When informed that the centerpiece of their week in Paris would be the creation and consumption of a single meal, my parents had radically different responses. In forty years of marriage my father has been cooked approximately 14,600 dinners by my mother. He couldn’t find his own kitchen with a map, and he tends to assume that I’d do well to follow closely in his footsteps. When he heard about the cassoulet, his face instantly became a mask of ironic detachment that as much as shouted, “What? You are going to cook? So how am I going to eat?”
Just as instantly my mother assumed the expression of maternal concern that typically precedes her intention to meddle.
Both reactions I fully understood. My personal culinary history has never been anything to write home about. Around ten years ago, for the first time in my life, I was seized by the desire to learn how to cook. I got over it soon enough, but before I did, I pretty well determined that I had no talent for it, for the same reasons I’m slow to learn new board games and to assemble Christmas gifts that arrive in boxes filled with parts. I take instruction poorly, especially when the instructions are written, and I have yet to encounter an oral recipe. So, you might well ask, “Why on earth did you think you should learn how to cook?” I admit, it’s a good question. The answer is that I was a single heterosexual American male looking for a quick and easy way to fool single heterosexual American females into believing that I held enlightened, up-to-the-minute attitudes about gender roles—which, at the time, seemed more important than it in fact turned out to be. Also, I liked to eat.
But that’s the catch. To become a cook, you not only need to be able to read instructions, you must want to cook when you don’t feel like eating. It only ever occurred to me to cook when I was hungry, and by then, of course, it was already too late. Chinese takeout beckoned; Domino’s whispered its deadly pickup line into my ear: “Why bother?” Realizing that I lacked the self-discipline to cook for myself, I took to forcing myself into must-cook situations. I invited friends to dinner and practiced on them. But my dinner parties tended to be long on the party and short on the dinner. I don’t think the guests actually suffered any real harm, but I don’t think they ever felt fed. Occasionally, I found them rummaging through the back of my refrigerator on their way out the door. Years later, a friend who came early and often, confessed that before he came to my place for dinner he routinely stopped at McDonald’s.
In any case, six months or so into the cooking life, I abandoned it.
Then, last year, we moved to Paris. We arrived in the dead of winter with fifteen suitcases and a trunk full of assumptions. One of the assumptions was that we would learn how to cook French food. Of course, if you are the sort of person who believes that it is pointless to cook when Domino’s is just around the corner, you are likely to find it even more pointless to cook when there are several dozen monomaniacal French chefs around the corner whose sense of self-worth depends entirely on the expression that crosses your face as you masticate. But it’s more complicated than that. There may be no point in knowing how to cook when you live in Paris, but there is every point in knowing how to cook when you have lived in Paris.
Permit me to explain. As anyone who is honest about it will tell you, Paris is a city of vulgarians that has somehow cowed the world into believing it is the global capital of worldliness, a living and breathing arbiter of good taste. The Parisians treat each other and everyone else with a crudeness and contempt that would make a New Yorker blush. Yet for reasons as deep as they are mysterious, they retain the unique ability to convey an air of sophistication to anyone unlucky enough to experience prolonged contact with them. You don’t live in Paris for the fun of it; you live in Paris to acquire, or seem to acquire, a bit of the Parisian ability to impress others with your worldliness.
Put another way, the whole point of living in Paris for a year is to let others know that you are the kind of person who might well have lived in Paris.
Put yet another way: Though I have arrived at the point where I can’t wait to leave Paris, I don’t exactly want to leave Paris behind.
To that end, ten months ago, for the second time in my life, I set out to conquer our new French kitchen. Knowing how to prepare elaborate French meals, I figured, might well inspire future dinner guests in the United States to inquire, “However did you learn how to cook this terribly classy French meal?” Whereupon I might reply, “Oh, it’s just a little something I picked up while living in Paris.” And my American dinner guests would just stare, slack-jawed, in awe.
Sincerity of purpose is in many respects an overrated attribute, but it is extremely useful when setting out to learn to do something new. In the ten months or so since I set out to learn how to cook French food, I have learned how to cook exactly one French dish—my cassoulet. The good news about my cassoulet is that it tastes great. The bad news is that it will do nothing to enhance your reputation as a French sophisticate.
Cassoulet isn’t what most people imagine when they think “fine dining” or “classy food.” It’s what they imagine when they hear the phrase “peasant slop.” But that, in a way, is also a virtue. Perhaps because it has its origins in the peasant culture of southern France, the typical cassoulet recipe is sufficiently fault-tolerant to be passed along orally, with happy consequences. The recipe that I settled on for my parents’ visit, for instance, is not so much a recipe but a few simple rules of thumb.
Rule #1: Nothing should be permitted to distract from the importance of the beans. You will spend a lot more money, and a lot more time, on the other ingredients, but you must always remember to treat the beans as the stars of your show. This isn’t as easy as it sounds. The cassoulet cook is subjected to endless entreaties from his fancier ingredients; he is a bit like the director of one of those independent films in which the leading actor is a humble unknown and the walk-on parts are played by glamorous celebrities. The cook who lacks the discipline and resolve to keep these prima donnas in their assigned places will find his entire production undermined. When he shops for ingredients, when he fiddles with his recipe, when he makes those slight adjustments to taste that allow him to feel less a dutiful craftsman than an improvisational visual artist, he must keep in his mind’s eye the simple white bean.
Rule #2: Do not attempt to flatter the beans falsely by juxtaposing them with inedible pseudo-foods. The French tend to ignore this rule. They include in their finished cassoulet many disgusting shards of animal fat and rind. The cassoulets you find in Parisian restaurants, in particular, are minefields of animal parts. This does not flatter the beans; it insults them. It suggests that they cannot hold their own in polite company. They can.
Rule #3: Avoid reminding your guests that they are eating meat. In my view, the well-cooked cassoulet should be able to fool a vegetarian for a bite or two. This is a radical departure from the French view of the matter, which assumes that cassoulet should be presented as a hearty meat dish. But, like many Anglo-Saxons, I am a hypocritical carnivore. I realize that there are people in this world, many of them French, who when they drive past a field of sheep, crave lamb. I am not among them. I enjoy a piece of meat from time to time, but not if I’m reminded where it came from. Of course, the English language encourages this hypocrisy—we don’t eat “cow,” we eat “beef.” People don’t say “Pass the deer” because it conjures up a mental picture that ruins everybody’s dinner. But I take the hypocrisy one step further—I like meat less the more it resembles its former owner. Fat and gristle and large chunks of dripping flesh put me off, and so I keep all of them out of the pot. All meat is sliced and diced to be as un-meatlike as possible.
Rule #4: Take off your watch. The pleasure of making cassoulet is precisely that it is an unsophisticated dish, created by unsophisticated people whose lives were so different from our own that we can barely imagine them. The cooking of their dish hauls you away from modernity and its time-is-money sensibility and throws you back into eighteenth-century French peasant life. There is no such thing as ins
tant cassoulet; when you set out to make this dish, you have to acknowledge right up front that it will require the better part of three days. The mere thought that you will be spending that much time on a single meal is annoying at first (at least it is to me). But I find that once I’ve settled into the cassoulet’s deliberate rhythms, I lose all sense of time. For this reason and others—the main one being that I can’t cook anything else—I have found that cassoulet is well suited to those special occasions when you have cut a deal with your mental diary to abandon your ordinary rushed habits.
Rule #5: If you want to preserve your authority in the kitchen, keep your mother out of it.
At some point between the vegetable stands and the butcher shops, my father simply vanished. I’m still not sure where he went, but he was gone for most of the week. The moment he did this, my mother took charge of my cassoulet. In apparent harmony, we passed from the glorious indoor market at Le Bon Marché—Paris’s devastating answer to Dean & DeLuca—to the glorious outdoor market on the rue Mouffetard, but just below the surface there simmered a power struggle that will be familiar to any man who has ever tried to cook for his mother.
In addition, my mother is one of those people who do things their way or not at all. She’s the only person I’ve ever met who becomes irritated. when someone else tries to help her wash the dishes. As a result, she can’t really understand what others mean when they ask her to lend a hand. She assumes they mean that they want her to do whatever needs doing for them. Often they do—nearly always I do—but whether they do or they don’t, she winds up doing all the work.
As we ducked beneath the animal carcasses into the French butcher shops, I could feel my authority shrink. It began with seemingly harmless suggestions (“Shouldn’t we really have some bacon?;” “Are you sure that’s the best duck?”). By the time we arrived back in the kitchen with the sacks of ingredients, I realized that I was already the victim of a coup’ détat. I had intended to serve the cassoulet straight, with maybe a little side salad. Somehow, my mother got her mind set on an elaborate concoction of green beans and carrots that I won’t bother to describe because I can’t. Once the cooking began, I became a puppet dictator in my own kitchen. In a blur of activity, the new regime rejiggered the cooking order, reduced the cooking time for the beans by 15 minutes, and restored the bacon to the pot—all of which, I admit, were improvements on my design.
Her insistence on bacon was a good example of her kitchen politics. I initially opposed the bacon. As I say, the biggest mistake that the French make in their cassoulets is their lack of discrimination about the meat. One solid chomp on a piece of loose goose rind can ruin your week. And what the French call bacon is not the light and crispy breakfast food so relished by red-blooded Americans. It’s a thick, ugly wedge of ham with a repellent brownish rind and thick streaks of glutinous white fat; there’s no disguising where it comes from. You could cook a piece of it for a week without rendering it any more appealing unless, of course, you’re a meat fanatic.
Ignoring all these obvious objections, my mother diced the bacon and eliminated every trace of brown or white. It took an hour or so, which to my mind was a huge waste of time for a few scraps of bacon. But each time I complained she’d say things like “I’ll just put in a little bit” and “I’ll chop it up so you won’t even notice” and “It really won’t change your recipe at all.” As it is impossible to cook a cassoulet and, at the same time, monitor another human being intent on taking control, the little pile of meat was ready to drop into the pot before I knew what had happened. It was all done with such subtlety that I nearly forgot it wasn’t my idea.
On day four, the guests we had invited arrived, and my father finally emerged from whatever hole he had disappeared down. The cassoulet came out of the oven at just the right moment—which is the moment everyone is ready to eat. My daughter, Quinn, took the first bite—then another. Soon, everyone was tucking into seconds and proclaiming the dish a smash hit, which they always do. “This is really good,” said my father, with something like shock. “You did a wonderful job,” said my mother. I didn’t, of course, but what does that matter? The cassoulet was nothing to me, the applause everything.
MICHAEL LEWIS’S CASSOULET DE CANARD
Serves 10
Active time: 2 hr Start to finish: 2 days
My recipe was adapted from Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking. I’ve changed the meats (a lot) and the seasonings (a bit). I’ve also tinkered with cooking times and sequence.
2½ lb dried white beans such as Great Northern
½ lb fresh pork rind
2½ lb confit duck legs
6 fresh parsley stems (without leaves)
4 fresh thyme sprigs
5 whole cloves
12 garlic cloves
1 (1-lb) piece smoked salted slab bacon, halved crosswise
3 cups chopped onion (1 lb)
1 teaspoon salt
1 lb meaty mutton or lamb bones, cracked by butcher
1 cup rendered goose fat
6 large tomatoes (3 lb)
5 bay leaves (not California)
1 qt beef stock (not canned broth)
1 (750-ml) bottle dry white wine
2 teaspoons black pepper
2½ lb fresh garlic-pork sausage (not sweet or very spicy) such as saucisson à l’ail au vin rouge, saucisse de canard à l’armagnac, or a mixture of the two
1½ cups plain dry bread crumbs
1 cup chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley
Special equipment: a small square of cheesecloth and a wide 10-quart enameled cast-iron pot
DAY1
ACT1: NASTY WORK1 hr
Bring 5 quarts water to a boil in an 8-quart heavy pot. Boil beans, uncovered, 1½ minutes, then turn off heat and let them soak 50 minutes.
While beans soak, do all the really disgusting work with the meat. Put pork rind in a 3-quart saucepan three-fourths full of cold water and bring to a boil. Boil pork rind 1 minute. Drain and rinse under cold running water, then do it again. (Sometimes you know it’s ready because it grows nipples.) After draining, cut the truly repulsive boiled pork rind into pieces that are big enough to identify (about 2 inches), so you can fish them out before serving.
Scrape off and discard fat from confit duck legs and shred meat (the more it shreds the better). [Editors’ note: Those who have no problem with identifiable meat in their food might want to keep the shredding to a minimum.]
ACT2: SLIGHTLY LESS NASTY WORK
1 hr and 20 min
Put parsley stems, thyme, whole cloves, and 8 garlic cloves in cheesecloth and tie into a bundle to make a bouquet garni.
First seasoning of beans: Add rind pieces, bacon halves, 1 cup onion, bouquet garni, and salt to beans. Simmer, covered, 1¼ hours, skimming regularly. Cool, uncovered.
While beans simmer, brown mutton bones. Do this by heating goose fat in enameled cast-iron pot over moderate heat until it smokes, then cook mutton bones, stirring occasionally, until browned, about 5 minutes. Set them aside on a plate. Drop remaining 2 cups onion into pot and brown that, too. This can take as long as 15 minutes. Stir regularly.
Peel, seed, and chop tomatoes.
ACT 3: NASTY GETS NICE
1¾ hr
Flavoring the meat: Add browned bones and shredded duck to onion. Add bay leaves, beef stock, tomatoes, remaining 4 garlic cloves, white wine, and pepper. Simmer, covered, 1½ hours. Cool to room temperature, uncovered.
DAY2
ACT 1: CRESCENDO
1 hr
Poke holes in sausage with a fork and grill it slowly in a well-seasoned ridged grill pan over moderately low heat 20 minutes (to get the fat out). (Sausage should still be slightly undercooked on the inside when you’re done.) Transfer to a cutting board and cool slightly. Slice into thin (¼-inch) rounds.
Remove and discard bones and bay leaves from meat pot. Remove duck with a slotted spoon and put on a plate. Reserve cooking liquid remaining in pot.
&nbs
p; Remove bacon from beans and cut into tiny, fat-free pieces. Put pieces on a plate and discard remaining bacon fat. Discard pork rind and bouquet garni from beans.
Julia Child says: “Now is the time to drain the beans and dump them into the ample, leftover meat cooking juices.” In my experience, there is nothing left to drain. What you are looking at, when you stare into the bean pot, is a fairly solid wall of beans, with some gluey goop in between. So pour reserved meat cooking juices into bean pot. Bring to a simmer over moderately high heat, stirring occasionally, and simmer 5 minutes, skimming any scum. Then turn off heat and let sit another 5 minutes.
ACT 2: FINAL ASSEMBLY
1½ hr
Preheat oven to 375°F.
Spread a layer of beans on bottom of enameled cast-iron pot. Layer half of sausage and bacon on top, then another layer of beans, then half of duck (and any mutton), then another layer of beans, et cetera, ending with a layer of beans. Then add enough remaining liquid from bean pot until beans are submerged. Sprinkle with bread crumbs and parsley.
Bring the whole thing to a simmer, uncovered, over moderately low heat. Then stick it in oven 20 minutes. Break through bread crumbs in several places with a spoon, allowing the liquid to mess up the look of the thing. Then reduce heat to 350°F and leave it in another 40 minutes. Serve very hot.
March 2001
PARISIANS
SHE DID NOT LOOK LIKE AN ACTRESS TO ME
Hilaire du Berrier
In point of history it was Paris’s Indian summer. That venerable old eyesore, the Trocadéro, still gazed across the Seine at Tour Eiffel, and taxis were not the uniformly squat bugs they were to become at a later date.
They still had originality, snub noses, bulb horns, and high cabs with luggage racks on top and were owned by erratic drivers with handlebar mustaches.
Remembrance of Things Paris Page 25
