French bistro cliche night: Onion soup, cassoulet, & tarte tatin
On Saturday, I cooked dinner for some friends. The original idea was to try out the Felicity Cloake Moules Marinières recipe, but as I'd failed to clock that mussels aren't in season, this wasn't going to fly. Instead, I opted for the checked-table-cloth bistro trinity of onion soup, cassoulet, and tarte tatin.
Well, I would have if the oven hadn't gently exploded and stopped working about half an hour before I needed to serve the cassoulet. Fuckery. Fuckery most pronounced.
Thankfully, by the time a cassoulet has had three and a half of its four hours in the oven, it's basically good to serve, so the only things to really suffer were the second crust and the tarte tatin, neither of which actually got made in the end.Reader, I swore far, far less than you might imagine.Anyway, cassoulet.
Cook all the things
Cook all the things
I love cassoulet. There are few things I love more. But the recipes and ingredients lists can be a bit intimidating.I've been making cassoulet on and off since I was an undergrad, and it was remarkably hard to screw up, even then. After several years, and much tinkering, the cassoulet I make is more or less the Elizabeth Luard recipe, de-faffed by use of tinned beans.
This time I also happened to have some leftover confit, made with the remnants of the Christmas goose. It was great, and I wish there'd been more. But basically, you just fry all the meat, some onions and carrots, de-glaze with tomatoes and stock, and layer it all up with haricot beans. In practice it's an order of magnitude less cary than it looks.All cassoulet recipes will irk some purist or other. There isn't a definitive one, and somewhere in the arse crack of Languedoc, blood's probably been shed over that.Here's mine.
Ingredients
Pork belly, rind on (around 500g, you can get away with other cuts)
Lamb neck fillet, 300g (shoulder works too)
Toulouse sausages (600g, I think. Loads, anyway.)
Goose or duck confit (extra lamb if you don’t have it)
4-5 tins of haricot beans
2 carrots
2 onions
Garlic
A tin of tomatoes
Breadcrumbs, a couple of big handfuls
Stock, white wine, or both
Thyme, parsley, oregano, and any other herbs that scream "French casserole"
If you're not soaking and boiling dried beans, this is actually all quite easy. You really do just fry everything, then layer it up.
So, dice the pork and lamb, then in the big fuck-off lidded casserole pan you're going to use, fry the meats until they've got some colour and rendered off plenty of fat. The order isn't important, but I tend to cook the sausages separately, as they react better to slower, gentler cooking than is ideal for browning pork and lamb.
When it's done, put the meat to one side in a giant bowl or something, and cook off the onions and carrots in the fat.
Thick slices of carrot, and onion quarters work well, but again, this is proper rustic fayre and it really doesn't matter. Once the carrots and onions have softened and coloured a little, add a bit of sliced garlic and some herbs. Fry briefly, and de-glaze with the tomatoes and some veg stock. Or just water, or wine, or whatever, really. Pour that into the same bowl as the meat.
Once the sausages are done, cut them into halves or thirds, and mix them in too.
Heat the oven to something low like 140.
Warm the confit so it's easy to separate the meat from the fat as it melts, and pick it off any bones, in decent chunks, into the meat mix. Then it's time to layer.
You can just throw it all together with beans, but layering is my one nod to traditionality. Technically, you should probably separate the meats, but hey, we've already covered the fallacy of cassoulet essentialism. Start with a layer of beans, then meat mix, then beans, then meat, and top with beans. Then put it into a low oven, with a lid on, for about four hours.
Check it periodically, as it shouldn't dry out during cooking. Dry-ish to serve is fine, but keep an eye on moisture while it cooks.
Half an hour out, take off the lid, and sprinkle a thick layer of breadcrumbs over the top, and spoon a little of the confit fat over this. Return it to the oven to form a delicious rich crust for 15-20 minutes. Then break this with a spoon and partially mix it in, and do it again. Breadcrumbs, fat, and back to the oven with a second crust for a few minutes.
Serve with a light green salad as a minimal apology to your tract.
If you’re not using confit and need extra fat for the crust stages, reserve some that runs off the resting meat, or buy a jar of goose fat, or use some melted butter in a pinch. It’s rustic, you can busk it.
The arresting thing is the richness. That'll be all the slow-cooked meats and fat, of course. So much of it resides in the crust, which is the real joy. There are a few additions you can make - more veg, salami, cured pork, I've even seen beef. Some people omit the lamb, and I used to go really light on the tomato. It's flexible and delicious.