Greg's cassoulet

This is a companion page for my recipe for cassoulet, a baked bean dish from the south-west of France.

I've been working on this recipe for some years, not helped by the fact that my wife Yvonne doesn't like cassoulet very much. 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 wanted 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. I later found places in Australia that sell something called confit, but it's very different from what I recall.

One of the big problems with cassoulet 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.

One book that I didn't use, for some reason, is Connaître la cuisine du sud-ouest, by Francine Claustres, published by Éditions Sud-Ouest. I must have forgotten it: it contains more recipes for cassoulet than all the others put together.

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

Ingredients

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

The next time round was in October 2009, and I used the following ingredients:

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

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