Z Whiz

The best cassoulet I ever had was made in one of my own kitchens by an insane, drunken Russian baker who didn't even know what cassoulet was. And technically, what he made wasn't a real cassoulet -- not the slow-cooked, rich, beautifully rustic winter farmhouse stew that's probably the most recognizable of all the French cuisine granmère -- but a wild mess of leftovers and bits and pieces that he would cook in a lidded stockpot sealed with raw bread dough, the components coming together to approximate cassoulet because ours was a rigorously French kitchen that produced rigorously French leftovers. Shredded duck confit and soft, prepped-for-service white beans that we used for à la minute purées; fresh mustard greens, concasse tomatoes and brown veal stock; sausages he brought from home in his pockets and fresh herbs he used for making rosemary boules and sage-scented flatbread -- he'd toss these all in the pot at 2 a.m. when he came into work, eat about two hours later, and leave any leftovers for the next day. The cooks and I would inevitably steal those for our breakfast, which pissed him off like you wouldn't believe. But he cooled out when we put his recipe on the menu -- calling it "cheater's cassoulet" in deference to its inauthentic provenance -- and started making it by the forty-quart stock pot because we sold out so quickly and so often. We'd hold out the last order -- which is the best order, always -- so he'd have lunch waiting every night when he came in.

That was the best cassoulet I've ever had. Z Cuisine's is the second-best, and the more authentic. This version combines a leg of duck confit on the bone, mild sausage (bratwurst some nights, other styles other nights, all fresh and locally produced), stiff white beans, bitter greens and whole cippolini onions gone soft as roasted garlic cloves, all in a thin, oily, almost-but-not-quite-broken tomato broth, muscled up with stock and deeply, richly flavored with the mingled essences of each individual ingredient. It shows restraint born of long practice, an expert's sense of balance, a love of good stock, good product and classical technique. And one bite will remind even the most recalcitrant epicure why the French deserve their reputation as the undisputed masters of cuisine both haute and basse, because there is nothing more comforting, nothing more filling or charming, than a real cassoulet expertly done.

The cassoulet usually appears on the chalkboard that serves as Z Cuisine's menu, a small slate that lists the night's dishes, written out longhand and mashed together so that the change in colored chalk is the only way to tell where one ends and the next begins, then 86'd with a slash as they run out -- but never erased, because there's no better tease than knowing what you could have eaten if you'd only arrived earlier. The roast pork on the bone? Sold out on a Friday night before seven, before the rush even gets going. On a Saturday, no cassoulet, no celeri soup with crème fraîche. The fish is gone, too, but I get the last of the watermelon radish -- fanned, lovely slices of pink and white dressed with dots of mellow mustard -- on the house assiette de campagnard. Dupays had picked up the radishes just that morning at the Boulder farmers' market, and already they're gone.