Hotel du Centre et du Lauragais

Visit during the Fete de Cassoulet festival

by mickebear

whole town turns to a giant outside restaurant with hunderds of tables on the streets of the center, offering only one kind of food, Cassoulet. Cassoulet is a mixture of beans, sausage, lard, and turkey all mixed in a clay pot. Tradition has it that this was all the food that was left during a siege some 200 years ago, and city dwellers turned it to a dish.

Period:
last weekend of August, in 2005: 26.-28. August

Castelnaudary a market town on the Canal du Midi

by ranger49

"The Birthplace of Cassoulet"

Castelnaudary, located in the south of Languedoc-Roussillon, is an interesting market town.
People on the boats that cruise along the Canal Du Midi probably get the best view of the town and often moor near the Grand Bassin.

It certainly makes a good place to stop and wander up and down the the roads and along the canal for a while. But as we drove through on an unusually wet and cold April day it was all the restaurants announcing that Cassoulet was on the Menu that caught my eye.
No wonder - because Castelnaudary is the place where cassoulet was invented, so they say, and a thick stew with pork, chicken and sausages and haricot beans sounded just right for lunch on such a wintery day.

http://www.hdefrance.com/en/rubrique.php3?id_rubrique=3

Cassoulet, Vin Rouge et des amis

by Norali

My only and fond memory of Castelnaudary area is a diner in a nice restaurant to try the real cassoulet. Reported as the mother of all cassoulet recipes.

Not only Toulouse claims to be a special place for this dish, Carcassonne does too... Well, both former cities recognize Castelnaudary as the hearth of cassoulet. They have variations of Castelnau recipes... Yes, recipe"s" because even within a given region, there could be small changes in the recipes. Castelnaudary recipes are diferent from Toulousaines.. etc... Still, Castalnau is Castelnau.

I was a kid back then. Still, I have a good memory of the diner. I think I liked it. No, I do like it. So that I've never tried to have it anywhere else. Maybe home. Indeed, home with a recipe from a parent from the area. But not in any other restaurant.

Well, beans are beans but saucisse toulousaine, confit de canard... those things made up for a scrumptious diner. Laughters, red wine, cassoulet and friends.

We stayed in Toulouse for some weeks and nipped over Castelnau for this diner ! Cassoulet and red wine. We did enjoy it and not regret at all. It's definitely a "do". Well, maybe we should have visited Cstelnau but the diner was already something we should not have missed.