Fava bean estouffet (pre-haricot cassoulet layer) Period COrigin theory CVerified

Before the white bean came in, the historian Loïc Bienassis says, the bean of Languedoc was the fava. That bean, called favolles, is the star here. Long rooted in the soil of Languedoc, it was a staple always on hand in farmhouse kitchens, whether fresh or dried. The beans were smothered for hours over a low flame together with scraps of pork and goose, a slow braise that went by the name estouffet (étouffée). In the pot they drank up the fat of the meat and cooked down until they fell apart—an everyday stew of the countryside.

No cook is named behind the dish, and it has no founding year. It went on being made in the farmhouse kitchens of Languedoc, from beans and meat that were already at hand there.

Later the white haricot bean reached Europe from the New World. What it went into was a different pot: the one medieval French called haricot, or haricot de mouton, and that was the name of a dish rather than the name of a bean. The fourteenth-century cookbook Le Viandier, attributed to Taillevent, sets out what went into it: breast of mutton, browned and then stewed with onions, with no beans at all. From the sixteenth century the newly arrived white bean went into that mutton pot, and in time the bean took over the name haricot itself.

The fava bean estouffet carried on in the farmhouses of Languedoc as a pot apart from that haricot. The dish of white beans took the name cassoulet only in the nineteenth century; the estouffet belongs to an earlier layer.

"Cassoulet is an old dish, going back to the Middle Ages," people like to say—a phrase that folds two things into one. That a pot of beans and meat was braised for hours in medieval Languedoc is one claim; that cassoulet as we know it had taken shape by then is another. What gives today's cassoulet its character is the white haricot bean, which came from the New World and was not in France before the sixteenth century. The name cassoulet, too, traces back no further than the nineteenth century in the dictionary of the Académie française. What is old is the manner of the braise, not the plate that now carries the name.

Where this confusion swelled up most spectacularly is the founding legend of Castelnaudary. In 1355, in the thick of the Hundred Years' War, the besieged townspeople are said to have fortified themselves on a stew of beans and meat and driven the English off—a piece of local heroism the town still tells. The record runs otherwise: that year the English Black Prince sacked and burned Castelnaudary on his way from Bordeaux toward the Mediterranean coast. The siege the legend rests on never took place. The historian Loïc Bienassis, quoted by National Geographic, says as much: the tale of a besieged town has no basis in history.

The word haricot is the other thing easily mixed into this. In medieval French, haricot (haricot de mouton) was the name of a dish rather than the name of a bean, and what the fourteenth-century Le Viandier gives under it is a ragout of mutton breast and onions, without a single bean in it. The cookbook says nothing about a stew of fava beans. The white bean from the New World joined that mutton pot and in time came away with its name. One bean had not replaced another; what had changed was the thing the name pointed to.

So how far back can the fava bean estouffet itself be followed? Setting this stew down as what came before cassoulet rests, for now, on what that historian told National Geographic. No account book or local cookbook of Languedoc naming the estouffet has yet surfaced.