Introduction

Cassoulet Confessions is an enthralling memoir by award-winning food and travel writer Sylvie Bigar that reveals how a simple journalistic assignment sparked a culinary obsession and transcended into a quest for identity. Set in the stunning southern French countryside, this honest and poignant memoir conveys hunger for authentic food and a universal hunger for home.

In Cassoulet Confessions, Sylvie travels across the Atlantic from her home in New York to the origin of cassoulet – the Occitanie region of Southern France. There she immerses herself in all things cassoulet: the quintessential historic meat and bean stew. From her first spoonful, she is transported back to her childhood in Geneva, Switzerland, and finds herself journeying through an unexpected rabbit hole of memories. Not only does she discover the deeper meanings of her ancestral French cuisine, but she is ultimately transformed by having to face her unsettling, complex family history.

Sylvie’s simple but poetic prose immerses us in her story: we smell the simmering aromas of French kitchens, empathize with her family dilemmas, and experience her internal struggle to understand and ultimately accept herself.

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Excerpt

Prologue

Wobbly from almost 20 hours of travel, I swung open the metallic doors of the restaurant kitchen, put my bag down and stopped short. On the counter, next to the neatly folded apron and the heavy knife, a pig’s head stared me down with sad eyes filled with eternity.

But in my mind, I could still hear my six-year old daughter Zoe’s squeal, as I attempted to embrace her. She squirmed and pushed me away.

“No, Maman, don’t leave!” she wailed.

My husband Michael knelt on the carpet and held her as he waved me on, smiling bravely as our four-year-old son ran around the brick living room singing Ring Around The Rosie. Filled with both piercing guilt and elation, I took a deep breath, turned around, closed the front door behind me and headed to the airport.

It was April 2008 and I was a Swiss French food and travel writer based in New York City. Months earlier, I was discussing a story idea with one of the magazine editors for whom I tracked down unsung cooks, forgotten spices, and secret culinary traditions. “Here,” I’d said, as we pored over the map of France, my index finger wedged between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic Ocean, between Spain and Provence, over a French region named Occitanie— at the crossroads of history and civilizations.

“The local specialty is cassoulet,” I continued. “An ancestral meat and bean stew I hear tastes like velvet cocoa. Locals speak a mysterious language, they spread bizarre legends.”

“Go,” was all he answered.

I exhaled. My editor had just handed me the perfect escape: a few days of solo travel through France with a delicious purpose. Truth be told, I had been dying to take a break from what may have looked like the perfect urban picket life.

I’d grown up along two older sisters with disabilities, within a wealthy but wildly dysfunctional family, and sworn I would never have children. I managed to sail through my first marriage without diverting from that credo but a year into my second, I woke up one morning with a bad case of nesting fever. Perhaps, I thought, I could placate this new craving by adopting a dog. But once we brought Chocolat —named for the chocolate croissants of my childhood— home from the pound, the fierce love I felt for him just made me crave more love, a deeper connection. It was as if this puppy opened in me a door I didn’t know existed. Beyond that door hid a person I’d never met. A person who, from one minute to the next, stopped the pill after twenty years of steady use, got pregnant a few days later and who would spend the next nine months on an ecstatic trip, convinced that she had morphed into a magical vessel of life. One child turned out to be not enough. A year after my daughter was born, while leukemia gnawed at my beloved father, I became pregnant with a son.

Fast forward a few years, I wrote more about food than travel and turned into a stroller-pushing Upper West Side Mama. A Mama dying to escape.

Which explains why from my home in New York City, I flew to Paris and on to Toulouse where I caught a rickety train, beige paint peeling from its flanks, bound for magical, medieval Carcassonne and its 52 towers.

In Marseilles, I’d gotten high on bouillabaisse, the wildly fragrant fish and shellfish stew; in Strasbourg, I’d almost lost my heart to an Alsatian chef and his rustic choucroute, and in Dijon, lathered so much mustard on roast beef that the pile on my plate became known locally as a mustard sandwich . It was high time to dig into Occitanie’s cassoulet, the slow-cooked carnivorous orgy of pork, lamb, duck, beans and herbs stewed together in an earthenware tureen. The same dish that had been dubbed “the God of Occitan cuisine,” by Prosper Montagné who in 1938, penned the Larousse Gastronomique, the first encyclopedia of French recipes, culinary terms, and techniques.

More research and it seemed cassoulet had spurred a whole religion: In 1990, Chef Eric Garcia of Domaine Balthazar near Carcassonne rallied a local group made of activist-chefs, fervent foodies and vibrant vintners. Horrified by the mounting tide of “all-you-can-eat-cassoulet for eight euros” that threatened the region and possibly the world, they founded an association they named, simply, L'Académie Universelle du Cassoulet. No local or national modesty here, its crucial mission had to be universal: preserve and defend the ancestral dish.

That sounded like my kind of battle. A band of toques-wearing Davids rallying against the Goliaths of mass tourism and culinary debacle in defense of a mythical stew. A quick, fun story, I thought. I couldn’t have been more wrong. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

1. What food best represents you as a person?
2. If you could immerse yourself in a region and study the cuisine, where would you choose?
3. What is your first food memory?
4. What more would you like to know about Sylvie Bigar?
5. What food writers would you most like to dine with?
6. If you had to choose between cooking and baking, which would you pick?
7. What's your favorite novel about food?
8. Favorite foodie memoir?

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