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Cassoulic
(Provence.) Chop the remains of any cold meat into dice; add some bacon and onions, cut up half as much of cold cooked lima or white beans, pressed through a sieve, and enough gravy or stock to moisten. Stir; add salt, pepper, parsley, sweet marjoram, and a pinch of nutmeg; pour into a dish, and sprinkle bread-crumbs thickly on top. Bake 1/2 hour and serve with tomato sauce.
A leftovers dish with no stated quantities, so treat the proportions as a ratio rather than a formula: two parts diced cooked meat to one part sieved beans, plus bacon and onion to taste.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. Half an hour at 375F browns the crumbs and heats a shallow dish through; if the dish is deep, allow closer to 40 minutes and cover for the first half so the top does not scorch before the centre is hot.
- Cook the bacon and onion firstNothing here gets long enough in the oven to soften raw onion or render bacon. Fry the diced bacon until its fat runs, soften the onion in it, then combine with the meat — this is the step that decides whether the dish tastes cooked or merely warmed.
- How much liquid"Enough gravy or stock to moisten" means the mixture should just hold together when pressed, not pour. Sieved beans thicken as they bake and will absorb more, so a slightly looser mixture than seems right is safer than a dry one.
- Sieving the beansPressing cooked beans through a sieve was the period method for a smooth purée. A food mill or a few pulses in a processor does the same; a blender makes it gluey.
- Sweet marjoramSold now simply as marjoram, and milder than oregano — use about half a teaspoon dried, or a teaspoon and a half chopped fresh, for a dish serving four.
- Crumbs"Thickly" means a full covering, and dry crumbs alone will stay pale. Toss them with a little of the bacon fat or melted butter so they colour.
- Yield and servingMade with about a pound of cooked meat and a cup and a half of beans, this fills a 1.5-quart dish and serves four. The tomato sauce is not optional in effect — the mixture is rich and starchy and wants the acid.
The name as printed looks like a compositor's approximation of cassoulet, and the dish is a thrift version of it: meat, beans, and a browned crumb top baked in a single dish. Cassoulet proper belongs to Languedoc — Castelnaudary, Carcassonne and Toulouse each claim a version, and the word is generally traced to the cassole, the glazed earthenware pot it was baked in — so the attribution to Provence here is loose, as regional labels often were in turn-of-the-century American cookbooks. What the recipe really shows is how such books worked: a dish encountered abroad, stripped to its principle, and rebuilt around the cold roast and leftover beans an American household already had. The instruction to begin with "the remains of any cold meat" places it squarely in the made-over dish tradition.