Kosher Cassoulet?

Swisskaese · December 27, 2004

Okay, so here is the challange:

I have studied Paula Wolfert's recipe for Cassoulet and I have found substitutes for the following:

Prosciutto - Smoked Goose breast

Garlic Pork Sausage - Beef sausage

Ham Hock - Smoked turkey leg?

Pork Rind?

Lean salt pork?

Any ideas?

Edited December 27, 2004 by Swisskaese (log)

lovebenton0 · December 27, 2004

Which cassoulet recipe are you referring to? Paula has two in S-W France cookbook? Andre' Daguin's Fava? or the one made by the Toulouse woman, Pierette Lejanou?

Perhaps duck fat and crisped skin for the pork rind?

Gifted Gourmet · December 27, 2004

I have found substitutes for the following:
Any ideas?
←

Michelle, as I have been known to state here on eGullet, when the issues of kosher substitutes are mentioned, I tend to avoid them .. over the years of keeping a kosher home, I have relied upon many of them with only moderate successes ... so, I avoid ...

actually, if memory serves me correctly, I think we both discussed this with Daniel Rogov on the desserts thread about parve desserts ... real things always are my issue ...

So, back to kosher substitutes in the cassoulet? Never the real thing and the taste to me will not be the same ... what I most desire is authenticity in my ingredients ... were there no pork products in this dish, I would have proceeded with great vigor and enthusiasm!

jackal10 · December 27, 2004

No problem. Make a Cassoulet de Carcasonne, where by tradition the pork is replaced with a leg of mutton, or during the shooting season, with partridge.

Of course obtaining kosher partridge might be difficult, but you can certainly find lamb, if not mutton.

akur23 · December 27, 2004

Prosciutto - Smoked Goose breast
Garlic Pork Sausage - Beef sausage
Ham Hock - Smoked turkey leg?
Pork Rind?
Lean salt pork?
Any ideas?
←

I saw duck prosciutto in a Vancouver market, don't know if anyone else carries it. I use turkey italian sausage in most pork sausage recipes. The smoked turkey leg should work fine. For pork rind, try schmaltz. Not sure of anything for the salt pork, turkey ham is not salty enough. I'd love to see some ideas, also.

Fat Guy · December 27, 2004

I agree. Don't focus on substitutions for key ingredients -- you'll never be satisfied if your goal is to find a substitute for bacon, because there is no substitute for bacon. Instead, focus on making a great dish on its own terms.

You can make a delicious, hearty simmered bean stew without pork if you base it on duck fat, duck confit and duck cracklings. Whether or not it is officially cassoulet is a matter for the people who like to debate about language to decide, but we served such an item to 40 or so of our most exacting gourmet friends last New Year's Eve and it seemed to go over well. We knew a number of our guests wouldn't eat pork and others had various other restrictions, so we kept the dish modular. Basically, we made the beans with plenty of duck fat and, later, bread crumbs. We made a tremendous quantity of duck confit, duck cracklings, braised lamb shanks and a big pile of chopped up Aidell's chicken-and-apple sausage. When it came time to plate the dish, everybody got a bowl of beans-with-crust, and on top of it we served as few or as many of the garnishes as the various picky eaters wanted. For the real vegetarians we had a separate batch of beans made with no animal products and a small batch of mixed vegetables, whereas the fake vegetarians had the duck-fat beans topped with vegetables.

If you're not familiar with cassoulet bean-making technique, I'd be happy to provide some pointers based on Christian Delouvrier's cookbook, Mastering Simplicity.

Jensen · December 27, 2004

So, back to kosher substitutes in the cassoulet? Never the real thing and the taste to me will not be the same ... what I most desire is authenticity in my ingredients ... were there no pork products in this dish, I would have proceeded with great vigor and enthusiasm!
←

Does that point of view accurately reflect the spirit of the cassoulet though?

What is "cassoulet"? How did the dish originate? Is it specific ingredients prepared in a certain manner or is it a type of ingredient prepared in a certain manner?

I don't have the reference materials around that others here most undoubtedly do however I do have a rather wonderful cookbook called "The Old World Kitchen: The Rich Tradition of European Peasant Cooking". In the introduction to the recipe for cassoulet, the author writes:

The cassoulet, the archetypal peasant meal, is a controversial dish. Food writers, culinary scholars, and restaurant chefs have been plucking and worrying at it for years. The cassoulet, quite simply, is the creature of its maker: a balance of habit, necessity, availability, and as with all the best peasant cooking, the special genius of the cook. The cassoulet is unusual in that most of its ingredients are home prepared panty items which demonstrate the cook's abilities in depth. The perfect cassoulet can only spring from the perfect larder.

It really shouldn't matter whether one includes pork or not. What is important to maintain authenticity is to honour the spirit of the dish.

(That's what I think, at any rate. :smile: )

Carolyn Tillie · December 27, 2004

Synchronicity... I just came in from various markets as I am making Wolfert's cassoulet for a small get-together on Wednesday and wondered what one would do to try and make a Kosher Cassoulet...

As an aside, I am terribly irked that I spent $20 on the friggin BEANS and barely $10 bucks on the ALL the pork products (bought 'em at a Latin market). Oh well...

Swisskaese · December 27, 2004

I absolutely agree that there is no such thing as a substitution, but I guess I was trying to figure out a way to make cassoulet that would fit to my dietary restrictions.

I mentioned in the eGullet Cookoff thread that Cholent is a "sort of" cassoulet.

Fat Guy, I have never eaten cassoulet and I am not a fan of Cholent, so I would love your insight on the dish.

I found a recipe for Duck Cassoulet and figured that I could adapt that recipe. It includes sausage and foie gras.

lovebenton0 · December 27, 2004

If you do have Paula' S-W France I'd suggest reading the info on cassoulet, the spirit of the dish comes through. Although only a few pages long she manages glances at variety in the dish -- mutton (I would use lamb), partridge also, and other points of history of the making of cassoulet. Following her quest for the ultimate cassoulet should inspire anyone to be inventive and follow your own tongue, make your own rules.

I have a half leg of semi-boneless lamb that I've mentally marked for cassoulet. Play with it -- what could be bad about white beans, garlic, onion or leeks, whatever meats you choose. :biggrin:

winesonoma · December 27, 2004

Synchronicity... I just came in from various markets as I am making Wolfert's cassoulet for a small get-together on Wednesday and wondered what one would do to try and make a Kosher Cassoulet...
As an aside, I am terribly irked that I spent $20 on the friggin BEANS and barely $10 bucks on the ALL the pork products (bought 'em at a Latin market). Oh well...
←

You mean that you don't get the Rancho Gordo dear friends discount on the beans? :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: :raz:

Gifted Gourmet · December 27, 2004

It is only my *mishegas, you know .. of course there are approximations .. I know .. it is my current state of rebellion which doesn't allow me to substitute ingredients ... nothing realistic, only in my head ... :hmmm:

*adj : senseless; crazy [syn: meshugge, meshugga, meshuggeneh, meshuggener]

VivreManger · December 27, 2004

A few years ago I made a kosher-style cassoulet -- style because I used a prepared confit de canard that was not itself kosher -- but all of the other ingredients came from the Butcherie in Brookline, Ma. ( the best kosher market in Massachusetts) , sausage, smoked turkey, and what else I don't remember. The basis was Mark Bittman's cheaters' recipe.

The results were respectable enough that a friend originally from Toulouse, who is a very good classic French cook, but now lives in the States, was happy to bring some home to her family who ate it up with no complaints.

I agree about pareve cream desserts, which are repulsive, but kosher substitutes for other dishes should not be dismissed out of hand. After all, cassoulet is merely French cholent. Maybe they stole the recipe from the Jews.

An even greater stretch was a kosher feijoada that some friends made about 15 years ago. I don't think they have repeated the treat. We were so stuffed we probably did not need to eat for another 15 years.

Gifted Gourmet · December 27, 2004

After all, cassoulet is merely French cholent. Maybe they stole the recipe from the Jews.
←

That I know all too well .... not the stealing part! all cultures have made their own variations upon a theme over the centuries ...

Cholent I can make ... and it will approximate the experience of a lovely cassoulet ... but I want it to be real! :laugh:

There is no way to make other things taste like the real thing .. pork is pork, after all ... :huh:

My closest friend made me a kosher duck prosciutto and gave it to me for Chanukkah .. it was lovely, but it was not the real thing ... I know, I know, picky, picky ... :rolleyes:

Fat Guy · December 27, 2004

Cholent and cassoulet strike me as the same only if you say that all bean casseroles are the same. There are so many key differences between the dishes, however, that I'd classify them only as very distant relatives. The salient features of cassoulet, to me, are that the beans and garnishes are treated separately and combined later on, and the inimitable breadcrumb crust. Cholent, for its part, involves mixing all the ingredients early on and cooking on a low heat straight through to the service. It also tends to have potatoes or other starches in addition to the beans, and of course no breadcrumb crust. It was created for a specific purpose: so that it could be prepared before the Sabbath (which begins at sundown) and left on low heat until lunchtime the next day. The variations on cholent are organized around the long-cooking principle (it doesn't even need to contain beans), whereas the variations on cassoulet are organized primarily around different garnishes (but the dish is fundamentally based on beans). So as species they aren't really comparable.

To me, cassoulet is all about the beans, and the difference between okay cassoulet and really good cassoulet is primarily in the way the beans are prepared. The garnishes are important, and they should be good too, but if you don't have good beans it's like a dish of bad pasta with good meatballs.

Cooking the beans is all about infusing them with flavor, because -- let's face it -- beans alone aren't terribly flavorful. They're not flavorless, but they need help especially if they're going to appear in a dish like cassoulet. There are many approaches to creating flavorful beans, and cassoulet recipes tend to be quite long, but the basic idea is to begin by cooking the beans with fat and aromatic vegetables, and then to cook them further with a stock/sauce derived from preparing the lamb, duck, or whatever -- and you can also cook the duck bones right in with the beans if you're willing to pick them out later. Then in the final preparation, preferably after the beans have been refrigerated overnight, you cover a casserole full of beans with bread crumbs and you bake that in the oven, very occasionally pressing down on the crust so liquid covers it.

Then you plate the dish up with the garnishes and you're all set.

Gifted Gourmet · December 27, 2004

To me, cassoulet is all about the beans, and the difference between okay cassoulet and really good cassoulet is primarily in the way the beans are prepared.
←

Cholent is more about the meat, from my experience, Fat Guy .. and the kishke resplendent on top of it all ... but I will accept your explanation and rethink this dish ... everyone will be downing their divine cassoulets and I will shed salty tears into my cholent pot ... :sad:

Don't cry for me, cassoulet lovers with apologies to Andrew Lloyd Weber ... :wink:

Jensen · December 27, 2004

but I will accept your explanation and rethink this dish ... everyone will be downing their diivine cassoulets and I will shed salty tears into my cholent pot ...
←

Oh, I don't know about that...

I'd be up for a parallel cook-off to the cassoulet one. Why not a cholent cook-off to run concurrent with it? In all honesty, after looking at some articles on cholent, it interests me more than the cassoulet does.

bloviatrix · December 27, 2004

You can make a delicious, hearty simmered bean stew without pork if you base it on duck fat, duck confit and duck cracklings. Whether or not it is officially cassoulet is a matter for the people who like to debate about language to decide, but we served such an item to 40 or so of our most exacting gourmet friends last New Year's Eve and it seemed to go over well. We knew a number of our guests wouldn't eat pork and others had various other restrictions, so we kept the dish modular. Basically, we made the beans with plenty of duck fat and, later, bread crumbs. We made a tremendous quantity of duck confit, duck cracklings, braised lamb shanks and a big pile of chopped up Aidell's chicken-and-apple sausage. When it came time to plate the dish, everybody got a bowl of beans-with-crust, and on top of it we served as few or as many of the garnishes as the various picky eaters wanted. For the real vegetarians we had a separate batch of beans made with no animal products and a small batch of mixed vegetables, whereas the fake vegetarians had the duck-fat beans topped with vegetables.
If you're not familiar with cassoulet bean-making technique, I'd be happy to provide some pointers based on Christian Delouvrier's cookbook, Mastering Simplicity.
←

Could you provided a recipe or pointers for the dish you describe above? It so happens that this very morning I found a source for fresh kosher duck legs and duck fat (I only have about 8 oz in my freezer).

Carolyn Tillie · December 27, 2004

Synchronicity... I just came in from various markets as I am making Wolfert's cassoulet for a small get-together on Wednesday and wondered what one would do to try and make a Kosher Cassoulet...
As an aside, I am terribly irked that I spent $20 on the friggin BEANS and barely $10 bucks on the ALL the pork products (bought 'em at a Latin market). Oh well...
←
You mean that you don't get the Rancho Gordo dear friends discount on the beans?
←

Yeah, well... darling Gordo doesn't carry a Tarbais/Cannellini equivalent! And don't think Wolfert and I haven't asked!!! I even transported one of Wolfert's cooked tarbais to Gordo for him to taste to see if he had anything remotely close, to no avail! :sad: :sad: :sad:

Fat Guy · December 28, 2004

I don't have the relevant Wolfert text in my Wolfert collection. I'm sure it's the last word. I'll have to go get a copy.

The Delouvrier recipe is the one I've used and I thought it produced excellent results. There's a lot of what I'd call restaurant technique in it, even though it produces a rustic outcome, so it's going to seem labor intensive if you're not accustomed to those methods, but if you go step by step it's not hard at all. Indeed, when broken down into their individual steps, many of Delouvrier's recipes are actually easier and more reliable than ones that seem simpler on the surface.

It's several pages of text so it would be beyond fair use to reprint it here. I'd certainly recommend buying the book, Mastering Simplicity, because it has so much to offer. But let me try to condense a few basic elements of the bean cooking process that Delouvrier advocates:

You start with beans that have been soaked overnight and drained, and you cook them with duck fat, tomato paste, pork rind and pancetta (which you'd skip for the purposes of this topic), garlic, carrots, peppercorns, cloves, bouquet garni, poultry stock and salt.

As the beans are cooking, you roast duck bones in duck fat and add the bones to the beans. You also add some halved tomatoes.

Once the beans are cooked, you strain and reserve the bean liquid, and you spread the beans out on a sheet pan so you can pick through and remove and discard all the bones and aromatics.

Then you go about preparing all your confit and braised meat and such, reserving the cooking liquids. You mix all that together with some of the bean cooking liquid and reduce it into a sauce, which you then pour into a pot with the beans. You bring the beans up to a simmer again so they absorb this round of flavors, and then you let them cool and refrigerate overnight.

A couple of hours before service you put breadcrumbs and melted butter on top of the casserole and bake it, pushing down occasionally on the top to create the signature cassoulet crust. You've also got to get all your garnishes warmed, and then at the end you assemble individual plates with the garnishes.

Swisskaese · December 28, 2004

Which cassoulet recipe are you referring to? Paula has two in S-W France cookbook? Andre' Daguin's Fava? or the one made by the Toulouse woman, Pierette Lejanou?
Perhaps duck fat and crisped skin for the pork rind?
←

I am referring to the recipe in The Slow Mediterranean Kitchen.

The reason I like to try to adapt recipes is because I only starting keeping Kosher four years ago and at the age of 40, I remember what non-kosher things taste like. I like to think of it as a challenge to try and adapt recipes. I adapted one of Paula's recipes that she asked me to test for her and it turned out very well. So, I think it is possible to adapt and as Melissa said and I have said in other threads, that is what Jews did around the world, we adapted recipes wherever we lived.

Even though my parents did not keep Kosher, pork was not allowed in the house, so I never developed at taste for it, even outside of the home. However, I have had prosciutto and melon, so I know the difference between duck or goose "prosciutto" and the real deal from Friuli or Parma. I have to say that my great-grandfather made the most amazing rauchfleisch (smoked meat or beef "prosciutto") and it could have gone head-to-head with regular rauchfleisch from Germany or Switzerland.

A friend of mine's cousin is a chef here who apparently makes amazing parve sauces. I realise that "amazing" and "parve" should not be written in the same sentence, but I heard in the Kosher hood that he does some very interesting things. He has a males-only Kosher cooking school in Jerusalem for restaurant and hotel chef wannabe's and has special dinners there to show off his students. He is suppose to offer courses for women at some point, but only for home cooking! :angry: But that is another thread.....