Don't Sweat the Aubergine

stage, so the beans needn’t be completely soft. (For further advice on dried beans, see here .)
    Tinned beans, as I’ve said earlier ( see here ), are fine, but somewhat duller-tasting than dried ones, and with a more mealy texture. If you use them here, you’ll miss out on the flavoured stock that cooking dried beans would have given you, but you’ll produce a perfectly nice meal in far less time. Mix them with the pork, tomato and onion stew (see below), before covering with stock.
    Meanwhile, heat the goose or duck fat in a heavy casserole, and brown the belly pork as in the basic lamb or beef stew recipe here ; a medium heat should do. Set the meat aside on a plate, turn down the heat, and add the sausages, keeping them moving in the casserole until they are browned in various places. Set them aside too. Add the chopped onion until it is softened (use more fat if necessary), then add the clove of chopped garlic. Let the garlic soften, then add the chopped tomatoes.
    Drain the beans, reserving the liquid; keep also the garlic and the pork rind, but throw away the onion. Chop the rind into small squares, and add it, with the beans and the garlic (which will probably melt out at some point, leaving people to find the bare husks on their plates), to the onion and tomato mixture in the casserole. Add the belly pork slices, burying them among the beans. Pour in the bean liquid, along with enough stock to come to the level of the topmost beans. Add salt to taste, and herbs if you want them (bay and thyme, perhaps). Cover the surface with breadcrumbs.
    Put the casserole, uncovered, in a gas mark 2/150°C oven. Check it after an hour: the mixture should be bubbling gently, and have a crusty surface. If it’s bubbling too fast, or not at all, adjust the temperature accordingly. If all’s going well, push the breadcrumbs into the bean mixture, and add another layer of them to the surface. Check again after another half an hour. Is there another crust? And is the liquid reducing and thickening? If yes to both, slice the sausage, and add it and the pieces of duck or goose to the beans; 2 you don’t have to submerge them completely. Cover with another layer of breadcrumbs, and cook until this too has formed a crust. Serve.
    That was quite hard work. Still, the only accompaniment a cassoulet needs is a green salad.
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WHY YOU DO IT
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    1 • The confit . Advice on making your own is beyond the scope of this book. You can buy goose or duck confit (the latter is easier to find) at smart shops. Do keep all the fat, which makes particularly splendid roast and fried potatoes.
    2 • Add the sausages and confit late . Sausages go flabby and dull if stewed for too long. The duck or goose is already cooked; what it would add to the cassoulet if there from the beginning would not compensate for what it would itself lose.
LAMB DAUBE
    This is a simplified version of the Avignon daube that appears in Richard Olney’s
Simple French Food
.
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HOW TO MAKE IT
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    For 6
    1.5kg shoulder of lamb, cubed
    For the marinade
    1 bottle dry white wine
    1 onion, chopped
    1 carrot, chopped
    3 garlic cloves, crushed
    1 tbsp olive oil
    Salt
    Parsley, bay leaf
    Zest from half an orange
    To add to the daube
    6 shallots, chopped
    3 garlic cloves, chopped
    4 tomatoes, skinned and chopped
    Salt
    Put the marinade ingredients, with the exception of the wine, with the lamb in a non-reactive dish. Pour over enough wine to cover. Put on the lid, and leave overnight.
    The next day, lift out the lamb and put it in a heavy casserole; pour the marinade over it through a sieve, discarding the solid ingredients. Add the chopped shallots, garlic, tomatoes and salt (remember that the marinade contained salt). Mix everything together, and pack it in quite tightly. If the marinade doesn’t cover the ingredients, do not worry at this stage, because the meat and vegetables will generate a good deal of further liquid. Bring the contents of the casserole, uncovered, very slowly to a simmer on top of the hob; you can allow an hour or more to get to this point. 1 Skim off the scum as it rises. Cover, and put in a gas mark 1/140°C oven, or at a setting that will maintain a very gentle simmer, until the lamb is tender – start checking after another hour. Skim off what fat you can from the surface; or, better, leave overnight (in the fridge), and lift off the solidified fat the next day. 2 If you have kept the stew overnight, warm it up gently, but do not cook it