.  Sarah made carbonara last week with guanciale that she cured, bacon that I smoked myself, and eggs—with sunset-colored yolks—so fresh they were still warm from the nest box. Food historians debate the origins of  carbonara, but I think the intent behind the dish was a quick-to-make meal with ingredients commonly available to Italians at the time—fresh eggs and cured pork. You can debate the authenticity of carbonara made in a Wisconsin farm kitchen, but I think ours is truer to the dish’s intent (and tastier) than one we could order in a local Italian restaurant anyway.

    It’s the same with cassoulet. The French can’t agree on what makes a proper cassoulet. Julia Child says as much in Mastering The Art of French Cooking: “The composition of cassoulet is, in typical French fashion, the subject of infinite dispute… arguments about what should go into this famous dish seem based on local traditions.”

  Restaurant cassoulet might be tasty, but it won’t be true in the spirit of the dish. In The Third Plate, chef Dan Barber admits that even farm-to-table restaurants like his are guilty of “cherry picking ingredients”.   Cassoulet was a peasant dish, a one-pot meal. Having grown up around more than a few frugal farm cooks, I think the real tradition behind cassoulet was about the cook making a good meal by making do.

    Making a cassoulet with beans and whatever meat you have on hand can give you a delicious meal, truer to the dish's origins than any restaurant version.

    Sarah’s version uses three kinds of pork because that’s what we had in our kitchen freezer. The recipe is a guideline, not a rule.

Sarah’s Cassoulet (AKA clean-out-the-refrigerator)

• 4-5 slices of bacon, cut into bite sized pieces – large bites
• 1 pound pork butt, cut into ¾ inch cubes
• ¾ pound Italian sausage (You could also use any leftover poultry meat still on the bone -chicken/turkey/duck leg or thigh. You would only need one or two pieces. Buying specific cuts for cassoulet misses the point.)
  
• ½ pound of dry great northern beans (navy beans). Soak them overnight. Then cook them until just tender). Canned would work too. Likely 4 cans, drained and rinsed.
• Garlic  (I had about 8 cloves of roasted garlic, raw and chopped would work as well -just use a bit less)
  
• 2 Medium Onions, chopped
  
• ½ c red wine
• 2 bay leaves
• some dried thyme
• olive oil
• salt & pepper
• tomatoes (somewhere around 14 oz – mine were roasted from the garden last summer)

         In a large dutch oven:

• Cook the bacon, remove from the pan, keep the fat
• Cook the sausage. When the sausage is still slightly pink, add the pork butt, salt it, add pepper.  (I pushed the sausage to one side and cooked the pork butt in the middle of the pan).
• Brown pork butt on all sides
• Add the onions. Don’t drain the fat.
• Add the garlic, cook until golden
• Generously add ground pepper and salt
• Deglaze the pan with wine, scraping up the delicious browned bits from the bottom of the pan
• Add tomatoes with juice.
  
• Add the bay leaf and thyme
• Add the beans and some of their cooking liquid.
• Simmer until beans are completely tender.

    Julia Child recommends that you make cassoulet in stages as you have time. Like so many stews and bean dishes. this one is better when it's cook a day or two ahead of time and then reheated before serving. The flavors well meld over time.