Back in February, my groupchat got ahold of Terry Nguyen’s piece in Dirt on layoff vlogs. The groupchat did what the groupchat does with a lot of the stuff from Dirt— we complained about the lukewarm take, we talked about how much it sucks that labor writing in general isn’t more focused on the material realities of work, we asked questions like: Is it actually narcissistic to write about oneself? Is it narcissistic to make a short video about oneself? Are we not our first and best subjects, after all?
Then we moved on, and I didn’t think about it again. Fast forward a few weeks, I get laid off on a Wednesday afternoon. I called my partner in a sort of giddy shock. I assured him we’d be okay financially, that I was more than prepared. I was looking at months of unemployment before I needed to become serious about the next steps in my career. I drank a mini bottle of Cab Sauv and emailed my friend, D, with whom I was supposed to make Cassoulet that weekend.
Subject: Cassou-layoff
“In light of my early retirement, I'm even more excited to start our cassoulet project…there's an element of mourning the life I've had for the last 4 years in there too, like a confit duck leg among a sea of beans and pork fat.”
An aside: I took a long break from eating animals, and I have mixed feelings about my return to this way of eating. I may chronicle that set of decisions here when I have a better handle on those ideas. For this recipe, though, I wanted to make everything from scratch, to really have the experience of crafting each piece and connecting with the ingredients.
Project planning and resource allocation
I learned that this is a really great way to make friends with your local butcher. They gave me a lot of pork fat for very little money (it’s trimmings!), tips on how to make the cassoulet taste perfect (grind pork fat with garlic and reserve, add at the very end), and advice for stuffing sausage (keep everything very cold). They told me I was doing things the Right Way. One of them was tall and thin and the other was short and round. Their contrasting appearances and encouraging advice felt auspicious.
I used this Kenji López-Alt recipe from Serious Eats. I kind of winged it when it came to the sausage recipe, using a mix of guidance from Mastering the art of French cooking by Julia Child and The Food Lab, also by López-Alt. Each writer is insufferable in their own special way. Julia is painfully vague, and in this clip from The French Chef, mixes up ingredient proportions with such regularity you wonder which ratio she actually uses. Kenji is the opposite, a precious snob about everything from pork shoulder marbling to the metric system. He makes expensive gear recommendations and insults his wife (?) in the recipe. His gelatin-stock approach does not work as written, and while the results tasted good, I feel I wasted a lot of unflavored gelatin pursuing a texture I wasn’t actually supposed to perceive in the final dish.
All this is to say: I got better, more consistent advice from my local butchers than from either chef. If you get laid off and want to learn some French classics, both Strip District Meats and Fat Butcher will be very soft landing places for you. You can probably film videos for TikTok layoff vlogs there too.
To me, it was essential we buy Rancho Gordo beans. I stocked up on a few other bean types in the process, along with the hullless popcorn. If you ever come to my house and we get drunk, ask me to make you this popcorn.
How the sausage gets made
Making sausage is not easy or fun. I will not lie to you about that. It’s a lot of touching very cold meat. I will try doing this again (see complicated feelings aside above) with better tools and more experience, but I also think the nice folks at Fat Butcher could do it for me without my conscience imploding. I don’t really even want to write about this part of it any more. Here’s a photo instead.
I was in a unique position when I lost my job, and it’s allowed me to focus on things like making cassoulet and reading Swann’s Way along with Jamie Hood’s regards, marcel project. I get to travel and see my friends, cook, put together little parties, all without the stress of finding my next gig. It’s a rare thing, but a good one for now. I’m looking forward to the kind of Bloomfield summer I had during the early pandemic days— lots of time outside in the sun, drinks on a patio or front step, many softserve cones from Twister’s. I think this will feel similar because time feels slower when you stop working. I want to catch every moment of the coming months and drink them slowly slowly slowly.
Order of operations
Cassoulet is just meat and beans with a hint of vegetables. The order you saute ingredients matters somewhat, but mostly it’s important to build the meat fond and then destroy it with vegetables and stock. After that, you chuck it all in the oven for 4 hours and wait. I was shocked at how easy it was once the tedious searing of meats was done.
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We got the idea to make cassoulet because a local restaurant, Butterjoint, sometimes makes it in the winter. It is a very cozy dish, but also expensive and time consuming. Before making it, I had never tried it. I would make it again for a special occasion, or because I happened to receive a lot of pork shoulder and duck legs from a genie, butcher, or butcher-genie. I think I may also make it if I were visited by the ghost of Anthony Bourdain, who is perhaps visiting me because I befriended a butcher-genie.
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Eating
Owen joined us for dinner, his presence was reviving after such a long day of searing meats and hauling the heavy pot in and out of the hot oven. We tried two different kinds of wine that D identified as being appropriate for drinking with cassoulet. I mixed the two up in our comparison because they were both so good. We preceded the meal with some cheese, pickles, and olives. I mostly ate pickles.
We didn’t prepare any sides. The cassoulet was delicious, though it could have stood up to more salt. The sausages had a slight mealiness because we failed to abide the wise-butchers’ warning: keep everything very cold. That’s very difficult to do when using a KitchenAid attachment to stuff sausage. I think I would also finish it with a splash of red wine vinegar or lemon, as well. The fresh-grated garlic was good, but it did not provide as strong of a bite as I expected. It’s a dish that’s mostly fat and protein, so it can handle a strong flavor without being overwhelmed, though no recipe I’ve seen calls for finishing this way.
The main thing I will do differently next time is warm the plates. I always forget this step when I’m cooking, but it makes a significant difference in how quickly your food gets cold! (And can you imagine me serving cold food to the ghost of Bourdain?)
For dessert, I attempted to prepare pots de crème. They were soupy and grainy! The problem lay with the eggs: the Serious Eats recipe I used calls for six egg yolks, where most call for at least 12 for this volume of milk and cream. Next time I will use a different recipe, and I may forgo chocolate altogether to try this Coffee-Cardamom business instead. I generally expect Serious Eats to have thoroughly tested their recipes, but it’s on me for not thinking “this needs more eggs” I guess.
Finally, leftovers! This was great reheated, though I struggled to reheat the whole duck legs without scorching the beans. My solution was to heat them separately, or shred the duck off the bone and incorporate before reheating on the stove.
Conclusions
The inclination we have to make a layoff about ourselves, to write about our own relationship to it happening, is because a layoff is fundamentally isolating. It’s not “shilling” to share the scraps of your most time-intensive community role, your former job, with other people as you lose access to it. I think it’s just as human as making a comically large pot of French stew with your friends about that loss. You can’t eat a TikTok, but you can eat from the money you make from the TikTok creator fund or doing sponcon, so why not do it?
I don’t have any cogent thoughts about the tech layoffs broadly, the future of work, or the economy— there are other Substacks about that. My only conclusion is this: when bad things happen to you, you might try to make things you enjoy making. Make TikToks and scrapbooks and music and pies. Share those things with the people around you. Put them online. Feed them to your neighbors. Undo the isolation of the layoff (or whatever the bad thing is) by seeking connection, and don’t let anyone on the internet tell you it’s wrong to do it.