"The French they are a funny race; they fight with their feet and fuck with their face." So goes an old saw about our once and future Gallic friends. No doubt all that face-fucking, with its inevitable effects on the sensorium, interlaces with French culinary experience, which explains how the French word cassoulet, which in standard usage denotes a dense, savory stew of sausage, beans, and other ingredients, a perfect hearty winter dish, in slang connotes the rich, complex quality of a woman's sexual odors. (So far as I know, they have no male equivalent for this. Tant pis for us guys.)

I'm brought to this pensée because it's freezing out tonight, down to 6 degrees Fahrenheit and dropping -- not necessarily a record low, but a serious one, the coldest of this winter so far. Fucking cold, you might say, in several senses of the words; the perfect night for you and your lover to get under the covers, pull them up over your heads, and enjoy however many cassoulets you have between you, until you've exhausted the oxygen and heated up the room (or at least the bed) enough that it's safe to come up for air.

I tasted my first cassoulet in exactly the opposite climatic circumstances: in July 1963, on a scorching night in New Mexico, on the lower level of a bunk bed in the dorm of a boarding school, my 18-year-old nose and mouth nuzzling between the damp thighs of a little 18-year-old midwestern blonde named Cara Lee whose cassoulet had at that point never been sampled by anyone (so she said, and I saw no reason to doubt her). It proved addictive: I've come up for air since, of course, but I've never stopped going down again, and hope I never feel I've eaten my fill.

Regrettably, I'm sans entrée at the moment, so to warm my bones tonight all I can do is reminisce, and practice . . . and dream of cassoulets to come. Pun intended.