Home › Meats and Entrees › Cassolette
Cassolette
(Languedoc.) Make a puree of cooked white beans, add salt and pepper and as much finely chopped turkey, chicken, or duck. Fry an onion, 2 slices of bacon, and 2 tomatoes, sliced, with 2 cloves, parsley, and the beans and meat, well blended. Now add 1 pint of good broth, enough to make a paste; pour into a dish and bake until brown. This is a very old dish and very good to eat, besides.
An economical, loosely written cousin of cassoulet: beans mashed to a puree, bound with leftover poultry, then browned in the oven. The instructions assume you can judge consistency by eye, so the broth quantity is a starting point rather than a rule.
- The hinge: consistencyAdd the pint of broth gradually and stop when the mixture holds a soft mound on a spoon — "enough to make a paste." Too wet and it never browns; too dry and it bakes into a brick.
- White beansThe recipe gives no quantity. About 1 lb dried haricot, cannellini or lingot (Tarbais beans are the ones usually named in connection with cassoulet), soaked and simmered until fully tender, gives roughly 5-6 cups cooked; three 15-oz cans, drained, come closest if you are starting from tins. Puree only part of them if you want texture.
- "As much" meatRead this as equal volume to the bean puree — cooked, chopped turkey, chicken or duck, skin and all. This is a leftovers dish; confit duck legs, shredded, are the luxurious version.
- The frying stageSweat the sliced onion and diced bacon until the fat runs and the onion is soft, then add tomatoes, cloves and parsley and cook down until the tomato loses its raw edge. Only then fold in beans and meat, or the tomato water thins everything.
- ClovesTwo cloves for the whole dish. Most likely whole spice cloves rather than ground, though in a dish of this kind "2 cloves" could equally have meant garlic; the recipe does not say. If you use whole spice cloves, fish them out before baking if you would rather not bite into one.
- OvenNo temperature is given. 375-400F for 30-40 minutes, uncovered, browns the top without drying the middle. A scattering of breadcrumbs over the surface helps it colour, though the crust on a traditional cassoulet is formed by the beans themselves rather than by crumbs.
- SaltBacon, broth and already-seasoned leftover poultry all carry salt. Season at the end, after the broth has reduced into the beans.
- YieldThe recipe gives no bean or meat quantities; at the amounts suggested above it feeds six to eight as a main course, with bread and a sharp green salad.
Languedoc's bean-and-meat casseroles are generally said to be named for their vessels rather than their contents: a cassole is the glazed earthenware dish of Issel, and cassoulet, cassolette and casserole are all traced to the same root word for pot. The famous Castelnaudary, Carcassonne and Toulouse cassoulets are long, slow affairs built on raw beans, pork rind, sausage and preserved goose; what Adelaide Keen brings home in With a Saucepan Over the Sea (1902) is the thrifty domestic form, made from beans already cooked and poultry already roasted. Her aside that "this is a very old dish" is the sort of claim travellers repeated everywhere in the south of France; bean stews of this kind are certainly old, though the cassoulet's celebrated origin stories are traditional rather than documented. Note too the tomatoes — a later addition that purists in Castelnaudary still argue about.