- Michael Gebert
- Prepping cassoulet at Honey Butter Fried Chicken
It’s 11 AM on Monday, but Josh Kulp of Honey Butter Fried Chicken and Sunday Dinner Club already looks beat. “We had the biggest night of Honey Butter’s life on Saturday,” he explains. “We sold out of chicken by 7:30. It was insane.” Apparently, as soon as the polar vortex was over, a significant portion of Chicago’s population decided to celebrate by eating Honey Butter’s fried chicken.
“I think we have looked for those dishes, like mole in Mexico or cassoulet in France, that have a good long storied tradition to them,” says Kulp.
They start with a meeting to work out the battle plan, rattling off what they need to make based on the dining preferences that came in with the reservations. There’s the vast quantity of the regular cassoulet, and later they’ll make a smaller batch of vegetarian cassoulet with a completely different recipe. And then?
“No, none of those.”
- Michael Gebert
Once the beans are started, Cikowski pulls out a tub of confit duck legs embedded in white fat with thyme sprigs jutting out of it like it was a frozen pond. It goes in the oven for a few minutes to soften up the fat, and then she settles in for what she guesses will be about four hours of picking the meat off the duck legs. For her, cassoulet is a typical comfort food in that “it isn’t all that hard, it’s just labor intensive. And labor intensive in a way that’s not challenging. I mean, cutting up bacon is not a hard thing to do. Cutting vegetables, soaking beans, poaching sausages—none of these things is very challenging as kitchen tasks.”
“That’s what I just said,” Cikowski says from the other side of the room.
