Wonderful Clafoutis, But So Many Versions

Over at the food portal Serious Eats, Robin Bellinger writes that she took her second stab at making clafoutis, a custardy French dessert that is usually made with cherries. She wasn't sure at first how this version would turn out, but

. . . in the evening my husband pronounced it irresistible. I was truly sold the next day when I had a sliver of clafoutis straight out of the refrigerator; the flavor and texture of the clafoutis were best when it was cold.

She even pitted her own cherries. Impressive. I have a clafoutis recipe, and I'm pretty happy with it. But what I find curious is that no two clafoutis recipes are identical. There seems to be some distinction from one to the next. I noticed that this recipe contains more than a cup of milk, while this recipe calls for exactly 1 cup of milk, and this one contains only 3/4 cup.

One thing that probably trips up amateur cooks who try their hand at clafoutis is the fact that the batter is so runny. I'm willing to bet that many people try to "fix" that runniness, and what results is a custardy texture that is denser than it should be.

Frozen French Food

I guess one weird food-related story (see my last post) deserves another. Police in the French city of Lyon have discovered the body of renowned chef Jean-Francois Poinard -- in an apartment freezer. The body may have been in the freezer for two years.

Poinard represented the fourth generation of a cooking dynasty, and a French newspaper hailed him as one of the "great names" in gastronomy. He was 71 years old when he disappeared. A former girlfriend has been taken into custody.

Tinkering With a French Classic

Cassoulet is one of my favorite dishes, especially this time of the year. It's the quintessential French "peasant entree." Leftovers from larger meals -- usually pork shoulder and duck legs -- are combined with white beans, chopped tomato and garlic in a large crock, which is covered with bread crumbs and baked.

Cassoulet originates from the southwest region of France, where three cities claim to be the sites where the dish was first prepared. Does it contain lamb sausage or not? Should it contain mutton or even partridge? It seems that every restauranteur or family in this part of France has a strong opinion on such questions.

As much as I like the food at La Chaumiere in D.C.'s Georgetown, I was disappointed by the cassoulet that I ate there a month or so ago. The beans were overcooked and they got skimpy on the meat. On the other hand, the cassoulet that I had last week at Bistrot d'Oc in downtown was superb.

Cassoulet is a labor-intensive meal to prepare. There's a lot of cooking, cutting, dicing and assembling. This recipe for cassoulet from Food & Wine magazine looks good, but I doubt that I will ever go to the trouble of trying to cook this at home.

If you'd like to make cassoulet at home, you're better off relying on this recipe that Adam Roberts adapted and posted on his blog, The Amateur Gourmet.

If you really want to simplify the recipe, then try this one from the N.Y. Times' Mark Bittman, although even he calls it a "heresy" compared to the original restaurant version of cassoulet.

I even found this recipe for chicken cassoulet. Knowledge of its existence would probably cause convulsions at a Cordon Bleu cooking school. Using an Italian cheese in a French entree? Incroyable!