Quick(ish) cassoulet
The other day, my friend Keir was after a simplified cassoulet recipe. “Why ever would you do such a thing?”, I wondered. But it got me thinking.
As it happens, the answer was: to use as base for serving cod.
Once I'd popped my monocle back in and had a fortifying sherry, this actually didn't seem so bananas. I like to serve quick-seared smoked haddock on a bed of cannellini beans stewed in leeks, oregano, and a little lemon. Beans and fish work, cod will take the savoury. Sure, why not.
Maybe another sherry first, just to be sure.
In the discussion, Keir made a very solid point:
How do you get yesterday's cassoulet leftovers, today, without spending a fortune and a whole afternoon?
You don't. But this is as close as I can get you, foregoing the fancy bits.
So how does cassoulet work? Well, those soft creamy beans soak up fat and flavour as the meats cook, and the pork and duck and lamb and bacon and sausage and whatever else you use give these little islands of texture and intensity when you get a forkful. But they’re also where most of the fuss comes from.
Where’s the trade-off? How many ingredients can you remove before it isn’t cassoulet any more?
Essentialism may be a great way to start an argument with a cultural conservative in an art gallery, but it’s not super helpful in refactoring classic peasant cuisine. I honestly reckon you can toss out almost everything except the bacon and sausage, and still have a cassoulet-adjacent nice time.
If you do have some confit duck to hand, the recipe will really benefit from it, but assuming you don’t, here goes.
Please don’t tell the French what I’ve done here today. I’d like to be allowed back into the country again.
Ingredients:
Haricot beans, 3 tins (see substitution note)
Toulouse sausages, 6 or about 500g (see substitution note)
Pancetta or bacon lardons, 100g
Onions, 2
Carrot, 1 large-ish
Passata, 200g (or a couple of decent sized tomatoes)
Chicken stock, 200ml
Garlic, 4 cloves
Breadcrumbs, about 100g (preferably fresh)
Herbes de Provence, 1/2 tsp
Bay leaf, 2
Optional but recommended: lard or dripping or some kind of animal fat for frying
Serves 4-6? It’s hard to tell with cassoulet.
Substitution notes
Haricot beans - These aren’t always available tinned, so dried beans may be easier to come by. Use about half the drained weight of the tinned ones (about 400g), soak them overnight, and simmer them low for an hour and a half or until tender. But honestly I just substitute tinned cannellini. My dad maintains you can rinse the sugary tomato goo off a couple of tins of baked beans, but he voted for Brexit. That said, Google reckons they're haricots. Stopped clocks and all that...
Sausages - My excellent local butcher sometimes makes Toulouse sausages, and some larger supermarkets stock them. When I can’t find them, what I do is find the coarsest Lincolnshire sausages I can, and add about half a clove of crushed garlic per sausage to the recipe, plus a bit of extra thyme and a splash of red wine.
Other meats - This is as cut down as I reckon I can get it, but would really benefit from some fatty pork belly. Every ingredient you add adds faff of course. If you want to add pork and/or lamb for extra body, use fatty cuts and treat them like the sausages - fry them off in chunks, let them rest, add them to the beans. You can switch the pancetta out for streaky bacon so long as it's good and fatty.
Instructions:
Roughly dice the onion and carrot. Crush the garlic. Chop the tomatoes, if you're using fresh rather than tinned or passata. Drain the beans.
Heat the oven to 160.
In a large, heavy casserole pan, set the sausages frying on a low heat in a little lard or other fat until lightly browned - probably about fifteen minutes.
Remove the sausages to a dish to cool, ensuring you keep any run-off fat and juices.
Add a little extra fat to the pan, and start the bacon frying on a medium heat for 3-5 mins. Add the onions and carrots and fry for fifteen minutes or so, until softening and colouring slightly. Add the garlic and herbs, and cook for another couple of minutes until nicely aromatic.
Add the tomatoes, and give it all a good stir to deglaze (get the tasty sticky bits off the base of the pan), then raise the heat slightly and simmer for 6-7 mins to reduce the liquid volume by about a third and thicken slightly.
Add the beans, bay leaves, and stock and stir it all together well. Remove from the heat.
Once the sausages are cool enough to handle, cut them into thick slices, maybe quarters. Stir the sausages and any run-off juices into the bean mix. Try to get them mostly submerged, so they don’t catch and it’s easier to form a crust.
Scatter a good layer of breadcrumbs on top and put it in the oven, covered, for 45 minutes.
Take it out, gently stir some of the breadcrumb crust back into the cassoulet, and form a new one by scattering over a fresh handful of breadcrumbs and patting them down lightly.
Put it back in the oven, uncovered this time, for another 30 minutes. You can repeat the crust thing again half way through that time, if you like.
Raise the heat to 180c or so, and cook uncovered for another 10-15 minutes to crisp up the crust.
Remove from the oven to cool for a few minutes, and serve.
You should have rich creamy beans, run through with sausage flavour, herbs, a bit of fat, and, yes, a bit more tomato than in many cassoulets. But it ought to come off rich and tasty.
If you’re going to use this as a base for serving cod - or, now I think about it, as a deconstructed take on cassoulet, topped with a seared confit duck leg - I’d be tempted to even out the texture by taking the sausage out of its casing and frying it in coarse dollops.
If you’re just going to eat it as is, put it with a simple green salad, or a salad of tomatoes and green beans.
I was pleasantly surprised by this. Once you’ve knocked out the slow-cooking meat cuts and you’re using tinned beans, it turns out you can really cut the cooking time, too. No overnight soak or slow simmer for the beans, and no need for three hours in the oven.
It’s still not quick - I ain’t gonna piss on your leg and tell you it’s ramen. But with largely supermarket ingredients and a total elapsed time just over two hours it gets a slot at the fussy end of my midweek roster.
I also made this one for about £12. I think. I lost the receipts and that’s probably generously rounding the cost of garlic and onions. Again, not nothing, but not bad for cassoulet.
Other recipes
This isn’t really a cassoulet. I know, I know.
Here’s a few that are:
Jack Monroe’s thrifty one - good for keeping it cheap and simple
My ancient recipe from before I cared about clear-ish instructions
The one in Elisabeth Luard’s excellent book: European Peasant Cookery
Serious Eats do one with chicken and gelatin, and I trust them but bloody hell