Cheating at cassoulet

"Sometimes in life, we have to make a choice: Idealized fantasy or achievable reality." Adina Steiman/Food and Wine

I've been thinking even more than usual about quick, easy, leftover dishes of late, because of this cookbook for the grandchildren which I'm still dithering about. I mean will they use it or will they just politely say thank you and anyway why should I think I can do any better than the heaps of recipes and advice that exist on the net. Anyway, after a very busy morning I was pondering, as usual, on what to write and picked up Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's Love Your Leftovers which just happens to be sitting on my desk at the moment, picked a random page and turned up the above - Quick cassoulet, which he introduces with these words:

"I publish this recipe with a sense of mild terror, lest any of the honourable people from Toulouse, Carcassonne or Castelnaudary, who take cassoulet very seriously indeed, ever come across my rough-and-ready version." Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall

Now the recipe is not online - but basically you cook up onions and bacon, add herbs, garlic some sausages, with leftover meat . Sauté for a bit then stir in tomato purée and wine vinegar. Finally add a tin of tomatoes and a tin of beans and cook for 20 minutes. Remove herb bundle, cover with breadcrumbs and butter and finish under the grill. Done.

He also has another Cheat's cassoulet on the News 24 website which is only slightly more complicated.

Now he's right to be a bit nervous about calling this a cassoulet, and in some ways you would have to wonder why he does - and the same applies to all the other recipes that I found as well, and that will feature below. A 'real' cassoulet' takes days to cook , involves complicated stuff with the breadcrumb topping and also really needs difficult to obtain meats like Toulouse sausages, duck confit and goose. I know because I have made it - a long, long, time ago. I have also tasted some really good ones in Carcassonne and surrounds, and yet, I'm always marginally disappointed with cassoulet. It's, dare I say, a bit stodgy. And that from an English woman.

The author of one of my other offerings - Weeknight cassoulet - Dawn Perry/Food 52, also wondered why she called it a cassoulet:

"I was nervous to call this a “cassoulet” at all, seeing as it eschews traditional ingredients, methods, and even the vessel for which the dish is named. But it does offer a similar saucy bean experience, complete with an irresistible breadcrumb topping, in a fraction of the time and without any advanced planning." Dawn Perry / Food 52

She didn't even use breadcrumbs but instead went for crushed Ritz crackers:

"Because they’re engineered to be delicious on their own, packaged crackers (or crushed pita chips or even pretzels) can make super simple recipes like this one really sing."

Time in this case was said to be a total of 40 minutes.

As I continued with my brief roundup of quick and easy cassoulet recipes I began to see what all of those recipe writers think, or maybe think that we think are the fundamental qualities of a cassoulet - which is perhaps why they all called them 'cassoulet'. Perhaps also so that we know what to expect. If you know what a cassoulet is of course. My grandchildren probably don't. The qualities that stand out to me as I read, were sausages, tomatoes, beans, breadcrumbs. Crunchy breadcrumbs The duck and the goose, often got replaced by chicken, and salt pork or expensive air dried hams were replaced by bacon.

The very simplest one is this Cheat's cassoulet from Coles, which takes a mere half an hour and a handful of ingredients - sausages, bacon, tinned beans a jar of roasted vegetable sauce and some torn up bread. Basically just fried and mixed together in a frying pan. Can you really call this a cassoulet - particularly since they specify beef sausages, and beef is never a feature in cassoulet? Does it matter if you do, and does it really get people to make it?

Would it be an attrractive option for an inexperienced cook though? 5 ingredients, 3 steps - well yes, probably. And if you wanted to be a bit healthier you could always serve it with a green salad..

Looking at that particular 'starter' recipe from Hugh Fearnley-Whitingstall, however, made me think about it through the imagined eyes of my grandchildren. I think they would be tempted by the photograph. That piece of toasty bread at the side really makes the photograph, although the rest of it also looks satisfyingly tomatoey and crunchy. However, the recipe takes up the whole of the opposite page, even though it is laid out very clearly and with a lovely drawing of a bay leaf and sprig of thyme. When you read it, you see it's actually not very complicated, but is there enough of a quick fix there? And would they be put off by all of those words.

So what else did I find? On the quick side - I found these: Quick cassoulet - Valli Little/delicious; Lazy chicken and sausage cassoulet - Molly Stevens/Food and Wine; Quick pork and butter bean cassoulet - Coles - now you would never see green beans in a proper cassoulet - but why not?

Then there are those that take longer or are slightly more complicated, but still eminently doable, and nowhere near as time-consuming as a 'real' cassoulet: Easy cassoulet - Jill Dupleix/delicious.; Poor man's cassoulet - Delia Smith - 2 hours; Cassoulet de Essex - Jamie Oliver - I just couldn't resist the Essex bit - Jamie has a few different cassoulet recipes ; Chicken casserole with fennel and bacon - Curtis Stone - fennel?

Back in my day there were no 'cheat's' versions of cassoulet, just Elizabeth David and others giving us various 'authentic' and local recipes, with rigorous instructions to follow. Well we didn't know what cassoulet was. Today cooks, chefs, recipe creators, try to discover the essence of the recipe and distil it into a few simple steps using readily available ingredients - and as a bonus adding in a few swaps for things you don't have. Well those that are aiming at normal everyday cooks that is.

Perhaps there's a time for cheating and a time for indulging in authenticity. Long, slow and expensive in this case. Maybe when your'e doing the indulging, you should do a cheat's version in parallet and see which tastes best. Cassoulet, after all, like so many regional speciality dishes, began as dishes for the poor to use up the frugal ingredients they had to hand, and to then put in the baker's oven for a long slow cook because they didn't have an oven of their own.

Food for thought re the grandkids though.

YEARS GONE BY

September 16

2024 - What is it with Kewpie mayonnaise?

2023 - Orzo or rice? with chicken

2022 - Nothing

2021 - I failed - lucky dip

2020 - Missing

2019 - From Mongolian hordes to René Redzipi

2018 - Nothing

2017 - Nothing

2016 - Beetroot goes with ...