The latest in warm winter cassoulets

Our friends' stout, old country house is more in the mood of a cabin, really - burly rafters, massive stone hearth, a blaze of sunlight, last weekend at least, bouncing off the snow, flooding in through the low, eave-shaded windows.

It is tucked into a hillside in lower Berks County, in farm country between Huff's Church and Hereford, and for years it is where we've retreated in deep winter for a lazy afternoon feast (followed by a reanimating postprandial walk down the rural lanes).

The menu is not rigid. But if it veers one year, it always circles back the next to the specialty of the woman of the house - grand, steamy servings of cassoulet, followed by a green salad (dressed with oil and the finest sherry vinegar), and a dessert often supplied by a guest (in the most recent case, rote grutze mit vanillemilch, a German berry-and-cherry gelatin pudding that takes on a rustic elegance topped with sweetened vanilla-flavored milk).

February can be a cruel month for local produce. But the larder has no such restraint, nor the smokehouse.

So our own copper kettle has been working overtime, producing surpluses of beef stews with wine and lots of browned carrots; and caldo verde, the kale-sausage-potato soup; and a hearty Hungarian goulash of sorts, a pork-tenderloin and sauerkraut confection ennobled with sweet paprika and caraway seed.

We give it away to neighbors, take it to potluck dinners. And still it lingers, overloading the freezer basket, filling up all the old yogurt tubs.

The cassoulet-making, on the other hand, we generally leave to others. By late January or February we await the call, crossing our fingers that we haven't been cut from the ranks of the Berks County elect.

The cassoulet there began rather traditionally several years ago, the white bean and meat casserole (cassoulet derives from cassole, the sometimes conical earthen pot it's cooked in) laden with duck and baked under a crust of bread crumbs, in the style common in Toulouse, the French capital of cassoulet.

It has evolved in recent winters to a more open, stewier offering - Catalan-style shoulder of lamb with garlic and white beans - the recipe for which can be found in Paula Wolfert's The Cooking of Southwest France, or by just typing its name into Google.