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Culinary Olympics: Cassoulet DivisionMaking the difficult dish to distract from the recession.

By Katherine LanpherPosted Wednesday, Feb. 25, 2009, at 10:44 AM ET

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Apparently, I wasn't, either. How else to explain the hours I devoted to locating a store that carried tarbais beans, the white kidney-shaped legume you presumably could pick up at the Safeway in Castelnaudary? I did find them in a bricks-and-mortar store in this country called Kalustyans but only by dint of an article on a spirituality blog, Guideposts, in which a writer named Rosie Schaap described a similar quest.

And moderation surely doesn't describe the picture I presented when I maneuvered past a tight-lipped server at Anthony Bourdain's Park Avenue restaurant, Les Halles, so I could sweet-talk the white-jacketed man at the butcher case into selling me saucisses de Toulouse, the garlic sausage most properly put into a cassoulet.

In my own defense, I will point out that I resisted the temptation of ordering my own cassoulet pot, made to the specifications of food writer Paula Wolfert by a pottery gallery in Hutchinson, Minn., called the Clay Coyote. And, luckily, there wasn't time for me to follow the Cassoulet Route prescribed in French by an organization in Carcassone called the Academie Universelle du Cassoulet.

Still, clearly, I had lost it. But I wasn't alone. I invited a tableful of carnivores to share my labors, but one couple demurred: They had already scheduled their own cassoulet for the same night. You think I was overreaching? They had made their own sausage and their own confit—of lamb belly.

Our phone conversations sounded practically Talmudic as we reverently intoned the names of food writers and their recipes for cassoulet: Have you read the Paula Wolfert? The Julia Child? The Simone Beck? Check, check, and check. Since I live in Manhattan and they live in Brooklyn, the cassoulet battle of the boroughs began.

Competition quickly turned into commiseration, however. Their first batch of beans had to be thrown out; I couldn't believe how long it took to make homemade bread crumbs for the crust. Should they brown the top? Had I cooked the duck enough? Eventually, they just flipped on the speakerphone for their kitchen extension so we could conference more easily.

The big night arrived, and I nervously broke the crust on top of my cassoulet. It was perfect. I filled plate after plate, and my apartment swirled with guests, so it wasn't until later in the evening that I was finally introduced to a woman who had been brought by a friend of mine. Her name was Rosie. Yes, she was my tarbais bean queen.

Culinary kismet doesn't happen very often. We screamed, everyone else screamed, and we all toasted the moment. Maybe it was all the duck fat talking, but I felt I had arrived in my own sisterhood of the cassoulet, flush with the success of a foodie quest successfully completed.

There is a Brotherhood of the Cassoulet, which you can read about in Saveur, whose members wear hats in the shape of the cassoule, the earthenware bowl that gave the dish its name, sort of a Gallic version of Green Bay Packer fans. I'd get one, but what do you think I am—crazy?