You may not have heard of the Chauriens and the Chauriennes, they are the inhabitants of Castelnaudary, a small town within the Aude departement in the South of France, which is located between Toulouse and Caracassonne and well-know worldwilde for its cassoulet.
The name of La Belle Chaurienne is a good choice since it has been established for more than 40 years in this beautiful town of Castelnaudary and is the standard-bearer of its gastronomic know-how. Indeed, La Belle Chaurienne’s cassoulets can be found everywhere in France and in almost all the supermarkets. Thanks to the success of our recipe, we can be found also abroad : Great-Britain, Spain, Denmark, … and farer in Hong-Kong!
The success of La Belle Chaurienne can be attributed to our inimitable cassoulets as well as our excellent range of quality recipes such as : duck confit, foie gras, coq au vin, poulet basquaise, lentils based meals, pâtés, … and many more : cooked vegetables, and culinary ingredients like goose fat or duck gizzards.
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For more information about La Belle Chauriennerange and products visit their website.
All about cassoulets
The town marshal wanted to put more guts into his defending army by feeding them a sumptuous meal (putting in whatever food-stuff the inhabitants could lay their hands on) before throwing them into a furious charge against the enemy.
In the warehouses of the besieged town, there remained a large quantity of beans, which allowed the fortress cooks to put together a gigantic stew, enhanced by the different meat gravies, like fresh and salted pork, goose, dry sausage, all lending to this excellent recipe. The dishes were heated up into the town oven and so they have been browned.
After having been fully-fortified by this lavish feast, and which goes without saying was of course washed down by any available local wine, the people of Castelnaudary only then left the banquet table to attack the English army, firing their old, jam-packed culverins.
Their stampede was so furious and the noise from their culverins so loud and terrible that the besieging troops panicked, believing that in the town (which they had miscalculated) was the existence of such a formidable artillery, that they didn’t stop running (according to the legend of Castelnaudary) until the English Channel coast.
This browned dish was appreciated and the people of Castelnaudary kept cooking it in small terrines or “cassoles”.
Besides, the name cassoulet comes from this typical earthenware bowl. The best cassoles are made in Issel in Aude, with the so special clay of this region, and since the XIVe century.
The mandatory ingredients of a Castelnaudary cassoulet are generous pieces of meats (duck, goose, pork), eventually preserved, pure pork sausages well peppered and lingots beans. This type of beans is the most appropriate to the cassoulet long cooking. And it is said that they are never so well cooked than when they are with Castelnaudary water, which apparently has special properties.
It is very long to prepare a good cassoulet. You have to start 12 hours before with the beans soaking and you need at least 3 hours of cooking, while you mustn’t forget to break the “crust” appearing on the surface, 7 times according to the tradition. In the past, people used to heat their cassoulet in the baker oven during mass.
It is also very long to learn the specific know-how of each step : beans soaking, preserving duck, seasoning, Toulouse sausage, cooking, … The recipe is still sometimes transmitted from generation to generation but nowadays, it is really rare to find a home-made cassoulet. For those who do not have time or who do not know how, do not hesitate to choose La Belle Chaurienne : as a great representative of its region, La Belle Chaurienne respects each point of the recipe and many would tell you that its cassoulet is like “home-made”.
All about foies gras
Effectively, wild goose seems to have been “programmed” to stuff itself before its anual long migration. Indeed, it is not the only animal to stock fat as energy before periodes of intense efforts or long fasting but it has, and ducks too, the capacity to stock spontaneously a large part of this fat in its liver. You have to know that foies gras are not sick livers : they have no cancer or cirrhosis. As soon as stuffing is stopped, liver comes back to its normal size, as in nature when goose or duck ends its migration.
We can easily imagine that those naturally fat animals were already noticed and appreciated by prehistoric hunters and that, when agriculture and livestock farming developed, it came to people to capture and stuff geese.
Egyptians were the first to stuff geese. They have noticed that, during Spring, before their migration, wild geese grown fat. And since the 3rd millenium before JC, Egyptians used to capture geese before they left and to keep overfeeding them by putting into their beack small sausages or small pellets of cereal paste, while massaging their neck to make the ingestion easier. Egyptians could then enjoy well fat geese. But Romans were the first to stuff geese only for their livers, with dried figs. And Greeks were probably the first to stuff ducks.
Thanks to Gaul conquest by Romans, stuffing techniques arrived in France and particularly in Aquitaine were people kept using them after Romans left, instead of others regions.
Later, Christophe Colomb, because he brought back corn, gave an unexpected extent to duck livestock farming in the South-West where this cereal well became acclimatized. And it is still true nowadays when South-West foie gras is a must-have.
It is even certified by a Protected Geographical Indication (PGI). This protection guaranties that these foies gras come from ducks of Barbarie, best species for stuffing, that these ducks were borned, raised, stuffed, slaughtered and carved in the South-West. It guaranties also that these ducks were fed with cereals and stuffed with South-West corn. These ducks were also raised outdoor, with a limited number of ducks by farm. La Belle Chaurienne offers you foies gras certified by this PGI.
