Reveillion: Cassoulet for Christmas

With the familiar, joyous customs that Christmas brings—the decorations, caroling, gifting, toasting and enjoying lively repasts with family and friends—the merriment of the holiday season is nearly inescapable.

In New Orleans, the 160- year-old tradition of Reveillon Dinners reflecting the city’s Creole heritage continues to add even more charm and opportunity for celebration during the season.

In the mid 1800s, families attended midnight mass together at St. Louis Cathedral on Christmas Eve after fasting all day, returning home at 2 am to elaborate multi-course dinners. The ritual was repeated on New Year’s Eve with an even bigger celebration following mass, often with singing and dancing and feasting throughout the night and into the next day and evening.

An adaptation of the treasured Reveillon custom was revived some thirty years ago as part of the city’s annual holiday festival, now called Christmas In New Orleans.

Today’s Reveillon is celebrated nightly throughout the city during December so that diners can share in the holiday culinary custom. This season, forty-seven restaurants are offering four-course dinners featuring timeless local cuisine from the city’s most talented chefs.

Participants are encouraged to borrow from the past, often updating the distinctive culinary specialties originating from the richly flavored mix of cultures and utilizing readily available, abundant seasonal ingredients and produce.

Looking at this year’s menus, noteworthy numbers of duck, quail, pheasant, squab, game hens, flounder, trout, redfish, shrimp, oysters, mirlitons, and other seasonal, natural resources appear in many courses offered.

But the main ingredient of note is pork. From the hoof to the tail, few parts are spared in creating the amazing dishes, flavors and textures in so many different concoctions. Whether in sausages, boudin mixtures, chops, or collard greens—pork is everywhere.

Of particular interest this year, six restaurants have created individual variations on cassoulet, the classic white bean dish from southwestern France’s Languedoc region.

The rich, slow-cooked savory casserole offers complex flavors from herbs, stock, meats (bacon, pork sausages, lamb, and duck or geese) and is sometimes finished off with a crusty breadcrumb topping, although many French traditionalists reportedly decry the practice.

Regional variations of the dish produce slightly different preparations in Languedoc’s three main towns and villages, but many other versions exist in smaller communities in the area as well as in villagers’ homes.

Legend has it that the dish dates back to the fourteenth-century siege on the town of Castelnaudary by the black prince, Edward, Prince of Wales. Townspeople gathered what food remained and cooked up the multi-ingredient, hardy stew in a large cauldron to fortify their troops for battle.

Acknowledged as Languedoc’s cassoulet capital—although the dish is a traditional favorite in neighboring Gascony as well —Castelnaudary’s ancient recipe calls for duck confit, pork shoulder and sausage.

In Carcassonne, the enchanting, medieval walled city, a cassoulet’s typical ingredients include pork, lamb or mutton, with partridge sometimes replacing the duck. In Toulouse, duck, pork and lamb round out the cassoulet.

Steeped in history, myth and religion, the legends and folklore surrounding cassoulet are not so distant from our homegrown Reveillon traditions.

At New Orleans’s Bourbon House, Executive Chef Darin Nesbit offers a classic smoked duck cassoulet as an entrée choice for the restaurant’s Reveillon dinner.

Nesbit is no stranger to cassoulet or its earthy components. “We order about three pigs a week and about a hundred and twenty ducks,” he said, “just for Bourbon House.”

Sourced from local farms—Covey Rise in Husser, Louisiana, and Chappapeela in Amite—Nesbit and company are making tasso, salamis, pork belly, prosciutto, head cheese, pancetta, duck rillettes, paté and terrines, andouille, duck and other sausages.

Some of the products are served on a charcuterie board as the chef’s daily selection—as an entrée at lunch and appetizer at dinner.

Meats from the same livestock and waterfowl are used in the Reveillon menu’s cassoulet. Nesbit adds a pig’s trotter to the beans to add an extra depth of flavor, removing it when the beans are cooked.

The duck confit legs are baked in a slow oven with thyme and garlic overnight and duck sausages are prepared in-house.

“We’ve had cassoulet on the fall menu on and off before,” he said, “and even prepared a Louisiana seafood cassoulet for a Reveillon dinner a few years ago.”

At Besh Steak, Executive Chef Todd Pulsinelli is serving an entrée selection of red bean cassoulet with pork belly, green onion sausage and crispy pig tail.

Pulsinelli said, “I love cassoulet because you can change it around and ‘mess’ with it.”

He chose New Orleans’s red beans rather than the traditional white beans and thought the pig tails atop the dish would be a crazy, crispy fun element in the assemblage.

With Pulsinelli’s access to Mangalitsa pigs, farm-raised by the Besh Restaurant Group for all of its eateries, he makes use of not only the tails, but also the pork belly as well as the bones to make stock. He prepares the sausage from the pork butt with the addition of green onions and other seasonings.

The pork belly is slow-cooked at 250 degrees overnight with onions, white wine, celery and carrots. “The fat renders out,” he said, “so the meat becomes crisp. Then I portion it out, season and sear in a pan before plating.”

At SoBou in the French Quarter’s W hotel, Chef Juan Carlos Gonzalez said, “This is one of my favorite seasons to cook and create. I love the ingredients available. I love cassoulet; it is truly comfort food,” or in this case, gourmet comfort food.

Although a big fan of traditional cassoulet, Chef Gonzalez wanted to do a deconstruction. “This is a classic dish that I respect, but I thought it would be fun to do it kind of SoBou-ish, incorporating our own style.”

The dish—Covey Rise Farms duck leg confit with dirty duck boudin, turducken sausage, white bean and foie gras purée—is the single entrée offered on SoBou’s four course Reveillon menu.

Gonzalez also decided to use ingredients that were already in the kitchen for current menu dishes. “The more I thought about it, I considered ‘… why not a dirty duck boudin with duck liver, duck confit, some herbs, and pork skin in the rice mixture and garnish it with duck cracklings?’”

Instead of using casings to hold the boudin, he just cooks the ingredients, mixing and pressing them together like a dressing, then places the confit duck leg across the aromatic, tasty mixture.

Gonzalez uses the braising liquid from the duck boudin and leg to make a jus, adding a hint of molasses for sweetness and color. He also takes some of the duck bacon from the menu’s foie gras burger to garnish the dish.

The white beans are puréed with foie gras, then grilled turducken sausage—made from duck, turkey and pork—tops off an extraordinary dish.

At Windsor Court Hotel, new Executive Chef Kristin Butterworth, a native of Pennsylvania, has had some wonderful experiences with cassoulet over the years.

She gets her inspiration from her grandmother’s Christmas dinners. “I’m from an Italian background, so we always had a pot of white beans cooking on the stove during the holiday season and at other family gatherings,” she said.

Her Reveillon dish, served as a second course, is another deconstruction, encompassing braised pork belly, Gulf shrimp, white bean cassoulet, garlic jus and fried baby sage.

Butterworth places the braised, crisped pork belly atop the bean mixture, which has been cooked in pork stock, bacon and seasonings, then partially puréed and mixed with a portion of the whole cooked beans.

The shrimp are sous vide, wrapped in a vacuum sealed pouch and placed in a thermal circulator, ensuring optimal flavor and texture and locking in the food’s natural taste, nutrients and moisture.

Although this is her first Reveillon experience, Butterworth gets it. “That’s what we are trying to do here at Windsor Court, use contemporary techniques to tie in to New Orleans’ classic culinary traditions with local ingredients, creating flavors that evoke the history and culture of this colorful area.”

At Commander’s Palace, rock star Chef Tory McPhail is serving a wild game bird cassoulet with game bird confit, heirloom legumes and smoked sausage.

McPhail, who grew up on his family’s farm in the agricultural community of Ferndale, Washington, holds great respect for fresh, locally sourced foods.

Since arriving at Commander’s over a decade ago, McPhail has been involved with many Reveillon dinners over the years and appreciates the traditions, history and symbolism involved.

“Spending time with Ella [Brennan], Dottie, Ti, Lally and their extended family around the table through many Christmases inspires me to recreate the dishes they grew up enjoying,” he said.

“We take what the south Louisiana bounty offers us,” McPhail continued. “That’s what the seasons are all about in a culinary sense.”

McPhail notes that he’s quite fond of reading old cookbooks. “I love learning more about these time honored traditions and recipes that still resonate in the hearts and appetites of diners.”

Details. Details. Details.

For more information on Christmas in New Orleans and to preview the Reveillon Dinner menus, go to www.neworleansonline.com/holiday or call French Quarter Festivals, Inc. at (504) 522-5730.