On a Thursday evening in late April, Rosa Whittaker put two pounds of dried Tarbais beans into a stockpot of cold water on her counter in Toronto and went to bed.
The beans soaked overnight. By Friday morning they had doubled in volume and the water had turned faintly cloudy, which is what it should do.
She drained them, covered them with fresh water by two inches, and set them on the back burner of her stove to cook slowly with an onion, a head of garlic split crosswise, four sprigs of thyme, and a small ham hock from a butcher on Roncesvalles Avenue.
They cooked at a bare simmer for two and a half hours, until they were tender but still held their shape. She salted the broth at the end, drained the beans, reserved the cooking liquid, and put both into the refrigerator overnight.
On Friday afternoon she pulled two legs of duck confit from a jar she had put up in November, scraped the rendered fat into a small bowl, and let the legs come to room temperature on a plate.
She also browned a pound of garlic pork sausage from her butcher, cut into thick slices, and a pound of pork shoulder cut into one-inch cubes, in a heavy skillet over medium-high heat, in batches, until the surfaces were the colour of toasted hazelnuts.
She deglazed the skillet with a cup of white wine, scraping up the brown bits with a wooden spoon, and reserved the liquid.
On Saturday morning she assembled the cassoulet in her aunt's cazuela, an unglazed earthenware vessel about fourteen inches across and four inches deep, that her aunt Maeve Whittaker brought back from a year in Toulouse in 1979 and gave to Rosa when she moved into her first apartment in 2003.
The order of layering, she has found, matters less than the cooks of southwest France would have you believe. What matters is that the beans, the meats, and the liquid are roughly evenly distributed and that the top layer is beans.
She layered beans, sausage and pork, beans, duck legs torn into pieces, beans again, and poured over the reserved bean broth and the wine deglaze until the liquid came up to about a half inch below the top layer of beans.
She dotted the top with three tablespoons of the duck fat and slid the cazuela into a 300-degree oven at one in the afternoon.
It cooked, uncovered, for the next six hours. Every ninety minutes she pushed the crust that formed on top down into the beans with the back of a wooden spoon, a step the Toulousains call casser la croûte and Rosa calls breaking the crust.
She broke the crust four times across the afternoon. By the fifth crust, around seven in the evening, the top was a dark, mottled brown, the beans were creamy, the broth had reduced and thickened, and the kitchen smelled like the inside of a French country restaurant in a small town with a single hotel.
She did not break the fifth crust. She let it sit, untouched, for another twenty minutes in the cooling oven, and then pulled the pot.
It rested on the counter for thirty minutes. She served it at the kitchen table to her husband, Mateo Hernández-Pratt, and to their friends Iris and Joachim Bell-Tóth, with a green salad, a baguette from a bakery on College Street, and a bottle of a southern French red Mateo had been keeping for an occasion.
There was enough cassoulet for the four of them on Saturday and for Rosa's lunch on Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday.
It got better each day, as cassoulet does. The flavours settled. The beans absorbed the broth more completely. The crust, reheated under a low broiler on Tuesday, was almost the best part.
Whittaker does not make cassoulet often. Three or four times a year, mostly between November and April. It is a significant commitment of time, oven space, and refrigerator real estate.
But once she has begun, she has found, there is very little active work. The beans cook themselves. The meats sear in twenty minutes. The assembly takes ten. The long oven time is the whole point.
The cazuela has cracked once, in 2015, along the bottom, and she had it repaired with copper staples by a ceramic conservator in Hamilton named Pekka Toivonen, who charged her sixty dollars and told her the crack would not get worse if she warmed the pot slowly. He was right.
Whittaker has been cooking from this pot for twenty-three years. It is the only one in her kitchen she will not consider replacing.
She does not believe there is a single correct cassoulet. The version her aunt learned in Toulouse used mostly pork. The version her butcher recommends uses more duck. The version she has settled on uses both, in roughly equal measure, with the sausage as the bridge.
What does not change, in any version, is the long oven time, the broken crust, the days the dish needs to settle into itself, and the heavy old pot that holds it all together.
