Filthy and exhausted, having been on the road since before dawn, I ring the number pinned to the door of the shed marked reception and croak my desperation down the phone. Fortunately, Madame is an utter delight, offering me a special cyclist’s rate of a laughable €5, ‘pour courage’ (a phrase that’s becoming increasingly familiar), warning me about the mosquitoes the rain has brought out (no need, their tinny whine was the first thing I heard when I took off my helmet and sat down in the dust to wait for her arrival) and quizzing me about my trip as she takes down my details.
This being France, she doesn’t seem overly surprised to discover I’m on a culinary pilgrimage, and, more specifically, on the trail of cassoulet. Pooh-poohing everything I’ve read on the subject (and believe me, there’s a lot to read about this cult dish), she assures me cassoulet isn’t really about the ingredients, the mutton or the sausages – it’s about the person making it.
Unlike poule au pot, me and cassoulet have what could be coyly described as ‘history’, ever since it first bubbled onto my radar during a previous tour of France in a borrowed Nissan Primera, the summer before university. I’d like to say I and my boyfriend at the time happened upon it in a little trucker’s café run by a gruff but ultimately charming Gascon with a yard full of fat, happy ducks, but in fact, if memory serves me correctly, we developed a taste for the tinned variety – cassoulet is an excellent thing to cook up on a camping stove, if you happen to have a car to carry one in.
The release of the River Cottage Meat Book a couple of years later, with its recipe to serve ten, only fuelled the flames of this passion, and there is a part of my memory forever stained with the goose fat and cheap red wine of twentysomething dinner parties. I can assure you, it’s impossible to have a hangover once you’ve lined your stomach with cassoulet. Or perhaps that’s just youth.
If I’ve made a lot of cassoulet in my time, I’ve eaten even more. Indeed, in 2017 I managed to do the treble, eating one in each of the three towns associated with the dish – Toulouse, Castelnaudary and Carcassonne. Time for a repeat performance – and this time, it’s professional.
PAUSE-CAFÉ – Cassoulet: When Baked Beans Go to Heaven
Joël Robuchon, the most Michelin-starred chef on earth (who died during the writing of this book), explains in French Regional Food, co-authored with food historian Loïc Bienassis, that ‘when we speak of cassoulet country, we speak in the plural of several different farming areas that lend themselves to the production of cassoulet’s key ingredients. You might ask whether this … categorisation is born of cowardice – yes, a certain lack of courage in choosing decisively between the three famous cities that have compelling claims to be the authentic home and guardian of this most famous dish of French gastronomic history’.
You might well, and if Robuchon doesn’t dare choose between them, it would certainly be more than my life is worth. The celebrated chef and writer Prosper Montagné, himself a Carcassonne man, famously defined the cassoulet as ‘the God of the cuisine of South-West France’, claiming ‘God the Father is the cassoulet of Castelnaudary; God the Son, the cassoulet of Carcassonne, and God the Holy Spirit the cassoulet of Toulouse’, which, even for a subject so shrouded in myth, is a strikingly unhelpful clarification.
The three are often claimed to contain slightly different ingredients: according to French Regional Food, Castelnaudary generally includes confit goose or duck, Carcassonne pork cutlets and Toulouse mutton and, of course, its world-famous sausage. ‘These distinctions’, Robuchon explains, ‘mask numerous other debates about the length of cooking and the addition of this and that ingredient.’
Though few books admit it, even this is up for debate – I find each of these ingredients attributed to all three places, including the Toulouse sausage, which mysteriously puts in an appearance in the official recipe of the Brotherhood of the Cassoulet of Castelnaudary. One thing is certain: cassoulet is a symbol of a region that prizes duck fat over olive oil and knows the value of a hearty stew. As Robuchon says, perhaps it’s best described as ‘the God of the inland cuisine of southwest France, where the influence of the Mediterranean evaporates, then finally vanishes’. And that’s as far as he or I am going to go.
Madame, after warmly urging me to try the duck-fat fries in Toulouse, suddenly stops – ‘But what are you going to eat tonight?’
When I confess that I was hoping she might be able to tell me, she seems genuinely heartbroken that her little épicerie behind the till is bare apart from a bottle of ketchup and some scouring pads. Even the pizzeria in the village will have closed by now. What were you after? I shrug. After 157km, my expectations are very low. A bag of crisps or something, I say miserably. But don’t worry, I have chocolate.
Just as I’m hammering the final tent peg into what appears to be an all-you-can-eat buffet for biting insects, she appears again, clutching a large bag of crisps she’s brought me from home. I’m almost overwhelmed by her kindness – ‘It’s not really French gastronomy,’ she says, ‘but it’ll do the trick.’ So, exhausted, and with a phone that seems to have taken this morning’s rainstorm to heart, jumping madly between apps and refusing to respond to even the angriest jabbed finger, I dine on salty potato crisps and sugary Milka Daim clusters, and go to bed with 2 litres of gloriously cold, fresh water and a lungful of Deet.
Though the phone is a worry, given how much I rely on it for navigation and research, I feel oddly elated at having got through today, and as the terrible details recede, I pick over them like someone worrying at a mosquito bite, taking a perverse pleasure in their awfulness. I did it, and lived to tell the tale, and there’s satisfaction in that.
The next morning it’s sunny again, and, to my slight astonishment, my legs feel pretty fresh as I pedal the 30km into Toulouse, stopping for a leisurely and surprisingly decent croissant in a roadside boulangerie: a good lesson, never discount these, however unprepossessing they look. Treasure can sometimes be found in the most unlikely places, and this is the best I’ve eaten so far: very buttery, very crisp, with a definite but not overpowering sweetness, I give it a 9/10. (NB: Do not discount the power of a sunny terrace and a good lunch ahead either.)
Croissant dispatched, it’s fun to be in a big city again, especially a southern one, glowing pink in the heat, with people drinking pastis with their morning coffee, and old men playing boules in the dust. I’m making good time as I speed into the centre, the roads quiet in the minutes before the lunchtime rush, straight as an arrow towards the ‘beating heart’ of the city’s food scene, as Lonely Planet bills it, the Marché Victor Hugo. It’s a striking white 1960s edifice whose winding multi-storey car-park ramp puts me in mind of the old penguin pool at London Zoo, but with quite a bit more scaffolding. In fact, the whole place is covered in the stuff (like most of France, it seems to my jaded eye) and it takes me quite some time to find my way in, which panics me, because it’s already 12.10, and everything I’ve read suggests that I’ll be lucky to get a table at the market restaurants on a Friday lunchtime.
Though there are a handful on the upper level above the trading hall, I’ve chosen Le Louchebem for the fact that it reached the finals of the world cassoulet championships a couple of months before (the winner, Café Francis, doesn’t appear to have cassoulet on its menu for some arcane but no doubt entirely logical French reason) with a recipe using broad beans, which were apparently the local pulse of choice before the new-fangled haricot arrived from the New World to take their jobs. Of course, on opening the menu, I discover that the broad bean version is only available on the first weekend of every month, but no matter: I have a prime spot on the balcony overlooking the square, the sky is azure and the first glass of rosé of the trip on order. I’m pretty happy with the situation, despite a vocabulary failure, which means I’m not exactly sure what I’ve ordered. The cassoulet that is on offer comes with a manchon de canard, which, the waitress tells me, is a bit of the leg, but no, not the thigh … she d
oesn’t seem able to point it out on herself, which makes more sense when Google suggests the word means ‘muff’, which doesn’t sound right (do ducks have muffs?), but also makes me very nervous.
To my relief, what arrives beneath the bubbling dish of beans appears to be nothing more sinister than the top of the wing, along with the requisite helping of fat Toulouse sausage, so packed with meat it’s almost, but not quite, dry and another, pinker, juicier sausage lurking beneath. The flavour of the whole is creamy and mildly herbaceous, but the overwhelming effect is of heat – thick, gluey beans, fatty meat, pure pleasure, even on this unexpectedly sweltering day. A revelation: cassoulet is as much about the texture as the taste – something I’d never realised, for all the cassoulets I’ve put away over the years.
Maybe it’s just that I’ve never eaten it alone before. That said, I can’t help but notice that the two men jammed in next to me – father and son, I assume – also take an interest in my lunch. I make eye contact and they look away hastily, almost embarrassed, which is so unusual in France I’m slightly perturbed. When the waitress comes to take my coffee order, they have a word with her, slightly too quietly for me to hear, and she looks over, obviously taken aback. I have a moment of terror, wondering what mad Toulousian by-law I’ve contravened (was it the salad I insisted on ordering on the side?), before the older man addresses me directly.
‘Mademoiselle,’ he begins politely, ‘how was the cassoulet?’
It was good, I tell him. He shakes his head, kindly but dismissively – ‘It wasn’t dry?’ And not waiting for an answer, he turns to the waitress. ‘It looked dry.’
She looks at me. I shrug. ‘Well, maybe a bit, but I enjoyed it,’ I admit.
Ah, he says, slowly, kindly, as if to a child – but was it your first cassoulet? They shouldn’t be dry, they should be more … more like a soup in fact. As he warms to his theme, the waitress slips away, and I learn that despite this setback (‘Usually it is very good here, you know, you made a good choice’), Toulouse is still the place to come for bean stew. Sure, he says, you can get decent cassoulet in those other places (he manages Castelnaudary, but apparently can’t quite bring himself to pronounce the name Carcassonne), but here is the best. It’s all in the sausage, you know. He winks. His son, fiddling with his phone, looks embarrassed as they get up to pay the bill, bidding me farewell, and good luck with my quest.
Wandering round the market downstairs as it winds down for lunch, I get a text from my editor at the Guardian telling me Tony Bourdain is dead. Cassoulet is perhaps the quintessential Bourdain dish – gutsy, ballsy French, the kind of peasant recipe that doesn’t shirk from hard work. His recipe takes three days, because it starts with making your own duck confit, a process he concludes with the immortal instruction: ‘A nice touch at this point is to twist out the thighbone from the cold confit … Think of someone you hate when you do it.’ That one, I think, was for you, Tony. Rest in peace, chef.
I, however, still have unfinished business on this earth, and am soon trundling south-east along the Canal du Midi towpath in the direction of Castelnaudary, and my next bowl of beans. The combination of cassoulet and sunshine means I’m grateful for the shade of the plane trees that line the route as it snakes through suburbs and industrial zones, under graffitied bridges and over vast pipes, and then the quiet that comes when I finally leave the city behind. A wave of nostalgia for 2017’s summer ride hits me, for our little band of merry cyclists, with our regular punctures and even more regular chocolate stops, and I sink happily back into the tranquillity of cycling along a road it’s impossible to lose, the kilometres slipping away like the sun through the sky.
Just as I’m about to go into a pleasurable trance, my phone emits a muffled, waterlogged squawk – it’s my friend Alex, ringing from Oban, where it is, apparently, raining heavily. I tell her about my mobile woes, which are weighing heavy on my mind – a woman who runs a safari business in some of the remotest parts of Africa is never going to be the most sympathetic audience for complaints about Instagram being a complete nightmare, but she’s still kind enough to offer to send an old phone of her own out to a poste restante. Given how long it takes anything to get from the West Coast to London, let alone the South of France, I regretfully decline: instead, once we’ve said goodbye, I sit down by a bridge and spend 10 minutes copying down reservations and contact numbers into my notebook, just in case. With a pencil. Take that, rain, I think.
Feeling a bit better, both for having insured against total disaster and, more importantly, after 20 minutes with a friendly voice, I ride on, coming back onto the road at Le Ségala, where, just like last year, the towpath abruptly disintegrates into a mass of tree roots and potholes.
The room I’ve booked for my night in Castelnaudary (fresh pork, no sausage) is absurdly cheap, tucked away down a narrow terraced street that ends suddenly in the quay. There’s no sign from the outside that this is a guesthouse, and no response at the door. I ring the number on the booking email: no answer. Eventually, after about 10 minutes of alternate knocking and quiet despairing, there’s a noise inside. It opens very slowly to reveal a man with one leg and a thick Italian accent. I tell him I have a reservation. He tells me this isn’t his place, he just lives here.
‘I tried calling,’ I say. ‘There’s no answer.’
He doesn’t seem surprised. ‘Well, there wouldn’t be; the owner’s gone to Saint-Tropez for the weekend.’ Lucky him, I think. Eventually, he agrees to phone the landlord himself, and then passes the phone over – oh, I thought you’d call before this, says the unruffled and completely unapologetic man on the other end. He tells me the entrance code for the door, and that my room is at the top of the stairs … And the code for that is …? Oh no, you won’t need one for that room.
The Italian gamely attempts to help me with my stuff, while propping the heavy door open with his stick. The space inside is small and dark, and I’d hardly dare ask if I can leave my bike inside, save for the fact there is nowhere to tether it in the street, but as soon as I do he begins to drag a heavy bench across the floor to make room for it, which makes me feel even worse about disturbing his Friday night in – I can hear a television still chatting away in the next room. Having apologised seven or eight times, I make my way shamefacedly up the narrow stairs to find my room – and realise both why it was so cheap, and why I have no need for a code. It’s a windowless cupboard with a low single mattress in the middle of it, and no lock whatsoever.
I briefly think about complaining, before deciding I can’t be bothered; what have I got to steal, after all? Instead, I take a shower in the spotless, if brown-tiled, communal bathroom, wedge the bedroom door shut with a pannier, and lie on the sweaty polyester sheets, trying to hatch an email plan with my editor to get an unlocked phone out to Nice next week, while attempting to stop this one sending 14 unfinished emails to one of my culinary heroes, Jonathan Meades, who I’m hoping to meet in Marseille.
I succeed, partially – he only gets three. I’ll be honest, I still kind of want to die thinking about this though, so instead I throw on my glad rags/crumpled dress and go out to dinner. Castelnaudary is a pleasant little town, with one main street and not much open – something that, after two weeks in France (only two weeks! I marvel), no longer surprises me on a Friday night. Online opinion suggests the best place to eat cassoulet, apart from Le Tirou, which features in the Michelin red book and only opens for dinner on Saturdays (because why wouldn’t it?), is the Hôtel du Centre et du Lauragais.
Initial signs are ominous; the decor has an Inspired-by-Laurence-Llewelyn-Bowen vibe, all monochrome floral wallpaper and massive chrome chandeliers, and my cassoulet arrives before I’ve even finished my blackberry kir aperitif, but I can’t argue with its impressive crust, clearly formed by long, slow simmering rather than the breadcrumb-based shortcuts so frowned upon by the cassoulet cognoscenti.
Underneath, it’s looser, and yes, soupier than m
y lunchtime version, with pork confit as well as the duck variety, and, in obedience to the rules of regional cassoulet, no sausage. I realise, as I slowly munch my way through the creamy beans, glad of the green salad it comes with, that though I’ve nothing against stodge, the broth element, enriched with mashed pork rinds, is a vital lubricant for all that carbohydrate – my friend in Toulouse knew whereof he spoke.
A large German party arrive as I’m contemplating my fraise Melba and begin anxiously to interrogate the waitress about vegetarian options. She looks nonplussed. I decide it’s time to retire to my monastic cell, where I lie for about 10 minutes listening to the sound of Netflix and laughter from next door before falling into a fat-induced coma.
The next day feels like a holiday as I quietly let myself out of the little house, banging Eddy against everything in sight, and make my way to the railway station – for the first time in a week I’m on my way to see friends, and the prospect is ridiculously exciting. It’s not that I’m lonely, but really, one’s own company can get old. My Guardian editor, a man popularly known as Grumpy Bob, is in the Languedoc for the annual knees-up at the St John Group winery and has somehow managed to wangle me an invite to lunch. If the food and wine are half as good as their London restaurants, I’ll be a happy woman, but to be honest, I’m mostly looking forward to talking at people in a language I’m fluent in.
As I wait on the platform, shedding croissant crumbs (a bronzed handsome bugger, but inside a bit dry and dull, 6/10), drinking instant coffee from a plastic cup and enjoying the singular mix of Santiago de Compostela pilgrims (one route starts in Narbonne, where my train is heading) and French Foreign Legion recruits on leave (Castelnaudary is home to the fourth foreign regiment), I feel jolly pleased with life, a feeling that quickly dissipates when I dash up to the bike carriage at the end of the train, only to be told by a man getting off with a racer that, ‘You’ll be lucky.’ It’s Saturday morning, but this local service is packed like the Tube at 8 a.m. – dismayed, I watch a youth who definitely arrived on the platform after me casually push his mountain bike into the mass of people. There seems no possible way I’ll get on, yet, I think, panicking, this is the only train that will get me there in time.
One More Croissant for the Road Page 15
