Christmas Cassoulet

You may notice that I updated the name of this newsletter! Head over here to learn more, but to abbreviate the news, I had far too much fun writing letters from Ballymaloe to stop after 12 weeks. I made The Dish public so anybody can subscribe, so feel free to pass it along to any food lovers in your life.

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Months ago, my big brother Trevor and I decided to cook cassoulet together for Christmas dinner. We had a vision: our first ever cassoulet—a glorious, decadent thing with duck confit (plus a casual four other types of meat) and creamy white beans. I gave Trevor the cookbook À Table by Rebekah Peppler last year, so we opted for her recipe. It’s nice to get to know the stacks on your shelves. Peppler is an American food writer in Paris, a Francophile like my family. What better way to evoke Southern France in the Green Mountains of Vermont than with a pot of an expat’s cassoulet? The dish’s homeland is Carcassonne, a medieval village in the Languedoc region, not far from where my parents and little brother took my dad’s sabbatical in Montpellier. I was never a good history student, but I imagine I’d be a good food history student; I love thinking about how cassoulet has existed since the Middle Ages, when French peasants layered available ingredients in a vat and cooked them for hours and hours to feed the masses. And now here we are, several hundred years later and an ocean away, planning a menu around the very same concept.

Cassoulet may be peasant food, but it’s not so simple. After reading the recipe, I made a Google Doc (as is my way), and Trevor and I diligently crossed out the ingredients when we purchased them. It doesn’t hurt that Trevor currently works as a cheesemonger at Formaggio, a dreamy specialty food shop in Cambridge, and gets a discount. He was thus tasked with the big ticket items like lamb shoulder, while I gathered vegetables, herbs, and spices and formulated our plan of attack. The days passed and then it was two days before go time and I was in Vermont, the place I love most on this earth, simmering white beans with carrots, celery, onion, garlic sausage, cloves, and a bouquet garni. I reserved both the beans and every last millispoon of the bean broth for later in the cassoulet process. Trevor arrived on Christmas Eve with a cooler full of the most beautiful meat you’ve ever seen: duck confit coated with pearly fat, ruby slabs of lamb shoulder, herby sausages encased in pork caul. I gasped as I opened the cooler. My compliments to the Formaggio butchers! At last, all the ingredients were in their rightful place and all the siblings were in their rightful place—home, together.

(As I preach the pleasures of cassoulet, let it be known that we ate slice-and-bake Pillsbury cinnamon rolls for breakfast on Christmas Day per Hummon tradition. The artificial vanilla frosting in the plastic tub is my childhood and I wouldn’t have it any other way.)

Back to cassoulet: Once the bustle of Christmas morning subsided, Trevor and I read through the whole recipe one last time and began to cook. Using the biggest Dutch oven we own, we seared, seared, seared, layered, layered, layered until we had a pot teeming with meat and beans, filling the house with a sensational scent. We bid adieu to the cassoulet for the next 1.5 hours, at which point we cracked its crust before returning it to the oven for 4 more hours, again cracking its crust every 30 minutes. When you’re trying a new recipe for a special occasion, it’s best to do it with someone else. That way, the blow of your potential failure is shared and the glow of your potential success is doubled. At long last, Trevor donned potholders and transferred the cassoulet from stove to trivet. Hallelujah! We ate it with a big green salad and barely spoke for the first several minutes. I love when good food elicits silence. The cassoulet was followed by a gorgeous cheese plate curated by Trevor, then a chocolate-orange mousse by yours truly.

In our Vermont house, there’s a lofted space just above the kitchen where Trevor and I used to play Playmobil for hours on end, creating our own made-up worlds while our parents cooked together downstairs. This trip, it felt as though the tables had turned; at one point, our parents were in the basement below the kitchen playing ping pong while we cooked! Trevor and I chatted as we worked, and it struck me that I’m so lucky to have had a buddy my whole life with whom I’ve shared so many interests. From Playmobil to violin to choir to theater to cooking, Trevor has been the best of companions.

Until next time!

Phoebe