Soixante-treize ans, et des haricots

Soixante-treize means 60-13. That comes to seventy-three. French has an idiosyncratic way of handling numbers starting with 70 (soixante-dix, or 60-10 up to 99 (quatre-vingt-dix-neuf). With 71, they throw you a curve ball by sticking an et in the middle: soixante-et-onze; sixty-and-eleven. And then they snatch that et back again with soixante-douze, soixante-treize, soixante-quatorze, soixante-quinze... And don't even talk about pronunciation. First, the X in soixante is pronounced like an S — say [swah-`sãt]. And don't pronounce the T of et in soixante-et-onze [swah-sã-té-`õz]. That little squiggly thing over the A or the O means the vowel is nasalized and the N following it is not pronounced; it just nasalizes the A or the O.

Anyway, today is my 73rd birthday. I'm 60-13 years old as of today. So what am I doing to celebrate? Well, I'm not having a party. And I'm not going to a restaurant. I'm cooking my own birthday lunch. Walt and I will enjoy it en tête à tête ("alone together" — just the two of us). Or is that en tête-à-tête? The authoritative book about French grammar and usage, titled Le Bon Usage, gives nearly a page of explanations and examples of writers who have written it different ways: un dîner en tête à tête or un dîner en tête-à-tête — or just un dîner tête à tête avec un ami for real purists.

So what am I cooking for this momentous occasion? I'm making a cassoulet de souris d'agneau. That's a pot of beans the way they cook them in southwestern France, around the cities of Toulouse, Castelnaudary, and Carcassonne. Each city has it's own style of bean-cooking, actually. The beans are haricots blancs, and you can use either the kind called haricots lingots ("ingots", unfortunately known as "slugs" of metal) or haricots tarbais (grown around the city of Tarbes). The Larousse Gastronomique food and cooking encyclopedia explains that in Castelnaudary, considered by many to be the birthplace of the dish, the cassoulet contains essentially cuts of pork along with an optional piece of confit of goose or duck. In Carcassonne, they put in some mutton or lamb and, in season, some partridge. In Toulouse they go all out, putting in cuts of pork including salt-cured pork belly and the local pork sausages (saucisses de Toulouse) along with some mutton or lamb, plus some confit of goose or duck.

My own cassoulet, with lamb, petit-salé (salt pork), and Toulouse sausages, will be what it is. Cassoulet de Saint-Aignan, I guess you could call it. Overnight, in the mijoteuse (slow-cooker), I've already cooked four souris d'agneau — so-called "lamb mice" because of their shape, which supposedly resembles a mouse's rounded shape. That's a lamb shank to you or me. I'm going to take the lean meat off the bones, maybe brown it a little bit in some duck fat, and then assemble the cassoulet by putting a layer of lamb in on top of a layer of beans, and then another layer of beans on top of the lamb with some sausages and pieces of salt pork pressed into it. I'll top all that with bread crumbs and bake the dish in the oven until it's hot all the way through and browned on top. The "ingot" beans are cooking in the mijoteuse now. More about that tomorrow, probably.