Tag: cassoulet

MtAoFC: BFD

mtaofcThere, I said it. I really have never been at all swoony over Julia Child and Simone Beck’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking. I don’t typically bring it up in public, because then people shoot bloody daggers out of their eyes at you for speaking ill of Saint Julia, and they also then assume that you cook nothing but tuna-noodle casserole.

So let me be clear: Julia Child is perfectly delightful, and did a world of good for this country and its food culture. My father still speaks in hushed tones about the bad old days in the supermarket, when the only mushrooms you could buy were in a can. And I know and appreciate that the French have a fantabulous culinary heritage, and we should all learn to eat and drink in such a thoughtful way.

But MtAoFC is just not all that. I have never, ever flipped through it and thought, “Ooh, I’ll cook this.” In fact, I think the book has only served to reinforce my prejudice against French food, and how annoyingly special it seems to consider itself. Whenever I read a recipe in MtAoFC, I find myself thinking, “C’mon–really? Is all that shit necessary?” And you know I am not a dump-and-stir Rachael Ray type. I like spending time in the kitchen, and look for reasons to do so.

So it was interesting to read this little Julia Moskin book review in the New York Times today.

Moskin points out the fundamental problem with MtAoFC: it’s restaurant cooking. Child studied at a school for professional cooks (Le Cordon Bleu), and that’s what she relays in the book. As Moskin says, and I have said, restaurant cooking is wildly different from home cooking. Restaurant chefs prize consistency, perfectly velvety sauces and manically regularly cubed vegetables, and they have an army of people and gear to make that all happen.

Because of this, I have always been deeply skeptical of all restaurant cookbooks. But I guess I just don’t give enough of a crap about French food to ever have noticed that’s the same reason why MtAoFC rubs me the wrong way. I mean, sweet Christ, I have only peeled pearl onions once in my life, for a Greek stifadho, and I think that just might be enough.

And of course it’s great that the country is currently in the throes of Julia love, and people who’ve never cooked are inspired enough to march out to buy fatback and red wine and all that.

But how many people are going to get halfway through the boeuf bourguignon recipe, with every pot and pan dirty and no more counter space left and dinner still hours away, and say, “This is what cooking is?! Get me the hell out!” (Or, heaven forbid, they’ll cook the aspic.)

Moskin in the Times reviews a different French cookbook, I Know How to Cook, which focuses on home cooking skills. Totally hateful title, and ghastly chick-y cover, but even so: this one might finally get me on board with the whole French food thing.

Oh, and OK–I feel I should admit that in mine and Tamara’s forthcoming cookbook, there is a recipe for cassoulet, perhaps the pinnacle of ridiculous overrated Frenchiness. And the recipe references MtAoFC–which is, in fact, a very good reference…which is not the same as a very good book to cook out of. (I think we can safely say that whatever French business is in that book was Tamara’s idea.) But we worked hard to make sure the cassoulet isn’t just blindly following some overly complicated restaurant-y procedure. And as a result, I will probably never eat cassoulet again…

Climbing Mt. Cassoulet, Part 2: Up and Over the Hill

Ungh. That’s my realization, at my doctor’s office last week, that I weigh a good 10 pounds more than I thought I did. And I feel like I gained it all this month, during my self-imposed Cassoulet Season. (Thank god it was freezing here. I think I would’ve thrown up if I’d had to go through this process in July.)

So here’s how I got at least 5 of those pounds.

First, I made some duck confit. I followed Paula Wolfert’s edict of 22g of salt per pound of meat, but either I did my math wrong or that is just really a ton of salt. I didn’t add all that I’d measured, and it still turned out very salty.

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I also–get this–confited the whole duck, instead of just the legs. It’s true what they say about the breast meat not getting so fabulous a texture, but hey, it’s all going to the same place anyway–by which I mean, to a pot in a slow oven with some beans and garlic for hours. Who’s gonna know?

Then I made some sausage.

Crazy! you’re saying.

It wasn’t that bad. First of all, it was days after the confit, so I didn’t get kitchen-grease overload. And they were patties. And no meat grinder was involved. I basically used Julia Child as inspiration to just make patties, and was heartened to read Paula Wolfert’s encouraging words re: the use of a food processor. So my little sausage patties didn’t have the fluffiest texture, but they tasted great. Amazing what a slug of brandy will do for some pork, and I subbed pancetta for straight fat, per Wolfert, and added more garlic than either called for.

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Then…then I rested for a few days.

Then I soaked some beans. I had a pound of gigantes, the Greek-style giant lima beans, which I was mildly concerned might not “read” as classic cassoulet. Like I fucking know, but I didn’t want to make a batch of this stuff, and then have it be so far off the mark as to be unrecognizable. But small beans are boring. Big beans are awesome!

Unfortunately, I only had a pound. But I had half a pound of great northerns, left over from the first effort. I threw those in a separate pot. This was handy, actually, because I got to try a couple of different approaches to simmering the beans.

Results (no pics, you’ll have to trust me): whole onions are fine, pork skin is good and cloves stuck in the onion are fun to do and help clear out years-old spice inventory, but may or may not make a difference.

For the meat, I did mostly lamb, with a smidge of pork left from the sausage-making. I put this in its own garlic-onion-carrot-tomato-wine-stock stew for about an hour.

Then I layered everything together. The unappealing orange stuff is the lamb stew. Trust me–it tasted good. Oh, I remember why: I put about 1/3 of a pound of pancetta in too.

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Oh, I forgot: on the bottom of the pot, I put in the pieces of pork skin, kind of as a buffer. Some recipes tell you to cut the skin into teensy little pieces, but I just knew I didn’t want one of those gelatinous gobs slithering down my throat. I left ’em big so I could taste just to be sure of my prejudices, and then pull it all out easily.

On top, I grated some nutmeg. Who the hell knows if this makes any difference, but it made me feel cook-y. And, as Nicole pointed out last night, it always feels like a small victory when you can put the Microplane away without having sliced up your knuckles.

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I poured in a lot of bean stock and let the baby bake a couple of hours. Slid it in the “walk-in”–aka the uninsulated pantry–for the night. Pulled it out two hours before dinner and stuck it in a cold oven set to 300, after adding another cup or so of bean liquid.

About 20 minutes before dinner, I sprinkled on some bread crumbs, mixed with some chopped-up parsley. (The vegetables–I cling to them like a mirage), and then scooped up some of the fat layer to drizzle over them.

They crisped up beautifully at the end:

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I was a little nervous digging into it, especially for the texture. The beans had cooked more quickly than I thought they would, and were verging on too soft when I layered them into the pot. I had also been very liberal with the bean stock, to counteract previous efforts, where the beans had just glommed up in a wad. And I wasn’t sure if my little sausage patties would actually hold together.

Aside from the confirmed nastiness of the pork skin, it turned out pretty well. The key thing was the textural variety, I think. Although the beans were a wee bit squishy, they hadn’t gotten totally gummy yet, and the less-than-standard sausage texture was actually a plus–it gave you a little something to properly chew on. And the bread crumbs rocked. I should’ve had a second batch to lay over the bottom half of the batch!

I wish I could say I felt elated at this point, like I’ve reached a major life goal. But I just feel sluggish. I can’t imagine why.

Anyway…want the recipe? This one, at least, you’ll have to buy the cookbook for. Good thing it’s not coming out till October–I wouldn’t want anyone to hurt themselves by cooking this in the summer.

Climbing Mt. Cassoulet, Part 1: The Complaining

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.