The Soup Base — Everyday Dish
Mogettes with Demi-sel Butter
EverydayDocumented🧂 🍄facile1 h 45 (plus soaking)
Fresh or dried white beans, slow-cooked with onion and bay leaf, then topped with a knob of demi-sel butter that melts into the warmth. Creamy, mild, comforting: the dish of the laborer as well as the future minister.
The Soup Base — Everyday Dish
Fresh or dried white beans, slow-cooked with onion and bay leaf, then topped with a knob of demi-sel butter that melts into the warmth. Creamy, mild, comforting: the dish of the laborer as well as the future minister.
You speak to me of feasts, of clever sauces? Keep them for your salons! I, with my Vendée stomach, have never eaten anything better than our mogettes. We would let them swell for hours on the corner of the stove, with an onion and a bay leaf, nothing more. And when serving, my mother would throw in a good knob of salted butter that melted like gold over the beans — there, young man, is what forges a solid republican. He who eats simply thinks straight.
Ingredients
- •Mogettes (Vendée white beans) — a large bowl for the household (nourishing base)
- •Demi-sel churned butter — a generous knob (binder and signature)
- •Onion — one (aromatic)
- •Bay leaf — one leaf (flavor)
- •Atlantic salt — to taste (seasoning)
How it was made : In Vendée farms, mogettes cooked slowly in a cast-iron pot at the hearth while people worked in the fields. They were eaten with bread rubbed with salted butter, sometimes with a slice of ham. It was the dish of both the poor and the well-off sharecropper.