There is cassoulet. You saw it coming, of course. And beyond the inductive link of ingredient to dish, four or five miserable days of bone-chilling cold and rain simply demanded this undertaking for the dinner K. and I had planned for D.&L., S.&N. and B. There is no better means of warding off premature winter weather than duck fat and beans. The combination is magical—somehow resulting in silky, creamy beans that retain their form despite hours on the stove and in the oven. 

    As with confit, once you start comparing recipes for cassoulet it becomes clear that there are no fixed rules here. I ended up triangulating between Gourmet, Bourdain and my own seat-of-the-pants solutions. Northern white beans soaked overnight for a start—no dispute there. But then questions began. Bourdain called for cooking the beans with pork belly, pork rind, quartered onion and bouquet garni, while Gourmet just wanted the bouquet garni. I opted for a quick & dirty approach: I threw in a half pound of thick cut bacon, hoping the smoke flavor wouldn’t be a problem. 

    Minor snafu at this point: B. still had my stock pot. The solution was to use the roasting pan over two burners, covered with a cookie sheet and some foil. Not pretty, as the picture shows, but effective. M. and D. were over for brunch during this stage of preparation, and we debated salting the beans—there’s that whole question of whether salt will make the beans break apart more readily. Ended up saving the salt for a later stage. 

    Once the beans were done we took a break to go see Where the Wild Things Are with the girls. Fabulous. Especially the part where Max is eaten and regurgitated.

    In the next steps, both Gourmet and Bourdain called for browning sausages in duck fat—I used mild Italian, since I couldn’t get a hold of fancy French garlic ones. But Bourdain didn’t say anything about browning the duck legs, as advised by Gourmet. Maybe it’s an editing error, since I can’t imagine Bourdain not frying something in duck fat if given the choice. So I did the legs too, for good measure. Then I fried up the bacon—both the unused half pound and the bits I pulled out of the beans after simmering them. 

    At this point, I implemented what must be Bourdain’s own brilliant invention. I fried up a bunch of sliced onions and garlic and ground it up in a food processor with some of the rendered duck fat and the bacon from the beans (he uses the pork rind for this). And prep was done. Bourdain calls for a fussy assembly in layers, but I scrapped that. I just mixed the beans with the puree of bacon and aromatics, lay them into the roasting pan, nestled in the legs and sausages, poured reserved liquid from cooking the beans to just cover, and baked for a couple of hours at 350ª. Gourmet called for a bread crumb crust, but I just went with the crusty beans, following Bourdain. B. pronounced this to be an inauthentic move—maybe I’ll do the crust next time, just to make him happy. 

    The guests were not shy about eating the end-product, and the bit with the bacon worked fine. In retrospect, I think one of the selling points of this dish was the reduced fat content. I know it sounds ridiculous, and just super health-freaky American. Bourdain’s recipe calls for an obscene amount of pork fat in various forms—good for flavor, but I don’t really like to put either myself or my guests totally out of commission that way. People were pretty raucous at table: a typical reaction to peasant food, I imagine.