Edward Behr

2020 | Issue 105

Cassoulet

The Meats Are Important, but Getting the Beans Right Really Matters

By James MacGuire

Cassoulet, the iconic meat-laden white-bean stew of southwest France, is a staple in French bistros around the world. For habitués, the arrival at the table of a wide bubbling container with an appealing brown crust feels like a celebration. For some home cooks, it’s a catch-all, something fun to throw together for friends using whatever’s on hand. But for a small contingent of aficionados, it has such exalted status that they are on a Holy Grail-like search for perfection — rarely if ever attained. The search is so steeped in dogma that it can lead chefs and gastronomes to cease their good-humored tableside banter and instead argue in earnest over allowable ingredients and techniques. It’s with such simple dishes that complete success can be most difficult to achieve. The biggest challenge in making cassoulet is avoiding stodginess.

Cassoulet’s pedigree is bolstered by the requisite lore. The traditional earthenware vessel used to bake cassoulet — the caçol in Occitan, from cassolo, “ragoût” — was first produced in the local town of Issel circa 1370 by an Italian potter named Jean Garivalda, according to Jean Tirand of a regional pottery association. Legend says the dish was then relatively new. In 1356, during the Hundred Years War, when the town of Castelnaudary was under siege by England’s Black Prince, the locals pooled their meager resources — a bit of meat and some broad beans (white beans from America came later) — to provide the soldiers with enough strength to repel the enemy. There are rituals: the brown crust that forms on the surface during baking must be pushed down into the mass a biblical seven times. And there’s plenty of folklore. To free themselves from cooking on washday, housewives would bring their cassoles to the baker’s oven once the bread was out, and retrieve them just before lunch, and (why not?) even the particular kindling from the foothills of the Montagne Noire is said to add a certain je ne sais quoi.

For a dish that began so humbly — as beans with what little meat peasants could afford, for succulence, in the same way that New Englanders would add salt pork to baked beans — it has received lots of attention from great chefs, particularly Prosper Montagné, a proud native of southwest France and co-author of the first Larousse Gastronomique, published in 1938. Everything that’s been written about cassoulet since then seems to bear his imprint. It had already been generally acknowledged that three towns along a 100-kilometer stretch of the Canal du Midi were the main centers of cassoulet, and in the 1929 book Le Festin Occitan Montagné assigned each one its place in the firmament. “Cassoulet is the God of Occitan cuisine,” he wrote. “A God in three persons: God the Father is the cassoulet of Castelnaudary, God the Son is that of Carcassonne, and the Holy Spirit is that of Toulouse.” In Larousse, which at the time was the authoritative reference on French gastronomy, he listed the defining ingredients of each:  Castelnaudary’s cassoulet should contain various cuts of pork and a piece of ham, Carcassonne added a leg of mutton and a partridge to the pork base, while Toulouse instead used confit of goose or duck and fresh Toulouse pork sausage (lamb was also mentioned for Toulouse, but I’ve never heard of it’s being put into practice). This was the kind of stifling codification usually reserved for the classical cuisine that I had drilled into me as a young cook, turning what began as a peasant bean dish into something all too serious.

Montagné further contributed an anecdote that enhanced the dish’s heroic status. During a visit to his hometown of Carcassonne, one Tuesday morning he went out to buy a pair of shoes only to find the store shuttered and a sign that read: “Closed because of cassoulet.” And when friends of the food writer and critic Curnonsky (Maurice Edmond Sailland, the “Prince of Gastronomes”) were in the area, they telephoned Madame Adolphine, a famous Castelnaudary cook, who imperiously informed them that an afternoon’s notice wasn’t enough for cassoulet that evening, and they’d have to wait until lunch the following day: “A cassoulet for this evening? Where do you think you are? In Paris, where all dishes are ready to serve?”

By the 1950s, the aura of the dish was such that, in his own recipe, Raymond Oliver, another classical chef with roots in regional food (and the first television chef in France), couldn’t resist poking a bit of fun at cassoulet, assuring readers: “I brought it all — the sincerity, élan, and total dedication of someone committing suicide.” These days, there exist both the Grande Confrèrie du Cassoulet de Castelnaudary and the Académie Universelle du Cassoulet, gastronomic clubs whose members sport the usual medieval robes, listen to long speeches, and make glass-in-hand pledges to remain faithful to their favorite dish. Both groups provide activities, recipes, and itineraries for tours of the cassoulet region, with stops at member restaurants, winemakers, and cassole-makers. The accent is inclusive and fraternal, but it seems that beneath the surface strong convictions fester. When asked by France’s TV5 to demonstrate its recipe, the head of the Académie vehemently refused to use the truncated-cone shaped cassole favored by the Confrèrie, and instead used the Académie’s own pot-bellied one. Passion for food is a guiltless pleasure, but this is like parents getting into fistfights at Little League games. The infighting led André Daguin, for many years the chef-owner of the well-regarded Hotel de France in Auch, 80 kilometers west of Toulouse, to quip, “Cassoulet isn’t a dish, it’s a war between villages.”

Cassoulet, like Mediterranean bouillabaisse, is such an extreme example of overpraise that it seems unattainable to both cooks and eaters, all the more so as both dishes suffer from technical handicaps. Bouillabaisse is based upon vibrant Mediterranean flavors, but bringing a difficult-to-eat mixture of whole fish and pieces, with skin and bones attached, to a furious boil gets things off to an inauspicious start. Cassoulet is downright staid in its ingredients and presentation, and the sausage and duck confit it most often contains end up boiled rather than brown and crispy. Choucroute garnie, the great Alsatian sauerkraut dish, would be regarded as the equal of cassoulet were it not for the cooler heads of northern writers. That isn’t to say that choucroute has been exempt from excess. As if to ennoble it or to justify high Paris brasserie prices, so much meat is piled on that one finds oneself peeking underneath in search of cabbage, and in a shameless bit of gussying up, a platter of it is transformed into choucroute royale by pouring over it a split of Champagne.

My few encounters over the years were a disappointment, and I can’t say that I avoided cassoulet entirely after that, but I was in no hurry to try it just anywhere. Then three days in Toulouse in the late 1990s felt like a now-or-never opportunity. Toulouse is called La Ville Rose for the pinkish-gray bricks of the cathedral and other historic buildings, and although it was February, the annual violet festival was in full swing. After the first night, while my work colleague moved on to other dishes, I determinedly ate cassoulet three nights in a row. Each restaurant was packed with locals and a few tourists contentedly chowing down, and the cassoulets were good. Yet none of them made me want to stand on my chair and cheer. There were problems in texture, and my own cooking trials afterward made me feel that they were linked to the restaurants’ having reorganized a long-cooked dish to suit à la minute service.

Recently, I was reading about the Contest for Best Toulouse Cassoulet in the World, which began as an offshoot of a local comedy and music festival. As co-founder Éric Carrière explained, the hope was for something “fun, relaxed, but very serious.” The 2017 winner embodied all of those. He was Christophe Fasan, the chef and co-owner of a restaurant called Chez Émile on Place St-Georges (not far from Toulouse’s central square, the Place du Capitole). During the event, in interviews, and in a television demonstration of the complete recipe, Fasan gave full credit to his restaurant’s previous owner, Francis Ferrier, humbly explaining, in an “if it ain’t broke” kind of way, that there were no possible improvements to be made. Most chefs crave recognition for their own fresh creations, but not Fasan. And after he won the contest, his business increased 30 percent. He explained that seeing tourists on the terrace in the height of summer sweating over their steaming cassoulet makes him laugh, but he added that if he were off somewhere in a similar circumstance, he’d do the same. It was only when I saw a photo of the restaurant that I realized it was where I had gone the first night. I had asked the desk clerk at my hotel for a suggestion and I couldn’t finish saying “cassoulet” before he blurted out “Chez Émile!” like a game show contestant. If I’d quit while I was ahead after that first night, like my colleague, my conclusions about cassoulet would surely have been different.

There’s nothing new in Fasan’s recipe, but it displays an uncanny understanding of the mechanics of flavor and texture and of how to achieve them with surprising simplicity. Careful reading also reveals where things can go wrong. Some readers might find the recipe overly pragmatic, but it works with a minimum of trouble, and Fasan’s surely remains one of the very best cassoulets in Toulouse.

The restaurant serves upwards of 60 portions of cassoulet a day, so, on the day before, about that many cassoles are prepared up to the point of final baking. On the day-of, they’re baked extremely slowly at 130 degrees C (265 degrees F), the lowest cassoulet cooking temperature I’ve seen. This is key because, although we think of beans as being forgiving and the dish as a whole as being ideal for reheating, there’s an ever-present danger the beans will turn to mush. Higher temperatures and the inertia of those thick cassoles can provide enough time for the beans to overcook before they cool down. Restaurants that prepare the dish as a sideline cook large batches in advance and reheat individual orders in a very hot oven. The beans absorb moisture and thicken during the first cooking and cooling, continue to thicken upon reheating, and during all of this the stirring and jostling break the beans and make the cassoulet even more stodgy. The fast reheating in a hot oven is too brief to form a natural crust, so bread crumbs are often sprinkled over the surface to replace it. (In fairness, I should say that both of Montagné’s home recipes in the Larousse, with no such time constraints, call for bread crumbs.)

Fasan uses Lingot beans, which are elongated in shape and resistant to breaking down during cooking. They have both Indication Géographique Protégée and Label Rouge certification and are labeled Haricot de Castelnaudary, although they’re actually grown in the nearby area of Lauragais. Bean production was traditional there, but there was no mention of them by name in recipes, and by the 1990s they had all but died out. Replanting was begun after partial mechanization reduced production costs and because of increased demand from Castelnaudary’s industrial cassoulet producers, who make around 23,000 metric tonnes of canned cassoulet out of 85,000 metric tonnes for all of France. They were hoping that replacing the Argentinian beans they were using with local ones would aid in their ultimately unsuccessful attempt to obtain an IGP for their cassoulet. Lingots from Mazères still exist, as do Cocos de Pamiers, which are rounder and more tender beans that had all but disappeared and are now making a comeback. The much larger Tarbais beans, produced by a cooperative at the foot of the Pyrenees, are also very good, but expensive; production costs are high due to the small scale and hand harvesting (and some growers still train their beans onto the traditional live cornstalks). White beans are mild enough in flavor that discussions center on texture. In North America, Navy or Yellow Eye come to mind as substitutes; darker beans (usually more flavorful) can lend their own flavors to cassoulet but raise the eyebrows of purists.  For even cooking, all beans must come from the most recent harvest, and if they’re more than six months old, soaking overnight is necessary along with placing them in fresh water before cooking. The first cooking of the beans should be slow to be sure that they remain intact, and although seasoned cooks might be tempted to keep them on the firm side, with Fasan’s low oven temperature they should be completely cooked. His cassoulet is relatively liquid, which limits jostling and so avoids breakage and pulp, with more bean stock or water added as necessary during cooking to keep the beans just covered.

The basic flavors in cassoulet come from the relatively mild broth produced as some of the meats simmer with the beans, which is perfectly agreeable but not particularly complex. In a television interview about cassoulet, Jean-Pierre Delsol, a chef from the region, shared his secret for more nuance: a somewhat hokey-seeming addition of a few slices of dried sausage (saucisson sec). Other recipes call for a country ham bone for similar effect. (In The Cooking of Southwest France, Paula Wolfert took this still further, adding five ounces of prosciutto and five more of pancetta to a recipe for 12 people.) Meaty aged flavors make sense and these solutions seem intuitive, but Fasan is more analytical. He calls what’s missing rancidity, which sounds off-putting but is completely true, and his fix is a spoonful of dry-cured fatback and garlic turned into a purée to provide that needed rancid fat. Looking backward, Montagné’s own recipe (which he didn’t include in the Larousse Gastronomique) does the same. Once again, a simple solution gets the job done. Some readers might have difficulty finding it (I’ve found versions at Italian and Hungarian butcher shops), but before heading to the deli section in search of a package of sliced salami, remember that a friendly butcher might set aside trimmings for you — rinds of Prosciutto or country ham.

I’ve asked chefs from the region about the addition of tomato to cassoulet, and their answers have often been a haughty-sounding: “That’s what they do in Toulouse,” as though tomato were the first step down a slippery slope of shortcuts ending with facile flavors. Neither of the associations adds tomatoes. Maybe they expunged them to distance themselves from those city slickers, for they appear in a good number of the recipes I’ve seen for all three cassoulets from Montagné’s time onward, although his personal recipe doesn’t have them. In any case, now that gastronomy has reached the history-is-bunk stage of its development and cooking websites promise to show you how to achieve the authentic flavors of Chinese takeout, the addition of a bit of tomato after 700 years seems pretty minor. And when I tasted the attempt by the modernist chef at the restaurant Les Jardins de l’Opéra to reinvent cassoulet by using fresh broad beans, to bring it back to its pre-Columbian roots, it didn’t even deserve that frequent phrase: “but I was happy to have tried it once.” Used carefully, tomato can add a bit of viscosity and round out the flavors. The thought of canned tomato paste may be off-putting, but like everything else in Fasan’s recipe, it’s completely thought out. Fresh tomatoes tend to distract (especially in visible chunks as some cooks do to add something “fresh”), while tomato paste usefully darkens during the long cooking and disappears in the mix.

The use of different meats no longer seems to distinguish the three classic cassoulets. Both associations have adapted the Toulouse version: browned cubes of pork shoulder, fresh saucisse de Toulouse, and confit (these days, it’s almost always duck — old-style aged confit can provide those desirable rancid flavors). Lamb seems to have disappeared, and that’s just as well because it would distract, though an entirely lamb cassoulet using cubes, with braised shanks to replace the confit, is an attractive thought. Partridge never made any sense. Fresh pork rinds and a pork trotter provide piggy flavors and a slightly sticky richness to the broth.

In Fasan’s recipe, the cubes of pork shoulder come from the échine (the center of the shoulder where it joins the loin), a well-marbled cut that becomes tender without breaking down into fibers. It has to be well-browned. The fresh Toulouse sausage can’t remain crisp because it’s cooked in the beans, but it’s browned beforehand for flavor. Unfortunately, “saucisse de Toulouse” no longer has any regional specificity, because the term is now used throughout France for ordinary pork sausage, and standards are low. Chefs in the region seek out “Véritable Saucisse de Toulouse Fabrication Artisanale” from charcutiers who volunteer to use a traditional coarse grind (passed through 10 mm, or 3/8-inch, holes) and who limit ingredients to 75 percent lean pork and 25 percent fat with 15 to 18 grams of salt and 2 grams of black pepper per kilo. The coarse grind helps keep the sausages from turning into mush during the long simmering in the cassole, and the duck confit is only half-submerged in the top of the cassoulet in hope the exposed skin will brown and crisp. My understanding now is that the key to flavor is browning along with just a bit of that rancidity. Salted pork, such as the ham-colored cured shanks and spare ribs (cambayou and castelou demi-sel, respectively) in a 1984 collective cookbook by the Maître Cuisiniers de France (French Master Chefs), distracts from the browning and rancidity, and smoked items head in the wrong direction. That doesn’t mean substitutions aren’t possible. Toulouse sausage and slow-roasted spare ribs, while I was testing the cooking of the beans, provided a satisfying weeknight supper. Around that time I began to wonder if I was becoming obsessed with all the details. Years earlier, when I asked an older restaurateur in Albi about the ideal bean, his response was delivered with feigned weariness with yet another purist and applied to cassoulet as a whole: “C’est une histoire de clocher” — “It’s a tempest in a teapot.” It was time to relax.●

Here’s the recipe for cassoulet.

From issue 105

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