I rarely buy food in supermarkets: not for any snobby, foodie reason, but for a good old-fashioned Scottish reason — value for money.

I will give you a for instance. I was in my local Asda last week when it occurred to me that, despite the unseasonably clement weather, it was time for a cassoulet. So I needed a duck. Asda’s offerings were two minuscule breast fillets for £4.26, or a whole duck (with giblets, yet!) for £6.24. Well, you wouldn’t have to be able to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem to work that one out, would you? So the whole duck it was, an apparent bargain: except that a decent farmers’ market would have done the duck for a fiver.

Admittedly, the trouble with farmers’ markets is that they keep farmers’ hours, which isn’t much use to someone who is never fully awake before 1pm, rarely asleep before 3am and functions on all cylinders only between the hours of 10pm and two o’clock in the morning.

But supermarkets? Good value? Forget it. Still, the cassoulet got made in the end.

Ingredients

Serves 4

Prep 30min
Cook 2 days (look, there’s no such thing as a quick cassoulet, OK?)

1 duck, 2.2kg
500g Toulouse sausage
1 large onion, sliced
4 garlic cloves, crushed
Handful of chopped fresh oregano and thyme
800g tinned chopped tomatoes
800g tinned cannellini beans

METHOD

Cut along the duck backbone and open out. Remove the legs and wings, slice off the breasts and cut in three, then pull off as much skin from the carcass as you can. Bung the carcass in a large pot with any old veg you can find — onion, carrot, celery — and maybe some black peppercorns and a bay leaf, cover with cold water, bring to the boil, then simmer for two hours. Strain, cool, remove fat from the surface.

Meanwhile heat a large nonstick pan and fry the duck pieces, skin side down. When the skin is crispy, turn the pieces and brown the meat. Remove to a large casserole. The pan will now be full of duck fat. Decant and reserve most of it (you can render the skin from the carcass as well, to make even more — sensational for roast potatoes), leaving 1tbsp.

Fry the onion, garlic and herbs in the same pan, and remove to the casserole. Chop the sausage into large chunks, brown them in the pan and add to the casserole along with the tomato, beans and 400ml of the duck stock. Simmer uncovered in the oven at 160C for two hours. If it begins to dry out, add more stock. Cool overnight. The next day, remove any fat from the surface, reheat and serve with crusty bread — or better yet, garlicky mashed potato.

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