Cooking Julia Child's Cassoulet should be an Olympic Sport

The trick with these hodgepodge dishes is to identify each component, cook each one for dinner for each day of the week and save the leftovers to make your final dish at the end. You could have had: Pork and beans, Roast pork, Sausage cakes, and Braised lamb monday through thursday and turned all those leftovers into the cassoulet on friday.

As a French person, I have to admit that initially I was like "Oh, cassoulet is not that hard to make, surely this person is exaggerating." But then I heard "the recipe makes no attempt to cut corners," and I understood immediately how much of a nightmare this was going to be lol

As a french person who regularly cooks Cassoulet, I applaud your performance because there's no way in hell you'll get me to follow all those steps

My brother is 17 years older than I am. Cooking food was our thing. We'd have whole theme days. I went down and we cooked French food for 2 days, including this Cassloute. We felt like we climbed Everest! I think we ate 100,000 calories that day. My brother passed away in December or cancer. This will be my favorite memory of him I will treasure thoroughly in my life. :)

My French grandmother basically just cooked the meats veg and beans separately then threw them together into the oven. The bread crumb topping was only added at the end.She would be horrified to see how complicated Julia's recipe was.French peasants didn't have that much time!

julia single-handedly carrying the bay leaf industry

Normally when I'm watching a cooking show, it's pre-planned and organized ahead of time. Instead, this is what it looks like when I cook. 10/10

Julia had a very wicked sense of humour. A lot of people told me that she purposely overcomplicated her recipes to make them appear more difficult and "special than they should be. A French friend of mine said it was an affectation to make cassoulet a marathon overcomplicated meal so that your guests made the appropriate oohs and aaahs. Hilarious

I think the hardest part of dealing with Julia's recipes is really absorbing the context. A lot of them are ridiculously difficult taken altogether, but they become much easier in the context of a French family kitchen, where a lot of the odd ingredients are already prepped. This cassoulet is a great example: it's a way to use leftover meat up and stretch it a bit at the same time. So, if you've already got some sausage, braised lamb, and roast pork lying around from previous meals, it suddenly becomes much easier, especially if you're a poor country cook who probably always has some beans soaking to use the next day. It's probably normal to leave the pork skin in, too, for some extra protein. (If you don't want to deal with removing it, cutting it smaller so you don't get the texture in the final dish is probably easier than cutting it bigger to remove it... Although, while it may have been obvious when the beans were done, you probably wouldn't notice it in the finished cassoulet.) That's also why there's so many bay leaves and bouquets garnis: you actually made three dishes just to prep for the final dish. And it's where the regional arguments about what goes into a "real" cassoulet come from: different regions have different leftovers to deal with. Of course, Julia is always a fan of saving duck fat for all your browning, so that turned out to be a lucky break. I know I'm making it sound simple, but I don't mean to demean the effort you put into doing this right. The first time I dove into Julia Child's book, I figured the veal liver looked like the easiest recipe in the book, and I ended up with a full sink and a barely-edible dinner after four hours of work, so the fact that you managed a decent cassoulet on the first attempt is honestly amazing.

This is the most realistic cooking video I’ve ever seen. Especially the confusion and emotional distress. I relate to this deeply.

Julia's recipes are needlessly and ridiculously complicated. The first dish of hers I ever made was the Boeuf Bourguignon. Took me 4 hours to do when following her steps. I learned my lesson, eliminated half the steps and now the prep work can be done in 30 minutes. And it tastes just as good as hers.

First off, you might want to try making Pork Cracklings, or Pork skinned Braciole. Also, the Pork skins do absolutely belong in the dish. They will shrink in size when cooked (which is what she meant when she said that they'll disappear) and finally, it's not too late to add more stock or water to the consistency that pleases you.

"i feel that could use a little more butter" that's such a julia thing to say

What I love about Jamie is that he spills stuff, dirties up way more pots and pans than necessary, cuts himself, burns himself, buys the wrong ingredients, and is basically all of us staring at Julia's cookbook like a clueless deer in the woods. And at the end, his kitchen is a hot mess unlike what we see on tv cooking shows. Like, yeah, that recipe is dope but you're going to pay, not just in groceries.

As a culinary instructor, this is the most infuriating video I've ever seen. I seriously applaud your effort and I think you did a fantastic job. Julia is the GOAT for a reason.

OMG sooo very funny. I made this recently and nearly cried the whole way through. Asked my husband what he thought of it and he looked at me and said ‘think you can do better’. He nearly died that night. Never making it again.

I can't explain how a man cooking on the verge of a nervous meltdown is so hilarious to watch, but it is. Thank you, Jaime, for sacrificing your sanity to preserve ours.

I usually reduce the anxiety level by drinking a glass or two of wine while cooking.... Honestly with a recipe like this I would've been drunk by the end of it.

Me and my husband made this for our anniversary this year. Took us 14 hours. Highly recommend making over a couple of days. No harm in letting your meat rest in the fridge. Save all cooking liquids in all steps, you will need them to keep it most for the end. Literally the most delicious thing you will ever eat. Remember that this was originally a "what to do with leftovers" dish for medieval French peasants. Whatever the nobility didn't eat at their formal meal was combined into a dish to feed the household staff and then the poor.

My husband got me the set of her two cookbooks 2 years ago. I have not used them. I have 4 kids 7 and under and he wants to know why I haven't made any dishes. My brain almost explodes when I look through the books and see the instructions. Thanks for this video! I'm very impressed.