Crazy about cassoulet
E-mail story Post a comment iPod friendly versionWith half of my household on an academic calendar, there are periods of feast and famine when it comes to meal planning.
Actually, we tend to wait until a few hours before the evening meal to decide what to have. That becomes a problem when neither of us has those few hours to spare. Casseroles and stews often save the day.
I recalled reading a mystery book by Michael Bond, (Mssr. Pamplemousse and the Secret Mission, I think) in which he detailed the legendary French cassoulet and it’s function in his (fictional) childhood home.
Mssr. Pamplemousse remembered his mother keeping a pot simmering day-long, day after day, and adding bits and pieces to it as other dishes were finished. She would then pull most of the dish to finish off as an official cassoulet and return the leftovers to simmer.
Now, following this logic, one’s cassoulet would never taste the same twice, which is not what a restaurateur wants. There are legends of chefs who in fact never stop cooking the cassoulet. Some restaurants will remove the entire dish for serving, then deglaze the pan with wine so that the original flavor, theoretically, remains for the next round.
Cassoulet (pronounced cas-soo-LAY) is a rich, slow-cooked bean stew originating in the south of France, generally containing meat (typically pork sausages, pork, goose, duck and sometimes mutton), pork skin and white beans.
The dish is named after its traditional pot, the cassole, a deep, round, earthenware pot with sides that slant outward at about 40 degrees. This pot does not look very stable, so a Dutch oven or heavy-duty, lidded casserole will be fine.
The cassoulet can be found in France in the 14th century and earlier in Persian cultures. The meats are usually cooked before being added to the bean stew. In fact many of them are preserved, like dry sausages, or confits (salted meats poached in their own fat).
Bone Soup Folklore - News
This skin or film must be broken seven times to make a perfect cassoulet, culinary folklore instructs.” Waverley Root, author of “The Food of France,” suggested that it all began in a continuously simmering cassole on the back of the stove,
bards of bone plain | Adventures of Cecelia Bedelia
While McKillip has written middle grade in the past, her recent books have been adult fantasy (with definite YA crossover appeal). Her latest publication is The Bards of Bone Plain , which I requested for Christmas in 2010, received, and read in early of 2011. In fact, I was quite sure I'd reviewed it here. Well, there's no time like the present!
Scholar Phelan Cle is researching Bone Plain – which has been studied for the last 500 years, though no one has been able to locate it as a real place. Archaeologist Jonah Cle, Phelan's father, is also hunting through time, piecing history together from forgotten trinkets. His most eager disciple is Princess Beatrice, the king's youngest daughter. When they unearth a disk marked with ancient runes, Beatrice pursues the secrets of a lost language that she suddenly notices all around her, hidden in plain sight.