Every country has its own solution to winter. In Russia, they drink vodka. In Norway, they set up a system of mountainside mirrors to beam light to sun-starved towns. And in France, they make cassoulet, a slow-cooked union of beans and meat so rich and lipid laced that a couple of bites will inoculate eaters against all but the fiercest of polar vortices. Cassoulet is native to Languedoc, in south-central France, which is not to say that the Gascony region, to the west, hasn’t claimed it, because it has, or that the various Occitan cities, known for their cassoulet, agree on what goes into one, because they don’t.
Beans are the main ingredient—seventy per cent of the dish, according to the official 1966 ruling by the États Géneraux de la Gastronomie Française—but should they be haricots or favas? As for meat, natives of Carcassonne throw partridge and mutton into the pot, while the “Larousse Gastronomique” claims that mutton is “a sacrilege” in Castelnaudary, where legend holds that cassoulet was invented by enterprising townsfolk under siege during the Hundred Years’ War. Castelnaudary will accept pork rind, loin, leg, and sausage, as well as goose. In Toulouse, forty miles away, they add Toulouse sausage and break the crust of breadcrumbs—the true mark of a successful cassoulet—seven times during cooking, versus Castelnaudary’s eight. Prosper Montagné, the author of the original “Larousse Gastronomique,” from the nineteen thirties, and a mutton advocate (he was born in Carcassone), brokered an uneasy truce between the picky cities by proposing that cassoulet be thought of as “the God of Occitan cuisine,” with Castelnaudary’s cassoulet as the Father, Carcassone’s version the Son, and Toulouse’s the Holy Ghost.
In Castelnaudary, the integrity of cassoulet is upheld by the Grande Confrérie du Cassoulet (the Great Cassoulet Brotherhood), a body of cassoulet partisans who dress in crimson robes, yellow scarves, and caps shaped like casolle, the traditional earthenware tureen that gives the dish its name. The Brotherhood, which seems to include a heartening number of sisters, is rumored to make impromptu visits to local restaurants to check that their cassoulet preparation is, as the French like to say, correct. On the Confrérie’s Web site, you can hear “Hymn to Cassoulet,” which begins with actual fanfare and is written in earthy prose in the Occitan language. “Young and old, we salute you / We love you like two eyes,” the Confrérie sings. “We will always find a place for you in our stomachs.”
Jimmy Carbone, the proprietor of Jimmy’s No. 43, a brew pub down a flight of stairs on East Seventh Street, and one of New York’s most enthusiastic cassoulet champions, takes a more lenient approach. “I look at the old Time Life cookbooks from the sixties, and it’s like, ‘Oh, New England baked beans,’ ” he said on a recent Sunday, at Jimmy’s No. 43’s sixth-annual cassoulet cook-off. Carbone, who greeted hungry cassoulet-seekers with a kiss on the cheek, looks like Santa’s younger, relatively clean-shaven brother. If he owns a casolle cap, he wasn’t wearing it. On election night in 2008, a few weeks before the first cook-off, cassoulet was given a lucky boost when a sound engineer from a French comedy show squeezed into news broadcasts in Times Square and unfurled a banner scrawled with the word “CASSOULET.” (On ABC, George Stephanopoulos said, before cutting to commercial, “I want to know who ‘cassoulet’ is.”) “Within the next hour, a million peopled Googled ‘What is cassoulet?’ ” Carbone said. “And still, to this day, most people don’t know, but we’ve been trying to change that.”
The cook-off competitors stood over seaming buffet trays, doling cassoulet into small plastic bowls. A number of flagrant, if delicious, digressions from protocol were in evidence. Mindy Ramirez, the chef of Nourish Kitchen and Table, a restaurant in the West Village, had used white beans, homemade duck confit, duck sausage with orange zest, prosciutto, bacon, and a topping of whole-wheat breadcrumbs and pork cracklings, plus a conspicuous leafy green: kale, celebrated in New York but derided in France as a symbol of wartime privation. (A kale comeback, however, may be in the works.) Someone from Mighty Quinn’s Barbecue, a few blocks away, had dropped off a menu item called Burnt End Baked Beans, more southern U.S. than southern French, and then fled the scene, lest any undercover members of the Grande Confrérie start asking questions.
Annette Tomei, founder of VinEducation, a food-and-wine-education service, and a veteran of Le Cirque and the River Café, was taking a minute to relax in the kitchen. She wore pearl earrings, chef’s whites, and a bandana. As the “culinary muse” of this year’s cook-off, Tomei had four cassoulets on display at the bar, including a Tuscan-inspired stew with a tomato broth and a vegetarian variation with mushrooms, roasted butternut squash, and Brussels sprouts. “Totally life changing,” she said, of her first cassoulet, prepared years ago by Peter Hoffman, at Savoy restaurant, and cooked over an open fire.
The sole French competitor, Gilbert Clerget, had driven with his cassoulet—a classic rendition, with duck confit, smoked pork belly, kielbasa, and fines herbes—and his wife, Rebecca, from Washington, D.C., where he works as a waiter at Occidental Grill. When asked to recall his first cassoulet, he gasped. Clerget was born in Metz and grew up in Corsica; he was initiated into the dish by friends from Toulouse. “We were waiting for fall and winter every year,” he said, pronouncing it win-ter. “As soon as the weather drops below seventy, he’s making cassoulet,” Rebecca, a Rockland county native, added.
A good cassoulet takes time. Yes, you can buy a very passable version in a jar, the beans and meat suspended in congealed sauce and crowned with a white rim of fat, and tip it all into a saucepan to heat up. Cassoulet from a jar is satisfying in the way that a polaroid is satisfying: the idea comes across fast and easy, but the results just aren’t the same. Patricia Clark, who quit a career in finance to train as a chef in Umbria and now runs a catering business, had spent most of the week setting off the smoke alarm in her East Village apartment as she made duck bacon. This was her second competition at Jimmy’s, a shot at redemption. “Last year, I walked in pretty confident, and it was a mess,” she said.
Creative differences aside, the contestants agreed on the really crucial aspect of cassoulet. “It’s all about the community spirit,” said Tomei, to applause and cheers. Like a Thanksgiving turkey, cassoulet brings people together by virtue of sheer volume; no one has ever made a single portion. If you don’t have enough friends around to crack your cassoulet’s crust with you, you should be prepared to go out and rustle some up while the oven is still hot. In their essay “The Cassoulet Saved Our Marriage,” Deborah Copaken Kogan and Paul Kogan write about Cassoulet Day, an annual gathering that they hold for twenty or thirty people to reap the rewards of three days spent chopping carrots and rendering duck fat. The Kogans don’t spell out exactly how cassoulet stopped them from breaking up, but try to imagine storming out of a kitchen where a cassoulet is bubbling in the oven, the air thick with herbs and simmering fat, and you begin to see where they’re coming from.
The convivial spirit at Jimmy’s extended to the awards, which, in American rather than French fashion, were nearly as numerous as the contestants. A five-judge panel took to the stage and started with the honorable mentions: best vegetarian dish for carnivores, best local dish, best Ameri-cassoulet. In the official competition, Nourish Kitchen and Table took third place, for best adaptation and use of healthy ingredients (a victory for kale), and Patricia Clark came in second. The winner, of both the judges’ decision and the eaters’ popular vote, was Gilbert Clerget.
“Tell us, what does cassoulet mean to you?” Carbone asked, as Clerget was presented with a Wusthof kitchen knife.
“Cassoulet means … uh, I don’t know,” Clerget said, stalling. He gathered his thoughts. “It means family, friendship, and have a good time, actually.”
Back at their station, the Clerget team kissed, and began to pack up the scant leftovers. They were meeting a friend for dinner before driving back to D.C. the next day. The Clergets were married last May, and, as the Kogans could tell you, their future is bright: the couple that cassoulets together stays together.
Photograph: Debi Treloar/Corbis
