Name: Cassoulet
Yield: For 12 servings
Cuisine: French
Ingredients: 1 piece ham skin sufficiently large to cover the top of the casserole (optional); 12 continental pork sausages; 2 kg shoulder or neck of lamb (ask your butcher to saw it into 8-cm cubes, with the bones); 4 sprigs of thyme and 4 sprigs of marjoram, tied together or chopped; 1 duck or goose; 1.5 kg dried, white haricot beans; 1.5 kg ripe tomatoes, roughly-chopped; 200 g pork skin, cut into 5-cm batons (each 1-cm thick); 15 cloves garlic, chopped; 4 ham hocks, sawn into 4-cm rounds; 750 g smoked belly pork, cut into 3-cm cubes; 1.5 litres semillon or chenin blanc freshly-chopped parsley (no additional salt is needed because of the salted meats used); ground black pepper; 2 bay leaves; 500 g Polish salami, peeled and cut into 3-cm slices; 8 onions, finely-sliced; 500 g hot salami, peeled and cut into 1-cm slices

Preparation info

For
12
servings

Difficulty
Easy

Appears in

Tony Bilson's Recipe Book

By Tony Bilson

Published 1987

About

In the past, the cold European winters precluded the use of fresh produce so we saw the development of dishes using preserved foods. Two of the most famous of these dishes are cassoulet and choucroute. Cassoulet causes as much argument among gastronomic pedants as bouillabaisse. In the west of France everybody’s grandmother is the guardian of the One True Recipe handed down through the family for generations.

Cassoulet should be made in large quantities because it keeps well and one