Simon's Cassoulet recipe

Ingredients:

a kilo of beans. The best are the legendary tarbais, a wonderfully firm white bean which will take any amount of maltreatment; unfortunately very expensive and hard to find. So I prefer the humble lingot but a good cannellini or coco bean will do

confit de canard. Again, your local supermarket may not stock this item, but as it is essential to the dish you'll have to find some. Tins of manchons de canards confits are fairly cheap and will come with a quantity of duck fat, also essential. Ideally you will have at least one manchon per person, or a few cuisses confites.

Saucisse de Toulouse. Eh oui, being a Toulousaine by adoption I insist on this ingredient. You will need about 500 g.

fresh pork belly. Again about 500g will do.

garlic - about 6 to 8 cloves. A couple of onions. A leek.

vegetable bouillon. 3 to 4 litres of freshly made bouillon from whatever veg you have lying around: leeks, carrots, onions and celery for example. Avoid cabbage.

150g of breadcrumbs

Method

Soak the beans overnight. Drain and cook for two hours or so in a large quantity of cold water until nearly soft. Drain.

Now you'll need to decide on what you're going to cook the dish in. Obviously you should have a genuine Cassole from Castelnaudary - a large wide-beamed earthenware dish that can be both used on a low flame and placed in the oven. Failing this, you could use a heavy cast-iron pot.

Chop the onions and leek and fry gently in a couple of tablespoons of duck fat (taken from your confit) in the earthenware pot on a very low flame. Add the Toulouse sausage in pieces of a couple of inches. Add the belly of pork in similar sized pieces. Stir around a bit to get some colour on the meat before adding the pieces of confit. Give it all another five minutes on the flame before adding the beans, another dollop of duck fat and all the garlic roughly crushed with the flat blade of a knife. Mix the ingredients around a bit but add neither salt nor pepper at this stage.

You should have lit your oven and set it at about gas mark 6 to begin with. Once you put the dish in for an hour it can be reduced to 4.

Add a good litre of vegetable bouillon cut with a bit of white wine. Place in oven. Cook for at least two hours. Take out and 'casse la croûte'; that is, re-mix everything especially the crust which should have formed on top. Add more bouillon if it appears too dry or looks like burning. It can be put back in the oven immediately if you are in a hurry but it's better to leave it overnight and re-do the whole thing the next day. And so on for three days. The crust should be 'broken' seven times! On the final cooking add salt and pepper to taste (the confit is salty so be careful with this) and throw a handful of breadcrumbs laced with chopped garlic on to the top.

That's really all there is to it. I know people who think it heretical to use vegetable bouillon ... but they use vast quantities of goose or duck fat instead which makes for a deliciously heavy Cassoulet ... and four or five days recovery time.

Accompany with a good Corbières or Fitou.

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