Recipe of Cassoulet
Prepare the night before to serve in the morning or early in the morning to serve in the evening.
Ingredients for 8 people : · 1.2kg ingot beans · 700g goose or duck conserve · 700g fresh Toulouse (pork) sausage · 250g fresh pork rind · 200g pork hock · 1 pig's trotter · 400g pork spare rib · 50g old bacon / pork fat · 2 garlic cloves · 1 onion stuck with a clove · 1 mixed bunch of thyme and bay leaves · 1 carrot · 1 leek · 1 stick of celery · Tomato paste · Salt · Pepper
Method:
Soak the dry beans overnight in cold water. Throw out that water. Put the beans in a saucepan of cold water and blanch them by bringing to the boil for 5 minutes. Throw out that water, too. At the same time, prepare a stock with the pork rind cut into large strips, pig's trotter, hock, onion stuck with a clove, thyme and bay leaves, carrot, leek, celery and a mince of crushed garlic and salted old bacon / pork fat. Filter the stock, taking out the rind and the trotter. You need to have about twice as much volume of stock as volume of beans. Cook the beans in the stock for 1½-2 hours over low heat. The beans should be soft but still whole.
During the cooking, add 1 soup spoon of tomato paste for each kilo of beans. In a frying pan, remove the fat from the pieces of duck or goose conserve. Retrieve the pieces. In the resulting fat, brown the pork spare ribs. Retrieve and drain them. Finally, in the same fat, brown the sausages
With all these preparations finished, put all the ingredients in a deep earthenware dish (the cassole). You can rub it beforehand with a clove of garlic. Line the bottom of the dish with the rind, add the pig's trotter and a third of the beans.
Place the conserve then cover with the remaining beans. On top, place the sausages in a spiral and embed them gently in the beans. Finish by pouring the warm stock and the juice from the frying pan. Pepper the surface generously. Put the "cassole" in the oven at 150-164°C and let cook for 2-3 hours. During the cooking, the top will develop a golden-brown crust that you should press down several time during the course of the cooking (people in the past said you should do it 7 times) without squashing the beans. At that time, check that the beans have not dried out, and if they do, add stock. Serve very hot, in the "cassole, of course.