My Cassoulet Obsession

You wouldn’t think beans and meat could mean so much

Photo by Léonard Cotte on Unsplash

I can pinpoint almost to the day the first time I ate cassoulet. It was the month of September, 1994. It would be the third week of that month, within a few days one side or the other of the 18th.

I know this because my now-ex and I were in Paris for our one-year wedding anniversary.

It was the day we landed, and “jet lagged” hardly begins to describe it — it’s a loooong flight from San Francisco to Paris. We landed in the morning, and we weren’t going to be able to check into our accommodations until much later in the day.

So we had the brilliant idea to just walk around Paris all day — lugging all our stuff — hoping the excitement would stave off exhaustion.

It sort of worked. I had never been to Paris before; he had only been briefly, many years prior, on a trip where he had no control over the itinerary.

We took a taxi from the airport to the Île Saint-Louis, right in the center of the city, and began exploring. It wasn’t long before we needed sustenance. We found an adorable, quintessential Parisian café, went in, and studied the menu.

Oh, sorry, the carte.

I was trying so hard to be sophisticated. You see, this was only one year into…