On 12 November 2006, while Yvonne was away in Germany, I spent much of the afternoon with experimental cookery of things that Yvonne doesn't like. I'd like to make a cassoulet again, but it's almost impossible to get one of the key ingredients, confit d'oie an ingredient so foreign to the English way of cooking that I don't even know how to translate it—neither do any of the references I can find on the web. It's goose cooked and salted and preserved in its own fat.

One of the big problems with casoulet is finding a definitive recipe. There are two basic kinds, the cassoulet tolosain and the cassoulet de Castelnaudary. The quantities and the methods and times of cooking also vary wildly. And the otherwise excellent Time-Life cookbook series that was printed in the 1970s omits the confit d'oie, presumably because of the difficulty of finding it.

So today I tried making a cassoulet-like dish mainly with the intention of getting the quantities right. A good thing too: they were way off. In particular, all recipes seem to specify too few beans.

I started with three sources of recipes:

• Time-Life “The Cooking of Provincial France” in two versions (English and German, the latter for usable units of measurement). This was published in 1968 as the first of a series of cookbooks, and in general I've found them very good.
• La cuisine du marché by Paul Bocuse, published by Flammarion in 1980.
• La Cuisine de Madame Saint-Ange, published by Larousse, this edition in 1982.

These recipes differ greatly in the recipes, and they all seem to have too few beans. Here's what I used:

Traditional measure	Quantity	Ingredient	Step
500g	beans	1
300g	lamb, from leg	2
250 g	pork, from forequarter	2
150 g	duck fat	3, 8
20 g	couennes (pork skin)	4
75 g	smoked ham	2
500 g	onions	5
25 g	garlic	5
170 g	double-smoked Moscow sausage	6
245 g	double-smoked Kransky sausage	6
800 g	tinned tomatoes	6
50 g	bread crumbs	8

Preparation

1. Soak the beans in lukewarm water for 2 hours. The purpose is not to soften the beans, but just the skin. Longer soaking will provoke fermentation.

   The beans should be “fresh” (i.e. from the last harvest). Madame Saint-Ange and Bocuse are both in agreement that old beans detract greatly from the quality of the dish. They will split, and the interior will remain granular.

2. Brown the whole pork and lamb in a frying pan.
3. Bring 2 litres of water to the boil and add beans, meat and 100 g duck fat. Bring back to the boil and salt lightly (salt tends to harden the beans). Simmer at the lowest possible heat for two hours.
4. Steam the couennes for an hour, then cut into small strips.
5. Chop and fry onions in duck or mutton fat until glassy, and then add crushed garlic, fry for a couple of minutes. Reserve.
6. After two hours, add the sausage and tomatoes, check the salt and boil on low heat for another hour.
7. Drain the pot, keeping the broth for later, and separate beans and meat. Chop meat into 5 mm slices (Bocuse recommends 3 mm). At this point it became clear that I had too much meat, so I split it into two parts, one for a later cassoulet.

   

   Place a layer of beans at the bottom of a casserole, cover with sausage slices, followed by another layer of beans, the meat, onions and couennes, and a final layer of beans:

   

   I had already used 500 g of beans where the recipes recommended more like 400 g, but at the end, I had almost none left over for the next cassoulet:

   

8. Cover the top with breadcrumbs, pour in the reserved broth to cover, then pour duck fat over the top.

   

9. Bake in the oven until the surface is browned. This didn't work too well for me; the breadcrumbs soak in the broth and don't brown easily. Clearly it needs to be grilled from the start:

   

What will I do differently next time? In proportion, there was far too much sausage and onions, and far too few beans and almost no couennes. It also tasted too much on the “smoked” side. Here are the proportions I'll use next time.

Traditional measure	Quantity	Ingredient	Step
400g	beans	1
200g	lamb, from leg	2
125 g	pork, from forequarter	2
150 g	duck fat	3, 8
50 g	couennes (pork skin)	4
200 g	onions	5
15 g	garlic	5
250 g	double-smoked sausage	6
400 g	tinned tomatoes	6
50 g	bread crumbs	8

Note that the smoked ham is gone, and that there is only one (unspecified) kind of sausage.