For Valentine’s Day 2025, we skipped the crowds at local restaurants. Instead, Julian and I stayed at home and joined forces to prepare a French-themed dinner. For several years, he had been wanting to try his hand at making cassoulet. We had even bought the imported dried tarbais beans (traditional for this dish), and they were waiting patiently in the back of the cupboard. We decided to make a tourtière for dessert. Both items got our usual mix of improvisations and shortcuts. More on this below.
In Paula Wolfert’s book, The Cooking of South-West France, she devoted an entire chapter to cassoulet, describing her travels through the region to taste and compare local variations of this dish. The common features are simple: a baked casserole of beans and meats: pork, sausage, and confit (duck or goose, preserved in its own fat).
A traditional preparation of cassoulet can take many hours, or even several days. To simplify the project, we vamped on a recipe from the latest edition of Joy of Cooking. We used preserved duck legs (confit de canard) from a local grocery, cans of low-sodium chicken broth, lean pork chops, bacon, and andouille sausage. We soaked the beans overnight and parboiled them the next morning with a pinch of baking soda. After draining the beans, we added broth, garlic, onion, tomato paste, parsley and thyme. While the beans cooked, we fried the bacon and browned the meats in the rendered fat. The beans and meats were layered in a Dutch oven, topped with breadcrumbs, and baked for several hours. Below is the final product.
Our first encounter with cassoulet was at a Seattle restaurant that prides itself on authentic French cuisine. Their version was not impressive. I think ours was better – not as overwhelmingly fatty and salty as the one from that restaurant.
It’s interesting to compare cassoulet with an American classic: Boston baked beans. We use the authentic 19th century recipe from the now-defunct Durgin Park restaurant in Boston. That recipe is quite simple, consisting only of navy beans, salt pork, molasses, sugar, onion, dry mustard, salt and pepper. The American style of baked beans usually has a strong sugary flavor note that competes with the saltiness of the pork. You may or may not prefer that to a rich meat-forward cassoulet. We also like other variants of the baked beans and meat theme. One is feijoada, the national dish of Brazil. See this blog post for details. There’s also Cajun red beans and rice.
The tourtière recipe had an apple-date filling. Instead of the phyllo dough, I used a conventional all-butter pie pastry. I cut the filling recipe down by a third, fearing that it wouldn’t fit in the pie pan. I should have used the whole recipe, as the ratio of filling to crust was too small. I also added some cinnamon to turn up the taste volume. If I make this again, I’ll do the phyllo crust
.Maybe next year we’ll do steak and baked potatoes for Valentine’s Day. They’ll take less time to prepare and won’t cost an arm and six legs. (Duck confit and tarbais beans aren’t cheap.) However, a little experimentation in the kitchen is good to sharpen one’s skills.
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