Fucking hell. Last week of the cookbook work (or it had better be…), and I had to squeeze in another cassoulet.
Cassoulet–just saying it kind of makes my lips turn up in a snarl.
See, French food kind of pisses me off. Everyone talks about how oooh-fabulous and delicious it is, but, duh–what doesn’t taste fabulous when you cook it with 8 pounds of butter and a pint of meat stock, oh, and some wine? I read a recipe for braised celery in my copy of La Bonne Cuisine, and it involved simmering celery for, like, 4 hours in a pound of butter. I love butter, but c’mon. Give the celery a fighting chance!
Anyway, this is all to say I have always thought cassoulet was not all that. Because, uh, it’s beans and meat. What makes it superior to any other cuisine’s meat-and-beans combo? Nothin’ but the accent and the Gallic attitude with which it is preciously delivered to your table.
This led to a dilemma re: the cookbook, as Tamara wanted to include a cassoulet recipe. It was not a project I could really get behind, but we drew up a rough recipe based on the couple of times we’ve done it for SND-related things. We made it, and it was just as I remembered: a big mass of meat flavor, and nothing more. Palate-dulling.
After that, I took it upon myself to learn more about cassoulet. Maybe I just hadn’t had any really good stuff? I made a list of restaurants in NYC to visit, and I even checked out cheap fares to Toulouse. I checked Julia Child and Paula Wolfert out of the library. I didn’t go to Toulouse, but I did take a 12-hour trip to Boston, to sample some vouched-for quality cassoulet.
Dang, I ate some nasty shit. I will call foul on Les Halles, because I swear to god I tasted a maple-flavored breakfast link in my bowl. But maybe it was just the residual sugar from the Van de Kamp’s canned beans it was swimming in. I don’t know much, but I do know cassoulet should not be sweet.
I ate some experimental versions of cassoulet at some less-vaunted outlets. People, adding collard greens will not make this thing “healthy,” K?
I ate a pretty decent cassoulet at a random bistro in the upper 30s on the east side–one of those places that you wonder how it stays in business.
And the Boston cassoulet–very good, though my palate was a bit clogged with duck fat by then.
And I got to go to a party at Saveur, where I was served a fucking fantastic cassoulet–just hours after I’d read the recipe in the January issue, and wondered if something cooked for such a relatively short time and with such a minimum of fuss could be really good. It was–and bread crumbs, that’s where it’s at.
So I finally synthesized all this into my own pot of pork and beans.
Which I’ll tell you all about in the next post, rather than bog you down here.
Spoiler alert: Today I ate some leftover cassoulet for lunch, voluntarily.
See, French food kind of pisses me off.
Ooh, them’s fightin’ words, Zora. If you see me and my quiche lorraine ambling down the sidewalk one dark night, you better cross the street. (I would be delighted to see you, of course; it’s the quiche that has a bad attitude.)
And how would you even know everything tastes fabulous with 8 pounds of butter if it weren’t for us French Fries? Hmmm?
Oh, I know! I know! The trouble is…French food tastes great! Nothing wrong with it at all, and I smack my lips and roll my eyes with just about everything I eat in France, except for andouillette.
No, the real trouble is that the French–or, some French dudes a while back–declared themselves king of culinary wisdom. And now everything is couched in terms of ‘French technique’–whether it’s used (good) or not (vaguely inferior, but we can’t say why).
And I think it has to do with the dudes. So many other cuisines are women’s cooking–home cooking, not professional. The French made it really pro, but also super-manly, and quasi-military.
Actually, I’d be curious to talk to some historians about, say, Ottoman palace kitchens and see what the hierarchy was like there. How far back does the dogmatic chef culture go?
But I digress… Mmm, French fries…. And quiche lorraine! I love quiche lorraine! Don’t hit me, little bacon bits!
I was reading one of my grandmother’s French women’s magazines yesterday and came upon this in the Health & Diet section:
“Three Light Meals Made From Foie Gras”
OK–I take it all back. I fucking love the French!