Cassoulet is my husband's favourite dish, and I make it several times a year. We serve it with a nice green salad dressed with a sturdy vinaigrette, at least two loaves of French bread (which Edmund often makes himself), and lashings of red wine, followed by pears poached in more lashings of red wine.

I find that a decent cassoulet involves at least five different kinds of meat, usually two kinds of sausage (one super-garlicky, one heavily smoked), salt pork belly with rind, double-smoked bacon with rind and cubed stewing lamb, usually from the scrag end of the neck. I have also used smoked chicken and smoked goose, even the wings of the Christmas turkey once, but generally fall back on the lamb/bacon/sausage combination.

The most frequently used beans come in a net bag labelled "haricots blancs" and sure look like Navy beans, but we're Canadian so we just call them "white beans". Black beans (also called turtle beans) are also excellent, if a bit of a shock to our more conventional foodie friends. I always use fresh tomatoes, even if they do cost the earth; the canned variety has a distinctive bitter taste that comes through even the garlic aroma emitted by every good cassoulet.

Making a cassoulet is a three-phase project that requires your presence (i.e., in the same house) throughout, but only two spasms of genuine at-the-stove labour. The long simmer in the oven means you have time to clean the house, set the table, make the salad and dessert, take a shower and have a nice stiff drink before the guests arrive. Better still, it has to repose for at least half an hour between oven and table, which leaves time for a nice fish course, or perhaps soup.

There's absolutely no point in making cassoulet for fewer than six people. With a kilo of beans, a kilo of lamb, 250 G salt pork and four or five thick rashers of bacon, plus several large sausages and about a litre of meat stock, you can produce enough cassoulet to feed up to 10 people if some of them are not particularly greedy.