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Cassoulet, Toulousaine
Soak a quart white beans in plenty water during night; drain, place in a saucepan with two quarts water and boil for five minutes; drain and place in a large earthen pot. Roast a five to six pound piece shoulder of mutton and half a duck together in the oven for twenty minutes or until a nice brown colour; remove, cut into six even pieces both duck and mutton, and add to the beans with a two-ounce piece lean raw pork, one small cervela sausage, three country sausages, one carrot cut in quarters, one onion with three cloves stuck in it. Tie in a bunch two branches parsley, one branch chervil, one bean garlic, one bay leaf and a sprig thyme; add to the pot, season with a good teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper. Moisten with three quarts of water, lightly cover the pot and set in the oven for eight hours. Remove, take up the bunch of herbs, onion and carrots, cut the cervelas and the piece of pork into slices, dress the rest of the pot on a large dish, arrange the bacon and cervela on top, sprinkle a half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley over and serve.
A full-sized Languedoc cassoulet, written for a coal range and a household of a dozen. The quantities are enormous by modern standards and the oven instruction assumes very low, steady heat.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives no setting; eight hours in a covered earthen pot implies a slow oven, and something around 275-300F is a reasonable modern equivalent. Much hotter will break the beans down to paste and dry the meat before the time is up. The liquid should barely tremble, never boil.
- Scale and yieldA quart of dried beans is roughly 1 3/4 to 2 lb, and with 5-6 lb of mutton shoulder, half a duck and four sausages this will feed a dozen or more. Halving everything is reasonable; keep the ratio of three parts water to one part beans by volume.
- "One bean garlic"A literal translation of the French gousse d'ail -- one clove of garlic, not a head and not a bean. It goes into the herb bundle and is fished out at the end.
- CervelaCervelas, a fat French pork sausage, mildly garlicked and often studded, sold cooked or lightly cured. A good-quality cooked garlic sausage or a Polish kielbasa is the closest supermarket substitute. The "country sausages" are fresh coarse pork sausages -- saucisse de Toulouse if you can get it.
- The bacon that appears from nowhereNo bacon is listed in the ingredients. Filippini most likely means the two-ounce piece of lean raw pork, which is sliced with the cervelas and laid on top. A piece of unsmoked pork belly or pancetta will serve.
- MuttonMature sheep is hard to find; lamb shoulder works and is milder, but it will cook faster and can go stringy over eight hours. Leave it in one piece for the initial roast and cut it into large chunks rather than small ones.
- The twenty-minute roastThis is browning, not cooking. No temperature is given, but a hot oven is implied -- around 425-450F until coloured, then everything finishes in the pot. Do not skip it; the fond from the roasting pan is worth deglazing into the three quarts of liquid.
- Beans and saltThe five-minute parboil after soaking removes the soaking water and any scum. A teaspoon of salt for this volume is light; taste and correct at the end, once the sausages and pork have given up their own salt.
- The crustFilippini says to cover the pot lightly, which lets a skin form on the surface. Traditional practice in Languedoc is to break that crust back into the beans several times during the long bake. He does not say to; it improves the result.
Cassoulet belongs to Languedoc, and the three towns of Castelnaudary, Carcassonne and Toulouse have argued over its proper composition for as long as anyone has written it down. The Toulouse version is the richest, taking in duck or goose alongside mutton and the local fresh pork sausage. The name comes from the cassole, the glazed conical earthenware pot the dish is baked in -- generally traced to the potters of Issel, near Castelnaudary -- which is why Filippini insists on a large earthen pot rather than a metal pan; the thick clay holds the low heat evenly across eight hours. His book was published in New York in 1906, and the entry keeps a good deal of French intact, down to the untranslated gousse d'ail and the cervelas he expected a good butcher to supply.