Then to the butcher, where I found a great roll of pig skin in the freezer: check. They cut me a ham hock to order, and gave me a pound of pork shoulder too. (Cost: $16.57.)
Then to the next butcher, for the pancetta. (Cost: $13.92.)
Then to the third butcher, as I'd failed to pick up "fresh hard pork fat or blanched salt pork" at the first two. (Cost: I couldn't find any, I was sick of shopping, and the recipe asked for just a little bit, so I skipped it.)
Then to the venerable Brooklyn food emporium Sahadi's—which felt a little like cheating. If part of the point was to see how practical it was to acquire these things, I already had an advantage (living in Brooklyn) even before going to one of the best grocery stores I've ever been to. Surely this project wouldn't play in Peoria. Still, a guy's gotta do what a guy's gotta do when he needs some expensive French meat products, and Sahadi's had both Toulouse-style sausages and duck confit, though not the Tarbais beans. So, another shortcut: I conceded defeat and got cannellinis. (Cost: $55.98. Caveat: The recipe called for six confit of duck legs. None of the duck legs cost less than $12 each and even though I was going to expense this I couldn't bring myself to commit to the full half dozen. I settled on four. [Ed. note: Thanks, Sam.])
Total cost: $97.37. (Estimated cost with all the duck legs: $120.)
After that, everything got simpler. Cassoulet—this recipe, anyways—takes a lot of time but most of it is waiting around. On the first day you season some of the meat and set it in the fridge overnight, and soak the beans. On the second day you simmer a ragout of white beans and cuts of pork, then refrigerate this again overnight to "develop the flavors."
Things get a little messier on game day. You find yourself spreading random pieces of pork across the kitchen counter as you cut meat from bone. The pig skin ends up lining the bottom of the pot the cassoulet cooks in. The confit is steamed so the meat falls of its bones. Ingeniously, a whole head of garlic you've cooked with the beans the previous day is pureed with fresh garlic, some pork fat, and water, to make a heady new broth for ... further simmering the beans. Add reserved meats, add confit, simmer again in the oven. Sear and add sausage: return to oven. Somewhere in all this it occurs to you that you could've easily done your back a favor and halved the recipe.
But then it's done and it's dinnertime and you find that the food is so rich that even a small amount of it is more than enough to send you to the nearest comfortable chair, and your boyfriend is about to go out of town for a while and you've got enough leftovers to fill a Volkswagen. Hopefully there's room in the freezer! But this isn't the worst leftover to have—it's rich, transcendentally meaty, and possessed of its own completely unique flavor in the way of foods that have cooked long and slowly enough to really meld with one another. It pleases you deeply. It more than fills you up. It makes you wonder if there's anybody around who's looking to hire a woodcutter.
