Susan Volland

Jeff's Birthday Cassoulet

Choosing the right birthday dinner for my husband is a lot like buying a present for the guy who has everything. The “problem” if you can call it that, is that he has too many choices. Another “problem” this year, was that I had done a lot of good cooking over the holidays. He wasn’t really craving anything.

We tossed around a bunch of ideas, but nothing seemed to inspire him. Finally, we decided to venture up the road to our local “Temple of Porcine Love”, The Swinery, (3207 California Avenue SW, Seattle, WA www.swinerymeats.com ) and select something from the fresh case. He had stopped by there before Christmas to pick up a few gifts and was still talking about the bacon-wrapped loin chops he saw.

The Swinery seemed to exacerbate his dilemma. The tempting chops were there, looking almost prim and lean next to thick, fatty slabs of fresh pork belly. But they no longer seemed special. I, personally, couldn’t tear my eyes from the charcuterie case – venison terrine, lean and tender pastrami, artisan salamis and gorgeous hocks of ham. “How about cassoulet?” I finally suggested, inspired by the house-made duck confit. “YES!!” So, last Sunday, we invited his parents over and all feasted on a decadent cassoulet, and here are my thoughts on the subject.

Outside of the French countryside, the word “cassoulet” is most often heard in snobby food circles. There is often a certain reverence involved. The music of the foreign term, often accompanied by moans of delight and perhaps an unmistakably cosmopolitan smirk can give the uninitiated the distinct impression that cassoulet is a very fancy, expensive and elaborate dish. But cassoulet is just a pretty term for French baked beans. It can, indeed be sublime and worthy of hushed tones. It can also be very complicated, expensive and elaborate. But to make a really good cassoulet, you must embrace the simplicity and peasant origins of the dish. If you pretend it is anything else, you will be sorely disappointed. I learned that the hard way.

I made cassoulet for the first time about 20 years ago for the family grape harvest. I wanted to blow everyone away with something super complicated and impressive. I used a recipe from the now very trendy, Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child as my framework and spend days sourcing and cooking the components. I knew I wouldn’t be able to exactly duplicate her recipe, but I interpreted Julia’s words to mean that the most important elements were diverse and flavorful meats, and a bold, inspired cooking broth. I nailed it. The finished dish was a glorious, bubbling rondo of garlic, smoked pork, stewed venison, duck and sausages, herbs and tender white beans crusted with golden crumbs. (I even made a smaller “cute food free” version without venison or duck for my sister.)

After four days of cooking, and hauling the goods 300 miles from Seattle to Walla Walla, I presented my masterpiece. The crowd, weary from a weekend of picking and pressing grapes, anticlimactically scooped it on to plates and scarfed up my pride and joy while they gathered around a Husky football game on TV. I was horrified. Those mounds of pork and beans on the their plates weren’t just pork and beans. It was cassoulet, dammit! I was in a right proper snit. I myself would dine at the table, thank you very much!

No matter where I dined, I was doomed. There was no getting around it. My classical French delicacy was, even after all that attitude and work, just a mighty tasty pile of beans. It is what it is. I’ve grown up a lot since then. And while I think back on that meal with mostly embarrassment and horror, I still hear the occasional moan of delight in reference to that long ago cassoulet. Football chow doesn’t get much better than that.

Since then, I’ve thrown together the occasional “quickie” cassoulet. I’ll dump some canned white beans into a gratin dish with lots of sautéed garlic, carrots and whatever bits of ham and sausage I have in the fridge. I’ll add a good handful of herbs from the garden and some stock, top it with breadcrumbs and pop it in the oven. It’s just a weekday meal, nothing for company, but a nice quick and relatively healthy winter dinner. I made a great roasted vegetable version once. In some ways a meatless cassoulet sounds like a travesty, but it also was very tasty.

To make a proper birthday meal, I needed to build another “real” cassoulet. To get it right, you need to dedicate at least two and maybe three days to the task. Coincidentally, Fine Cooking magazine featured a multi page spread on making cassoulet in their recent issue. It looks good. But I didn’t follow their recipe. I cobbled together memories of Julia hints, preferences from former restaurant recipes and my own likes and dislikes.

Here’s what I did. I soaked two pounds of Great Northern beans for 24 hours, changing the water twice. I made a stock with half a dozen roasted marrow bones, some beef short rib bones, chicken bones, onion, carrots, fresh thyme, rosemary and bay leaves from the garden, peppercorns and a splash of red wine. That simmered for about eight hours. I browned chunks of pork sirloin in a little fresh bacon fat and then stewed it in a can of chicken stock, with a few roasted vegetables from the stock pan, lots of herbs and two cloves. Then I read a book.

The next day, I cooked the beans with some onion, carrot and more rosemary and thyme until they were tender. While they cooked, I tore the duck confit from the bones, (and somehow managed to not gobble it all up. FYI, The Swinery makes a killer duck confit. Not only is it spiced nicely, but they leave plenty of duck fat in the container for your cooking enjoyment!) I tore a big Hempler’s smoked pork chop into rough chunks and sliced up some Hempler’s garlic sausage. I sautéed onions, carrots and lots of garlic in duck fat, mixed them into the cooked beans and seasoned it all really well. Some recipes call for tomato, but I am anti-tomato in cassoulet. I don’t like the pink color it adds.

Finally, I started layering it up, mixing the beans and the meats in a big, terracotta casserole and drowned it all in a super-flavorful but still light, stock. I had some dried breadcrumbs from Trader Joes, but they were too fine, so I chopped up some sourdough bread into coarse crumbs and topped it with those. For flavor and color, I drizzled the breadcrumbs with a little more duck fat and finally called Jeff over to marvel at my work. It was beautiful.

Beautiful is good, but looks aren’t everything, right? There were some problems. First, I used to work for a wonderful French restaurant that served a very good cassoulet, but I didn’t like how their beans seemed all mashed up. They looked overcooked and over handled. I wanted my beans to be smooth and velvety, but still keep their individual integrity. I originally cooked my beans tender enough that I could squash one between my fingers, but then I messed them up. In order to get all of the ingredients in the dish, I piled the top layer of my cassoulet in a heaping mound. Don’t do this! It looks great, but the top beans are not able to soak up all that great broth. In my heart, I knew that two hours of baking would be barely enough, but we got hungry and couldn’t wait. We had a lovely meal – with a crunchy salad of bitter greens a fabulous baguette and a dessert of lemon tart and coffee, but the texture of the cassoulet was slightly off.

When we were finished, and stuffed to the gills, I rebuilt what remained, making sure that all the beans were swimming in stock, added more crumbs and baked it for another hour. I am not usually a fan of leftovers, but last night, the evening of his actual birthday, we had a dish worthy of celebration. It was amazing.  A good cassoulet demands both reverence and humility. And a decade between preparations is not unwise for such a rich and filling treat. We will mete out what remains in between leaner, vegetarian entrees for some much needed nutritional balance. 

I wonder what he’ll want next year? Happy Birthday Sweetie!

For the Love of ...Rutabagas

Happy New Year! I am determined to write again in 2010. And to kick off my foray into the already over-saturated world personal and culinary essays online, I have selected to write about… Rutabagas.

It is too easy to forget about this homely, yellow and purple root. And yet, when the right menu presents itself and I cook up a batch, I find myself swooning over every nutty bite. (Silently, of course. No one in their right mind would publicly swoon over a mouthful of rutabaga.) My inspiration to spread the gospel of the rutabaga began when I recently made a puree of locally grown rutabagas to serve with a rich, slow-braised beef brisket. The meat was good. The rutabagas were spectacular!

Regardless of how we feel about the root itself, I think everyone can agree that rutabaga is a silly word. It’s a Bugs Bunny/Daffy Duck kind of word that people tend to think of more as a joke than an actual vegetable. That was certainly the case for me when I was growing up. I can safely say that no rutabaga ever even made it past the threshold of our family kitchen. Canned spinach? Yes! Frozen Lima Beans? Definitely! Rutabagas? Never. But that might be because, even today, Dad doesn’t much care for root vegetables. Threaten him with a beet and his spine actually shivers. He’d rather go hungry than eat mashed potatoes. Perhaps it is my lack of traumatic childhood rutabaga memories that allows me to pontificate over the glories of the rutabaga as an adult?

I met my first rutabaga in London, masquerading as something called “Swede.” I was 18, broke, miserable and had agreed to work in a dark, smoky pub, pulling pints for alcoholic pensioners in exchange for a room with a very kind family. Part of my responsibility as barkeep was to help cook dinner while the pub was closed for afternoon break. That first evening, I was put in charge of mashing, stirring and seasoning a pot of bubbling, golden orange puree. It was love at first nutty, buttery, earthy taste. My job at the pub lasted less than 36 hours. My love of mashed “swede” endures.

“Swede” in England is short for Swedish Turnip. How a simple, one syllable term in “the mother tongue” became “Rutabaga” in America baffled me, so I had to look it up. Turns out, our modern day rutabaga was originally discovered growing wild in the forests of Sweden. There, it was called the “Rotabagge” or “root ram”. Aha!! It was cultivated in Northern Europe around 1700. In Ireland it is often just referred to as a turnip. To the Scots, it is a “neep” as in ‘buttered neeps” a classic side dish of buttered turnips or parsnips alongside a nice joint of roast meat. These were the turnips the Scots originally carved as Halloween Jack O Lanterns. In Denmark and Germany, the term for rutabaga starts to sound more like kohlrabi, which is definitely NOT on my list of favorite veggies.

The rutabaga is a cross between a white turnip and the cabbage. It is botanically a brassica, like broccoli and cauliflower, so you can eat plenty of them in the name of preventing cancer, if that’s what floats your boat. The greens are also edible and I would love to try them. In my mind, they have a richer, buttery flavor. But I have never seen anything on the market tables labeled “rutabaga greens” and wonder if they are often just piled high and called generic turnip greens.

The rutabaga became a staple in colder climes like Russia, Scandinavia, the UK, Canada and the US Midwest. It is filling, stores well and provides a source for desperately needed vitamin C and minerals for the dark days of winter. What I want to know now is why rutabagas aren’t seen more in Northern Chinese dishes, much like cabbage, carrots and turnips? I need to look in to that. It sounds delicious- fried up Szechwan style, with red chilies and peanuts! Mongolian lamb and rutabaga? Mmmm. Those ideas will be tested before the winter is through!

I’m going to guess that it is just this practicality and usefulness that has kept the golden root out of the limelight. Rutabagas are not sexy. Nutritionally, they are just fine. They have fiber, a good amount of vitamin C, some B6 and are plentiful in minerals like thiamin and calcium. But a rutabaga isn’t something you would toss in your bike bag for a quick power snack. They don’t have an impressive glycemic index, nor do they fit neatly into the South Beach Diet Plan. It’s a rustic, old-fashioned vegetable that is best served in a rustic, old-fashioned way. They take long, slow cooking. In my imagination, they should be served with a hand carved wooden spoon, near a crackling fire with perhaps some lute music playing in the background.

The rutabaga, (much like myself), does not always play well with others. It is too often relegated to a “filler” position in stews and pasties. I, along with much of the general population, find it slightly offensive when used in this manner. I don’t want to chomp into a savory cottage pie or beef stew and find my mouth startled by a tidbit of skunky, sweet rutabaga. It tastes somehow off, like finding a Brussels Sprout in your Caesar salad. They make good soup. They are good roasted. They are a compliment to braised and stewed meats, but must be a highlight, not a base note. Best of all, they are served alone, mashed with butter, salt and pepper and a perhaps a splash of cream.

As I mentioned earlier, the rutabaga and most root vegetables were not a mainstay of my childhood diet. So imagine my surprise when I first experienced the produce section of a supermarket in Grand Fork, North Dakota. Rutabagas the size of soccer balls was sold heavily waxed, in huge wooden bins. At my local Thriftway, they reside in a small silvery bowl tucked in amongst the “boutique” items like fresh horseradish root, red endive and live watercress.

I tried something new with my last batch of “swede” and I cooked the rutabaga chunks in the pressure cooker. Rutabaga doesn’t cook as quickly as most potatoes. I tend to be impatient and will sometimes undercook the pieces, resulting in a slightly stringy, albeit still flavorful mash. No such worries this time! In just minutes, the pressure-cooked rutabagas were velvety smooth, easy to mash and quick to dry. And of course there is the added bonus of retention of vitamins and minerals and improved carbon footprint, but I’ll save that for another time.

I have promised myself to be more disciplined in the act of writing but less dogmatic about the topics and craft. In other words, I have given myself permission to write grammatically incorrect, whimsical nothings about rutabagas in the hopes that it will eventually inspire more creative and potentially marketable work. It is the act of writing and creative thinking that I need to nurture. And as a reward for those of you willing to plow your way through it… here is a recipe.

Mashed Swede

This was my introduction to the rutabaga, and still my favorite preparation. The puree tastes much more complicated than it is – as if enhanced with and extra step of browned butter or pureed caramelized onions. A splash of cream is all that is needed here, and milk will do in a pinch. If you have a pressure cooker, use it here.

3 lbs rutabagas
2-3 tablespoons butter
2-3 tablespoons cream or half and half
Plenty of salt and black pepper.

Peel and dice the rutabagas. Place in plenty of cold, lightly salted water. Cover and bring up to the boil. Reduce the heat to medium and simmer for 30-45 minutes, until the pieces are fork tender. Drain well, mash or rice the rutabaga and return to the pan. Cook the puree over medium/low heat stirring often for 10 minutes, or until the puree has steamed away the residual water. Add butter, cream and salt and pepper. Stir to blend and serve hot.