Never even heard of this heretical recipe. I think it was something made to fake a long properly made one.
I agree …
Bone marrow? Where is that drooling smiley =)
I use LaRousse Gastr. as my main cookbook, and the Cassoulet d’Isigny is my go to version - though I tend to use confit of chicken leg [cheaper than duck] along with garlic sausage on top, and inside leftover roast beef, roast lamb and roast pork. I peel off the excess chicken fat from chicken when I prep it for cooking and when I get a few pounds of it, I add lard to make enough to confit a dozen or so chicken legs at a time and make a few dozen confitted legs and freeze them [I can use the same batch of fat to confit several batches of chicken legs because I never season the fat]
Yes it will self crust, and I generally leave the crumbs off, but the reason it is baked is because it is a casserole, a food designed to use up the leftover heat of the baking oven, the local baker did his run of bread at some ungodly hour of the morning, then he did ‘communal baking’ - the local women would bring pies and casseroles and for a small fee he would put them in to use up the rest of the heat n his ovens, creating foods for the households that didn’t have their own ovens. Sort of a hold over of the old feudal system [monastaries and the land owners owned tings like the bake houses and flour mills and charged a fee for the tenants to use the facilities. In general households only had fireplaces where they could spit roast and use pans over the coals or only had braziers to cook over in pans. A full on stove able to bake with is very modern, call it late Victorian or so.
I can make damned near anything, if I really want to. I do use premade pie crust, spaghetti sauce, canned pumpkin, though I don’t use instant mashed potatoes, boxed cake/muffin/bread mixes - and I make a damned good loaf of bread, when I was growing up Mom and I baked the weeks bread on Saturdays for 6 or 7 years [Beard on Bread’s Italian bread is one I can make in my sleep, and probably have. snicker]
I can’t personally testify to this because I haven’t tried it. But I’ve seen this method suggested by several people.
Bring a big pot of water to a boil. Fill another big pot with ice water.
Gather your tomatoes. Cut a small x (about an inch across) in the bottom of each tomato (the end opposite the stem). Put each tomato in the boiling water for twenty-five seconds. Then lift it out and put it in the ice water. (You can probably do more than one tomato at a time but don’t lose track of them. You don’t want them in the boiling water for too long.)
Do this for all the tomatoes. The skins will then supposedly pull right off.
I home can about 50 quarts of tomatoes (about 4 bushels) every year and I take even more shortcuts with the skinning process.
I don’t bother with the ‘X.’ I don’t bother with the ice water. I just drop about a dozen whole tomatoes into boiling water for a minute or so, depending on size. The tomatoes cool fairly quickly, at least enough to handle, because they’re not heated all the way through. While the first batch is cooling, I slip another dozen into the boiling water. While the second batch is cooling, I skin the first batch.
Core the tomato with a paring knife while simultaneously slipping off the skin. With practice, you can do this in pretty much 1 quick motion – but be careful! If you’re not paying attention, you can cut yourself easily.
I then slice the tomato in half and stuff it into a prepared canning jar, meaning sterilized and 2 TB commercial lemon juice added to the jar. I also add a teaspoon of salt to each quart, but that’s a matter of personal preference.
I run two water bath canners to process 14 quarts at a time (90 minutes to process), so a couple of afternoons invested in canning yields a generous year’s worth of home canned deliciousness that tastes of summer all year long.
I understand it’s not everyone’s cup of tea to do this. Worth it to me, because I obviously love tomatoes and I just enjoy doing it. (Don’t even ask how many I dehydrate every year.)
I use can tomatoes (crushed, puree’d, diced or whole) to make spaghetti sauce but I never buy Ragu or Progresso. I have also made spaghetti sauce from tomatoes from my garden but only when Mother Nature blesses me with baskets full of them. It never occurred to me to make spaghetti sauce from store bought tomatoes. That is certainly not worth the trouble. Store bought fresh tomatoes would make terrible sauce.
P.S. Sometimes my homemade from the garden sauce comes out pink. Especially if I plant Celebrity tomatoes. They make a WHOLE lot of tomatoes but their flesh is very pale. Taste fine, though. Also, if I only used garden tomatoes, I’d have spaghetti sauce maybe 3 times a year, and that ain’t right!
ETA: Yeah, that’s how I peel tomatoes-- X, boil, ice water, rub.
Amen to that. I tried making it once years ago, using a whole chicken. I ended up with fried chicken blobs and more Crisco on the stove and walls than in the skillet.
I used to make brownies from scratch. Honestly, the boxed Ghiardelli double chocolate brownies doctored up (I add nuts or heath bars) are the bomb.
Counterargument: Not if it’s a specific family tradition (i.e., Christmas Eve dinner for the whole gathered family. Used to be Mom’s meal to orchestrate, but after she passed we continued the tradition with my sister (the older of the two) stepping in.
But true in the most general use case: it’s a hell of a lot of work, and (like a lot of very complicated Japanese meals), if made in any great quantity, the cook is often stuck eating after everyone else has finished. (Because they’ve been busy cooking the “seconds” round of it while everyone else is eating their first round.)
Me, too. And pumpkin pie and mincemeat filling (well, I already know I’m a weirdo for liking mincemeat I guess). Mincemeat filling is easy enough : boil chopped apples and raisins and spices for a few hours; but not much better than the jarred stuff.
Also, bakery desserts, like Viennese cakes with six different layers. Sure, it was good, but not worth making six different layers for. And eclairs aren’t hard to make, but unless you’re having a party or a bake sale near a refrigerator, what are you going to do with two dozen eclairs?
There are two similar-looking things in cans: “whipped dessert topping”, made of white paint and chemical thickeners, and real whipping cream, which does in fact taste like cream. I mean, it’s not that hard to get a bowl, a hand-held mixer, dump in some cream, a spoonful of sugar and a half-spoon of vanilla, and beat for two minutes, so most of the time I don’t see the point of even the real cream stuff, but there is stuff in a can that’s not nasty.
I acknowledge IvoryTowerDenizen’s point, but I have to say my experience matches Johnny L.A.'s. Homemade corn bread is one of those effortless, “got the recipe memorized and don’t have to consult”, bulletproof works-every-time things, and my family recipe is a thousand miles better than that horrid mix stuff from the box.
My own nomination is pie crust. If I spend an hour rolling dough out with the rolling pin and getting flour all over ever freaking surface in the kitchen and cram the results into a pie shell, the outcome is less pleasing than if I’d just purchased a grocery store pie crust. I know it’s because I’m inexperienced and not very good at it, and that some folks make spectacular homemade pie crust, but still.
Pie crust is a pain in the ass. It’s worth it, but it’s so much easier to just make a crumble topping.
Pizza dough is hard to make? Seriously? OK, I do have a mixer and dough hook. But it’s literally yeast, water, flour, and salt. Wake up the yeast in warm water, dump it in the mixer with the flour and salt, turn it on to knead for a few minutes, let it proof for a couple of hours, and that’s it.
It’s super-easy. Same with, you know, mashed potatoes. The mind boggles.
A couple times I’ve made fried wontons from scratch. Never again. Costco sells giant bags of frozen potstickers.
