by Ann Mah
I kept searching for a hint of the town’s status as the “father” of cassoulet, which the culinary historian Prosper Montagné had mentioned. The city, however, with its crowds of well-heeled shoppers and university students sauntering arm in arm, seemed to have other interests. Though many restaurants offered cassoulet—usually announced in a chalkboard scrawl reading CASSOULET MAISON TRADITIONNEL! which made me very dubious indeed—they all also specified that they served “le véritable cassoulet de Castelnaudary,” the authentic cassoulet of Castelnaudary. What about the cassoulet Toulousain?
“Traditionally cassoulet from Toulouse has a base of pork, with a bit of mutton and tomatoes,” said Alain Lacoste, the chef and owner of Le Colombier, a local restaurant. “Of course,” he added, “it was a dish that changed with the seasons, depending on whatever you had on hand.”
At Le Colombier, Lacoste uses the recipe of the owner before him, the same recipe that’s been prepared on the premises for a hundred years. He makes his own sausage and confits his own goose (“It’s very hard to find these days,” he told me) and simmers them together with the beans for hours.
Lacoste served his cassoulet in a cassole—the traditional terra-cotta bowl that I would soon learn more about—with a thin crust on top, composed not of bread crumbs but simply of the natural juice and starch and fat of the dish, sealed from the heat of the stove. It was good—better than good—with silken beans and generous chunks of meat, though I found the intense flavor of nutmeg overpowering.
“Well?” Lacoste stopped by my table with raised eyebrows.
“It was a fine example of cassoulet from Toulouse,” I assured him.
“Toulouse? Mais non! This is a recipe from Castelnaudary!”
The message was clear: If I wanted to truly understand cassoulet, I needed to hop in a rental car and drive about an hour through the region’s flat, dry farmland, eastward to the town of Castelnaudary.
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In ancient Rome every home had a lararium, a small shrine that stood near the hearth or in a corner of the atrium. Though the shrines were simple, usually just a cupboard or a shallow painted niche, they were crucial to the family, for inside them dwelled the statues of the household deities, guardian spirits who watched over the happiness and security of the home. There were two different types of gods: the Lar Familiaris, the protector of the building and all who lived within it, from master to slave, and the Penates, who watched over only the master and his blood family.
The Romans honored their household gods with daily prayer as well as offerings from every meal, usually bits of food thrown onto the fire. And when they moved houses—and this was the part that fascinated me the most—they took their Penates with them, as if they were an extension of themselves. But the Lar Familiaris was tied to a house, specific to a place, and there it would remain.
The household gods had intrigued me ever since I’d learned about them on our honeymoon in Pompeii, though initially my interest was abstract. But as Calvin and I made one international move (and then another and another), I began to absorb the implications his career as a foreign-service officer would have on our marriage, as well as our lives as individuals. In recent months I’d started contemplating the household gods with increasing frequency, linked as they were to the concepts of cooking and family and home.
My brooding interludes usually began with a single question asked at a cocktail party: Where are you from? Simple enough, but I never knew how to respond. Should I say Southern California, where I was born and raised, where my parents and brother lived, where I still voted and spent every Christmas? Yet I hadn’t lived there since I’d graduated from college almost fifteen years earlier. Should I say New York, where I forged a path as a young professional, where my closest friends still lived, where I’d fallen in love with book publishing, ethnic cuisine, and my husband? But because the city changed so fast, I sometimes felt like a tourist when I visited, the blocks stripped bare of familiar landmarks. Should I say Washington, D.C., the city in America where we’d lived most recently? But we’d spent less than a year there, not even enough time to retrieve all our belongings from storage.
In my twenties and early thirties, the idea of an itinerant lifestyle seemed adventurous and romantic. But now, as my birthdays mounted and the numbers crept up—thirty-four, thirty-five—I began to worry that my Penates were too lonely without a constant Lar Familiaris. I wondered if it thought of all the lares we’d left behind and missed them as much as I did.
One gray autumn day—as autumn days in Paris often are—I stopped at a Chinese restaurant for lunch, a little treat since I was between appointments in a neighborhood inconvenient to our apartment. I had just settled in with my book, a plate of dumplings, a bowl of rice, and porc lacqué—a Frenchified version of char siu pork—when my cell phone rang. The number was blocked, but I answered it anyway because the restaurant was empty and in the shabby gloom I felt a little lonely.
“Ann?”
I knew her voice at once, high and bright. It was Nicola—calling from New York—the friend I used to lunch with almost every single day when we worked together in publishing.
“Can you smell the pork dumplings from there?” I asked.
“Where are you?”
I told her about the restaurant, and my lunch, and the book I had just spattered with black vinegar. And then I told her about the stocky man outside the métro who had tried to attract my attention by shouting “Ni hao!” at me. “Is that supposed to be attractive? Screaming hello in Mandarin Chinese?” We laughed, and my lunch was growing cold, but I didn’t really care, because it was so wonderful to hear her voice again after so many months.
“How are you?” I asked, glancing at my watch. “It’s so early over there!” With the time difference, it was only six in the morning in New York. And as I spoke the words, I suddenly knew exactly why she was calling.
“I have some news,” she said. “I’m pregnant.” Pause. “With identical twins.”
“Congratulations! It’s so exciting! I’m so thrilled for you guys!” I exclaimed as loudly as I dared in the restaurant, which turned out to be pretty loudly, because the waitress poked her head out of the kitchen to see if anything was wrong. I repeated the words over and over, simultaneously trying to shake my head at the waitress. The news surprised me—especially the part about the twins—but didn’t shock me. Nicola and I had discussed children many times, circling around and around the questions of identity and balance and ticking clocks and the imperfect choices that most women seem to face. She knew she wanted kids, I thought I might, but we both struggled with the question of when. How, I fretted, would a baby affect the house of cards that already seemed so precarious—the work that I loved balanced on the marriage that I cherished teetering on the overseas moves that occurred every three years? Yet while I had hesitated, Nicola had made a decision and moved forward, and I admired her for it.
She was about three months along, she told me, and feeling pretty good, just a little tired and maybe a bit overwhelmed by all the different tests and information and concerns that came with carrying multiples. Multiples! Already she sounded like an expert. We discussed the aesthetic delights of chubby babies in tights and the probability of the twins’ developing a secret language in the womb, and then she had to go get ready for work. Just as suddenly as she had appeared, she was gone.
I wandered around for the rest of the day in a haze. Every time I passed a children’s clothing boutique—which was often, because in Paris there are at least two on every block—I stopped to gaze in the window and ponder pairs of matching outfits. I kept marveling at the news—Nicola! pregnant! with twins!—burnishing it brighter and brighter. I was so happy for her, so excited to meet her beautiful, identical babies, to buy them striped French onesies and, maybe one day, to help introduce them to the pleasures of runny cheese. My joy was so buoyant I almost didn’t no
tice the little hollow underneath it, but as the day continued and Nicola’s news moved from surprise into reality, I started to feel it more keenly, a thimbleful of emptiness that stretched across the distance. One of my best friends was about to become a mother, and I wouldn’t be there. Oh, we still had e-mails, phone calls, visits, but I would miss the small events—like visiting her in the hospital or leaving a tray of lasagna in her fridge—the mundane participation that is the true meaning of friendship. She was over there and I was here, and the circles of our daily lives overlapped less and less, until they barely touched at all.
I knew it wasn’t her fault, or mine, just the natural consequence of distance. And yet recently the distance had started to loom unforgiving and unmanageable, shadowing almost all my relationships. I felt it when I saw photos of friends’ new boyfriends-turned-husbands, with my baby nieces who were suddenly young girls weaving me pot holders, with my parents who grew a little grayer every time I visited. The people I loved most in the world were living the most important moments of their lives without me, and I was living mine without them. It took me a while to recognize the emotion, unfamiliar as it was, but when I did, it scratched at me with thorny immediacy: I was homesick.
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For centuries, cooking historians have posited the theory that Catherine de Médicis established modern French cuisine in 1533, when the young Florentine bride to Henri II imported the world’s finest cooks from her native Italy to France. (Also included among her retinue: pâtissiers, perfumers, specialists in fireworks, table items like the fork, and recipes for noodles as well as, possibly, ice cream.) Though in recent years modern scholars have debated the reach of Catherine’s influence—perhaps none more thoroughly than Barbara Ketcham Wheaton in her book Savoring the Past—it is true that during her reign as regent queen Catherine traveled widely throughout France, organizing festival banquets and teaching local cooks court recipes.
In 1553, Catherine became the Countess of Lauragais, claiming a section of the Languedoc province that reached from Toulouse to Carcassonne (in other words, cassoulet country). When she visited the region for a few months, she brought an entourage with her, cooks and servants, as well as provisions, introducing new foods and plants, among them the bean.
Haricot beans are a New World plant, native to South America. Christopher Columbus imported them to Europe sometime around 1510, and their cultivation quickly spread throughout Spain and Italy. Some considered the bean a symbol of fertility—something to do with wind and a puffed stomach—and perhaps this is why Catherine carried them in her retinue. (She did bear ten children.) After her visit to the Languedoc, the white bean took root, eventually spreading through the whole of southwest France.
Before Catherine de Médicis—before the bean—cassoulet was made with mature dried fava beans, or broad beans, which remained tough and fibrous even after long and slow cooking. Given this description, it’s easy to understand why local cooks so eagerly embraced Catherine’s haricot lingot, a type of white navy bean. Even today Languedoc natives claim that locally grown beans have a thinner, more delicate skin, making them easier to digest.
I headed east from Toulouse in my rental car, and as I approached the outskirts of Castelnaudary, I began to see large signs proclaiming the town “the world capital of cassoulet.” According to legend, cassoulet was invented here during the Hundred Years’ War, an extended series of conflicts between England and France that occurred from 1337 to 1453. Under siege from the English, the town’s starving inhabitants pooled their food stocks—pork, fava beans, sausage, fat—simmering everything together in a giant cauldron. After feasting on the ragout—I imagined them all sitting down together in the town square—the Castelnaudary soldiers became so invigorated by the hearty meal that they rallied to defeat the English, chasing them all the way to the Channel.
As I drove along busy streets, past gleaming strip malls, the town seemed more of a commercial center, a place of transit, rather than the cradle of the Languedoc’s signature dish. Nevertheless, almost every storefront, no matter how large or small, advertised cassoulet fait maison, ready to be enjoyed immediately or packed sous-vide and transported home. A ring of factories dominated the outskirts—collectively, they produce 170,000 cans of the stuff a day—further confirmation of Castelnaudary’s world cassoulet domination. In fact, I soon realized that the town’s residents were deadly serious about the title of cassoulet capital—so serious that in 1972 they formed a society, La Grande Confrérie du Cassoulet de Castelnaudary, to defend and protect the dish.
The Confrérie has about forty-five chevaliers, or active members, who meet several times a year to taste cassoulets from various restaurants and judge them worthy of inclusion on their list. They wear medals, long robes in red and yellow, and tapered fezlike hats adorned with a yellow ribbon, meant to resemble a cassole being licked by flames. Every August the Confrérie organizes a Fête du Cassoulet, a weeklong event featuring concerts, demonstrations, and more than forty thousand servings of the celebrated dish.
But what distinguishes Castelnaudary’s version of cassoulet? According to Jean-Louis Malé, a former grand maître of the Confrérie, it is the cassole—in Occitan, cassolo—the earthenware bowl that gave the recipe its name.
“Castelnaudary has a tradition of pottery,” he told me. “There is an exceptional native red clay found here, and its composition has a special capacity to retain heat. These dishes can last up to a hundred years.”
The cassole is a deep bowl with sloping sides that make it narrow at the bottom and wide at the mouth—an inverted pyramid—a smooth-glazed interior, and a rough exterior. It traditionally sat on the hearth simmering continuously for hours, or even days, the peasant wife adding scraps of food at different intervals. This, then, was arguably the true origin of cassoulet, a humble pot of food that never stopped cooking. The layer that formed and re-formed on the surface probably contributed to the old wives’ tale that the cassoulet’s crust must be pierced seven times during cooking, Malé told me.
“There’s no bread-crumb crust?” I asked.
“Jamais,” he replied.
Until World War II, Castelnaudary was known as a center of pottery, but today only one establishment continues to make cassoles in the traditional manner—the Poterie Not Frères. Run by two brothers and a nephew, it is the oldest pottery establishment in southern France, a family business started in 1830. Their atelier, on the banks of the Canal du Midi, resembles a medieval shack, with the three craftsmen toiling away by the light of narrow windows. When I visited, I found the three men perched on high stools, poised above foot-operated pottery wheels, painstakingly shaping each cassole by hand, forming a small spout in its lip. Outside, I spotted a backhoe—used for harvesting the region’s clay from a seam located steps away from the atelier—and a wood-burning kiln the size of a modest New York apartment, which one of the pottery’s owners, Jean-Pierre Not, told me burned for thirty-six hours at a time and took fifteen days to cool.
Here, amid the dust, and the man-powered pottery wheels, and the handcrafted bowls, I started to feel a little emotional, washed over by a wave of timelessness. I couldn’t leave without a cassole. I picked one up from a low shelf and weighed it in my hands, admiring the solidity of its clay and its tradition, wondering how on earth I could transport it home to Paris in my carry-on luggage. I put it down. Picked it up again. Down. Up. Down. Up. I had to bring it home with me. And so I did. Perhaps this was one of my Penates, a kitchen god to move with me around the world.
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Here are five things that I discovered about cassoulet in Castelnaudary:
1. It’s not so much cooked as assembled.
Obvious, right? And yet I didn’t realize it until Philippe Dunod, the owner of the Hôtel de France, a cassoulet producer in Castelnaudary, gave me a demonstration. Cassoulet is kind of like lasagna. All the ingredients are
precooked—the beans, the pork meat, the pork skin, the goose confit, the sausage—layered together in the cassole, and baked in the oven at 350ºF.
2. It’s simmered again, and again, and again.
Piercing the crust seven times is a myth. But the experts I spoke to all agreed that after it’s assembled, the cassoulet should be cooked, then cooled, preferably overnight, then cooked and cooled again—at least three times. “Nothing,” said the Grande Confrérie’s Jean-Louis Malé, “is more catastrophic than a cassoulet made at the last minute.”
3. But it can be overcooked.
The beans should be tender and flavorful, but not mushy. “If the beans fall apart, the dish is ruined,” said Malé.
4. You can never eat too much cassoulet.
Malé once ate eleven in one week, though he admitted, “I lost some years of my life during my term as grand maître.”
5. There is no difference between cassoulets from Castelnaudary and Carcassonne.
Traditionally Carcassonne’s cassoulet contained partridge, which bred wild in the town’s surrounding grapevines. “Today there are no more vines in Carcassonne and no more partridge,” said Malé. Instead chefs use duck or goose confit just like in Castelnaudary.