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.