You bake Tarbais beans with duck confit, Toulouse sausage and pork until a crust forms and is broken — seven times if the old cooks are to be believed. The beans should be creamy, the meats falling. Peasant food that takes all day, and tastes like it.
Three towns claim it: Castelnaudary, Carcassonne and Toulouse, each with a different balance of goose, pork and sausage. The argument is the recipe; the recipe is Languedoc winter, eaten from an earthenware cassole that gave the dish its name.
Soak the beans overnight and do not rush the oven. Bake at 300°F, break the crust and baste; that is the method. Rest fifteen minutes before serving. Madiran has the tannin to stand up to the fat.
Method
- 01
Drain the soaked beans and cover them with fresh water. Add the clove-studded onion, the carrots, the garlic and the bouquet garni, and simmer until the beans are just tender, about 1 hour — creamy inside, still holding their shape. Drain, reserving the liquor; discard the onion and the bouquet garni. Undercook them slightly; they have two more hours in the oven, and mush is not cassoulet.
- 02
Brown the pork belly in the duck fat until the cubes have a deep gold crust and the kitchen smells of it. Brown the sausages in the same pan, until they have taken color all over. Pull the duck confit from the bone in large, generous pieces; it is already cooked, so treat it kindly. Keep the meats aside — you will layer them, not stir them into a hash.
- 03
Heat the oven to 300°F. In a deep earthenware pot — a cassole if you have one — layer the beans, the meats, and the tomato paste, ending with a layer of beans. Moisten with the stock and enough bean liquor that the beans are just covered, not swimming. The liquid should come to the top of the beans and no further: a dry cassoulet is a failure, a soupy one a stew.
- 04
Bake for 2 hours, breaking the crust that forms on top and basting twice — seven times if the old cooks are to be believed, twice if you have a life. Scatter the breadcrumbs for the last 20 minutes so they take color. Rest 15 minutes before serving; it will be molten if you don't. The beans should be creamy, the meats falling.
