In the United States making cassoulet is a Big Cook. But where I sit as I type this, ten miles from Castelnaudry, it’s standard cuisine, almost to the point of fast food. Behold!
My husband here is standing bemused in a discount supermarket. The wall of canned goods in front of him is every possible permutation of the ingredients of cassoulet, canned. Duck legs plus beans. Duck legs plus sausage plus beans. Beans with sausage. Beans alone. Beans with pork and duck but no sausage. And so on, a wall of canned goods that extends for the full wall of this supermarket. And we have not even wandered over to the freezer section, where there is yet more. I am in the white-hot center of cassoulet, folks.
Therefore I had not intended to make my own, but to simply follow humbly in the footprints of the local chefs. Alas, the coronavirus lockdown has closed every restaurant in France. The only possible response is to make one’s own cassoulet. So, are you with me? Here we go!
One of the joys of writing historical fantasy is mining the past for tidbits and obscure events on which to hang a story…and one of the best places to do that is the wealth of magazines and other periodicals that survive from the nineteenth century. Even better is the fact that there are plenty of such magazines to be had for a pittance at flea markets and places like eBay.
The reason Other Architecture is so fascinating, I realize, is because all my life I’ve lived in American houses. I know how those are put together and why. If you go somewhere else, it’s not the same at all. Why is that?