A delec­table mem­oir reveal­ing how a sim­ple jour­nal­is­tic assign­ment sparked a culi­nary obses­sion and tran­scend­ed into a quest for iden­ti­ty. After get­ting a taste of cas­soulet in 2008 while on assign­ment writ­ing about the cui­sine of South­west France, Bigar, a nice Jew­ish girl, couldn’t stop think­ing about the quin­tes­sen­tial his­toric meat and bean stew. Unable to shake this obses­sion, she trav­els again from her home in New York to the Occ­i­tanie region of South­ern France where cas­soulet is said to have orig­i­nat­ed, to study with the man who would become her culi­nary guru, Eric Gar­cia, founder of L’Académie Uni­verselle du Cas­soulet. There, she immers­es her­self in all things cas­soulet. From her first spoon­ful, she is trans­port­ed back to her dra­mat­ic child­hood in Gene­va, Switzer­land, and finds her­self jour­ney­ing through an unex­pect­ed rab­bit hole of mem­o­ries lead­ing her miles away from her upper-crust upbring­ing. Not only does she dis­cov­er the deep­er mean­ings of her ances­tral French cui­sine, but she is ulti­mate­ly trans­formed by hav­ing to face her unset­tling, com­plex fam­i­ly history.