The Route des Cassoulets lies in Southwest France, on the wild Basque borders with Spain. It sounds helplessly romantic, like so much in Europe – one imagines that it must be a sort of savage jaunt through hamlets and hills, maybe ending at a ruined castle, or the tattered remains of a saint’s reliquary. But in truth, it’s nothing so elevated. A cassoulet is a stew of white beans and pork, cooked for hours at low heat. And the route des cassoulets isn’t ancient at all, but the recent fruit of a typically French group who calls itself the Universal Academy of Cassoulet, a hikeable road of restaurants who serve the authentic article. Still, I’d like to head down there some time, and take the walk along its 130 miles – I can’t think of a better thematic holiday to obscure the monotony of a chilly fall, or a more sustaining meal for a daily trundle across the rugged foothills of the Pyrenees.

But why all the melodrama about a stew? Well, first, the cassoulet takes a long time to make. Not all of us are required to be as fanatical about it as Anatole France’s favorite cook, a certain Madame Clemence, who kept hers simmering for twenty years consecutively - but even so, the stew takes at least a whole day of effort, and another day of waiting for the beans to soak. The French, like many Europeans, intuitively understand the relationship between effort and respect– I’ve always chuckled derisively about the German habit of deferring to the oldest members of their upper legislative house, but when you see how those ideas ripple through society in dishes like this, I wonder if I’m too quickly dismissive. But cassoulet not only takes effort to make, it’s ancient and venerable as well. We’re not sure for how long people in France have married beans and pork and other ingredients to make a long simmering, unctuous stew (cassoulet is known as “haricot cream” in some parts, and for good reason), but I know that the efforts man has made to make beans taste better are of mythical vintage. Even with all this, had cassoulet been just the work of Languedoc, it might yet have wandered away into the sands of history unlamented. But cassoulet is a deeply local dish, bound to memory by villages and towns, and micro-regions, and the brutal rivalries of trivial men. There’s not one cassoulet, but dozens, and three greats ones that stand above all the rest like so many heads of a declining French culinary Rushmore – the cassoulet de Castelnaudary, with fresh pork, ham, knuckle, and bacon, the cassoulet de Carcassone, with all the above and mutton and partridge, and the cassoulet de Toulouse, with sausage, and preserved goose or duck; and you can taste them all along the route the local cooks have laid out for you.

To me, all that sounds very fine, and delicious. But really, when you think of it, when you put aside my rhapsodies above, the cassoulet is a stew. It might well be, as Richard Olney puts it, a “voluptuous monument to rustic tradition”, but in the end, it’s also just pork and beans. And that’s the real point of all my meanderings above, for we Americans also do pork and beans, and when we let ourselves make the effort, we do it well. No, even our most elaborate version isn’t the masterpiece that they make in fairytale Carcassone, seat of the medieval cathars. But they’re honest, good meals, and before we introduced sugar and molasses into the mix in the mid-19th century, they were every bit a match for the Europeans’ best. This fact has two messages for us – first, we ought not shy away from making cassoulet for ourselves. The meal requires neither wizardry nor decades of mastery, but just some effort. And second, we needn’t be ashamed of our dishes just because they don’t wind their way through enchanted foothills and around ancient villages steeped in local history. Beans and pork are our heritage too. Let’s make the most of them.


Cassoulet

Put a litre of dried white haricot beans in cold water overnight. The next day, put the beans, some salt pork if you have it, some bacon, a carrot, an onion, some cloves, and a bouqet garni (bunch of herbs in a sack) in a pot with enough water to cover. Simmer on very low heat for about an hour (the beans should be squooshable between your fingers).

In another pan, brown 1.5 pounds of pork loin and a pound of lamb (actually, the recipe is for mutton, but lamb will do in these dreary days of agricultural monotony). Add two chopped onions, another bouquet garni, and garlic. Cook with beef broth for an hour, adding occasionally when necessary – you’re trying to make a sort of sauce for use later.

Take the meat from its sauce and add to the beans along with a garlicky sausage and perhaps some confit de canard (preserved duck). Simmer for another hour, together.

Remove the pieces of meat from the beans, and cut into even portions. Line a casserole with a layer of beans, add a layer of meats, some of the sauce made of the broth, good pepper. Repeat until the ingredients are all used, and top the entire cassoulet with white bread crumbs. If you have it, pour a little goose fat over the whole thing.

Cook at very low heat for another two hours or so. The traditional recipes say that you should allow a crust to form and break it with a spoon seven times before you eat. In any case, by the end you should have creamy, incredibly flavorful beans, and tender meat, all topped with pungent sausage. Eat with crusty bread, and if possible, serve in the casserole in which it was cooked.

Pork’n’Beans

Soak beans of your choosing overnight in cold water, which you can reserve if you want. The next day, cook the beans for one hour in different water, which you can also reserve. Place beans in an earthenware casserole with a large amount of salt pork, some of the reserved liquid, a whole onion, and a little dried mustard – the liquid should be enough to just cover. This also is when you add maple syrup or molasses if you want it. Cover, and bake at low heat for 3 hours, adding more liquid as necessary to keep the beans from drying out. Bake for additional half hour, uncovered. Remove the onion before serving with bread (preferably steamed Boston Brown Bread).

Boston Brown Bread

Get a one pound coffee can, wash it well, and butter heavily. Mix 1/3 cup of molasses with about 1 cup of milk or buttermilk. Stir until fully combined. In a different bowl, mix ½ cup of rye flour, ½ cup of whole wheat flour, ½ cup of yellow cornmeal, a little salt, and some baking soda. Add the buttermilk/molasses mix, and half a cup of raisins. You should have a thick batter. Pour the mix into the coffee can.

This can either be baked for an hour and a half, at about 300 degrees, or can be properly steamed in a pot filled somewhat with water for two hours. If you’re steaming, make sure to cover the top with foil

Again, I’m late. No matter – Let’s put it down to end of semester nerves rather than anything else.

What I’m Reading [about food] this week: The Road to Wigan Pier; George Orwell

Not all food reading consists of cookbooks and memoirs. Some of it is a little more socially significant – though with my belief in the foundational import of food to human experience, it pains me to say that. In any case, as World War II drew inevitably closer, George Orwell was commissioned by the so-called “Left Book Club” to write a polemical defense of socialism as the great hope of humanity in the face of German fascism. The result was The Road to Wigan Pier, a striking description of the life, and food, of the British working class in the late 1930’s. The book has several astonishing moments - a description of the least expensive diet that could possibly keep someone alive particularly stuck in my mind – I never knew that beef dripping and wholemeal bread went quite so far.


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But perhaps the most important thing Orwell says for us today, however distasteful its “class” based snobbery, is his explanation of why people insisted on eating the kind of processed rubbish they ate to their own detriment. As he put it,

“Would it not be better if they [the poor] spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and whole-meal bread . . . ? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. . . .When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored and miserable, you don’t want to eat dull wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn’t. You want something a little bit “tasty”. . . . White bread and margarine and sugared tea don’t nourish you to any extent, but they are nicer (at least most people think so) than brown bread and dripping and cold water”.

What’s striking about Orwell’s observation, of course, is that the same fundamental problem afflicts us today. Yes, the misery of the 1930s is long past, and our world is infinitely richer than the one Orwell describes. But our people still put aside natural and wholesome foods in favor of things that are that “little bit tasty”. It’s still our trendy, richer, populace that poured oat bran into their breakfasts in the 80’s, and embraces the Atkins lunacy today. And we still haven’t been able to persuade people to do otherwise, all the efforts of various zealots aside. One wonders if we’ll ever prevail on this point, or whether a century from now the eating of natural, homemade foods will have retreated ever further into the confines of elite hobby.

Ultimately, Orwell was thankfully wrong when he wrote that “nothing but Socialism can save us from the misery of the present or the nightmare of the present”. Both Nazism and then Communism were thrown back from the gates of civilization’s Vienna despite the dubious aid of the Socialism dream. But devoid of its ideological nonsense, what remains is still a valuable book; and read today, a glorious repudiation to the myth of a zero sum world. I recommend a quick leaf through.


4 pm snack – a lemon-poppy quick bread, with lemon zest. Unfortunately, I ate all of it by yesterday (Wednesday) and was forced to satisfy myself with the new candy bar size Lindt brand dark chocolates I’ve been seeing around.

Lunch:

Pseudo-Japanese soba noodles: This is a really great, quick recipe. Just get some Japanese soba style noodles, boil them in plenty of water, and toss quickly with a little honey, rice wine vingar, and soy sauce. I’d use more of the last, and less of the first, if you see what I mean – otherwise, the noodles sugar overnight. Also, toss in some sliced scallions or green onions while you’re at it.

Rices: I have a great love affair with rice. In part, it’s because of how I was raised; rice is a big deal in a household that eats a lot of middle eastern food. But rice has intrinsic values as well – it’s soft and filling, and serves as a neutral canvas for your best efforts to gussy it up. This week, I used beans and chickpeas (garbonzos) combined with a mix of white and brown rice. Delicious.

Dinner:

½ poussin and potatoes x 2 – okay, so I didn’t actually have a poussin, but a Cornish game hen. Nonetheless, I prefer the British word in this case, even though whether you call it a poussin or a game hen, you basically end up with the same thing - a small, entirely linear, chicken. They make great dinners, though my one complaint is that they don’t produce enough fat to properly roast potatoes. A tin of goose fat would have been a nice addition. But alas – my wallet forbids.

Butternut Squash soup x 2 – what is fall without some kind of squash? Just roast a butternut squash, drop into some chicken broth season with onions fried in butter, and puree the whole affair with a little light cream. You can leave out the cream if you want and add noodles, but in either case the resultant soup should be eaten with crusty bread and gales of freshly ground pepper.

Smoked Salmon - is there a better ready-made meal than a packet of lightly pink smoked salmon? Well, yes - a fresh brie balanced on your lap in a Parisian garden, jabbed with a hastily torn baguette. But failing that, smoked salmon is magnificent. If you insist on strewing a few capers and sliced cornichons on top, you’re welcome to do so – but naturally smoked Scottish salmon needs neither.