Cassoulet Done My Way

Today’s inspiration word is “cassoulet.” 

Like many women of my generation, I grew up watching Julia Child cook on Public Television.  I loved the quirky theme music, her breathless, bassoon-like voice, and her sanguine approach to culinary vivisection.  I hope it is not sacrilegious to admit that I never really learned much technique from her shows.  I found the fat content of her recipes hard to swallow (so to speak).  In the years that followed, I saw other chefs—Jacques Pepin comes to mind—make tasty French dishes that don’t require a side order of Lipitor.  Julia was very critical of adapting recipes.  “If you don’t want all the fat,” she would say, “then simply eat smaller portions.”  She was unabashed in her culinary point of view.   “Don’t make it the wrong way!” she insisted.

As extreme as her cooking could be, nothing was more over the top than her Cassoulet show.  If I recall correctly, it was so detailed that it spanned two episodes.  Cassoulet is an earthy, slow-cooking casserole made with alternating layers of beans and meats.  The meats generally include duck or goose confit (a rich preparation in which the legs are rendered in their own fat), mutton, and sausage.   I remember watching this show in reruns as a young newlywed.    By the time Julia had prepared the confit and the beans, then made cracklings from the fatty skin, and began layering all the ingredients in the traditional deep casserole, I distinctly remember wondering why anyone would create a dish that took so long.  The intermediate steps were more laborious than most entire meals.  As a mom who loves to cook, nothing is quite so frustrating as spending hours or days preparing a meal that can be consumed in a matter of minutes.  What kind of “audience” could possibly be worthy of such a production?

I did not think I would ever have an opportunity to answer that question.  Then one Sunday night, a pheasant arrived on my doorstep.  My husband was a first-year resident at the time.  In those days, the resident on weekend call collected pagers from all the residents staffing the three main hospitals (county, VA, and university).  After a long weekend with my husband taking call, the other residents came to collect their pagers for the week ahead.  One of the residents, who grew up in a rural area east of San Francisco, spent the weekend hunting.  He shot a pheasant.  With nowhere else to turn, he showed up on my doorstep with a field-dressed bird, asking if I could prepare it.  There was something incredibly sweet about the way he brought it to me.  I could not resist.

I had never prepared a game bird before, but the idea of a pheasant seemed to cry out for a French country casserole.  In fact, pheasant is a fairly lean bird, making it less suited to this particular application than I realized.  But ignorance is bliss in the kitchen, and it goes unnoticed when eight hungry surgical residents are involved.  I ended up taking an entire day off from work in order to turn this tiny bird into something that resembled a cassoulet.  I found fresh herbs and fashioned my very first bouquet garni, substituted bacon for the more traditional salt pork, bought some chicken thighs to round out the small portion of pheasant, selected kielbasa as the sausage of choice, and completely ignored the mutton.  There was no skin or bones on the pheasant, so I was forced to improvise, hoping that cooking the pheasant after browning chicken thighs and sausages would bring it a little bit of fatty, slow-cooked taste.

Julia Child would not have deigned to call the finished product a cassoulet.  It did not matter.  At the end of a long day, a collection of bachelor surgical residents would eat anything.  And eat they did.  The pseudo-cassoulet was obliterated in a matter of minutes, choked down with a green salad, some crusty bread and some good wine.  As outcomes go, I consider this a measure of success.

I have learned much about cooking since those days.  I understand now that the traditional process of preparing a cassoulet involves the development of deep flavors that come only from slow cooking.  But on that day many years ago it didn’t matter.  We were in that stage of life where luxuries were few and far between.  We feasted on our cassoulet as if it had been prepared for us in a stone hearth in Toulouse, toasting the intrepid hunter who had assured our bounty, and kissing the cook on the way out the door.