How to make cassoulet.

  About a year ago, the members of Léran's culture et patrimoine society went on a bus trip to Castelnaudary. Do a search for "Castelnaudary" and you can read the whole post. Briefly, we cruised on the Canal du Midi and, after a massive cassoulet lunch, went to the factory where the cassoles--the slope-sided brown dishes intended for cassoulet--are made.

Each cassole is made by hand.

  I already owned one that holds cassoulet for six, and another that feeds four. What I wanted was an even larger dish, and I left with one large enough for ten servings. There it's stayed in the cupboard above the stove until a couple of weeks ago when I promised to inaugurate it at a lunch for four friends visiting from the US.

That's a standard size colander which gives you some idea of the size of the cassole.

   Dozens of cassoulet recipes exist. I ended up combining the one from Saveur Cooks Authentic French and Paula Wolfert's version from The Cooking of South-West France. I also took a look at Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles Cookbook. Technique and main ingredients were fairly similar but I did notice massive discrepancies in the quantities of beans. Wolfert said two pounds (about 900 grams) would feed 10 to 12 and Saveur was fairly similar but Bourdain allowed 1100 grams for four people. All authors agreed that this was not a dish you make on the spur of the moment.
   We set the date and time. Saturday at 1 p.m. Lunch because cassoulet is a very heavy dish to eat at night.
   Thursday, I took the 500 gram hunk of couenne out of the fridge. Pork skin with a thick layer of fat. Feeling like Hannibal Lecter, I cut this into strips, rolled and tied them neatly, and simmered them until they were pliable. I simmered a fresh pork hock in another pot until I could stick a fork in it, then skinned and boned it.

Le bouquet garni et le head of garlic.

    Friday was an afternoon of work. I browned chopped onion and carrot, added cubed pork shoulder, added a kilo of beans (rinsed but unsoaked) an entire unpeeled head of garlic and a bouquet garni and lots of chicken stock. Everything burbled away for a couple of hours in a big cast iron pot on the top of the stove.

Pork and vegetables.

    Saturday, I was up early. The first job was to cut the pork skin into tidy squares and use them to line the bottom of the cassole, fat side down. On top went the bean and vegetable mixture, sans the garlic head and the bouquet garni, and everything went into the oven. Two hours later, I browned about 800 g of saucisses de Toulouse, a large chunk of pork shoulder, cubed, and the pork hock meat, shredded, and buried everything in the bean mixture. Next came the confited duck legs. I drained as much fat off them as I could and arranged them artistically on top of the cassoulet. And no, I didn't do the traditional breadcrumbs-on-top thingy because I wanted the skin on the duck legs to brown and crisp.


     A couple more hours in the oven. By now it was 2 p.m. and we were just getting into our first course, a light salad of greens, chopped green onion, cubed apple and hazelnuts.

Bubbling away in the oven. The cassole and contents were almost too heavy for the wire rack which fell off its moorings seconds after I'd taken the cassoulet out of the oven.

Tah-dah!!!!

    
     The cassoulet was spendiferous if I do say so myself (and everyone else said so too). The best one I've made so far. Next time, I wouldn't change a thing, except to invite a couple more people over and add in two more duck legs. As it is, there's a cassoulet "base" of beautifully seasoned beans waiting in the freezer to use as the foundation for a winter soup--or another batch of cassoulet.
     You want to know what else we had? Cheeses, grapes and figs, and then a small attack on a box of Ladurée macarons that someone had brought us from Paris. And a great deal of big red wines.

Lovely Ladurée macarons. Two dozen, each one different and a little sheet of paper to tell you which was which. We ticked them off as we ate them.

    
    

All Aboard for a Trip to Castelnaudary

  It's a long. long while since either of us has been on a bus trip. To be honest, I can't remember the last one so we signed up for an "Adventure in Castelnaudary" organized by Léran's Association de Culture et Patrimoine. 

   We all met up outside the old mairie and we were on the road a bit after 8:30 a.m. Doesn't the village church look handsome in the golden morning light? 

    I don't know what I'd been expecting, maybe a school bus, or something out of the 1950s but what picked us up was an elegant white motorcoach. Off we sped towards Castelnaudary like kids on a Sunday School treat. Because we were sitting higher than usual--certainly higher than a Renault Clio--meant we could see over hedges and actually glimpse the river in Mirepoix.

   The next shot is of us on the boat that cruised us along the Midi Canal for a couple of hours. First, we tootled around the grand bassin: like a large lake and, on this crystalline blue-skied day, looking its absolute postcard best. 

     A floating bouchon (traffic jam) in August, this time of year the Midi Canal is remarkably tranquil. A few boats were tied up, another followed us into a lock, but mostly, apart from flotillas of ducks, we had this wide bottle-green ribbon to ourselves. 

   The coach picked us up again as we disembarked and drove us a little way into the countryside to a restaurant we would never have found otherwise.

   We started of with a kir, then ploughed into a salade de gesiers, followed by, of course, cassoulet--an especially good version. Red wine, ice cream, coffee and back on the bus for a visit to a pottery. 

    More than a few us nodded off as we were driven home. 

Cassoulet Day in Castelnaudary

Hot weather and cassoulet aren't obvious partners. But, even though it was 37 degrees, the chance to eat this iconic dish in Castelnaudary, the town where it's said to have been created was too good to pass up. So that's what we did last Saturday along with hundreds of others, at the 9th Fête du Cassoulet de Castelnaudary.

I really like the way that French people believe food and fun should take precedence over mundane things like traffic. Barriers stopped us going into the town centre so we parked in what we hoped would be a shady spot (P.S. it wasn't) and strolled up to the main square. Strung between the plane trees, blue bunting flapped and snapped while increasingly high decibels revealed we were closing in on the promised animation musicale non stop.

Restaurants, cafés, bistros, stalls, stands, everyone had some kind of cassoulet deal going on. What to do? A 15 euro package sounded good to us, especially when it included salad, bread, a cassoulet (with a free cassole--the slant-sided pottery dish that holds it included) dessert (let's not get excited here, it was canned fruit salad) a quarter litre of vin rouge and a cheery server.

Every cassoulet is different. Besides the essential beans, this one held a chunk of duck breast, a length of sausage, couennes (rolls of pork fat) and a piece of coustellou (rather bony pork)--in other words, all the ingredients pictured on the official poster. 

 Everyone sat at long tables under white tents. 

Outside, several kilos heavier, we browsed the stalls selling organic vegetables, honey, bread, hams, wine and crafts, slowly making our way back to the Canal du Midi for the afternoon's entertainment. Young guys teetered out on a long pole suspended over the water and tried to retrieve a French flag. A half dozen or so corporately sponsored  floats held a water battle. All were in costume. We're still trying to figure out why the McDonald's team was dressed as ancient Egyptians.