Cassoulet only beans, tomato sauce, sausages, and bacon. More expensive versions are likely to be cooked with goose fat and to include Toulouse sausages, lamb, goose, or duck confit. Haute cuisine versions require mixing pre-cooked roasted meats with beans that have been simmered separately with aromatic vegetables, but this runs counter to cassoulet's peasant origins. In the process of preparing the dish it is traditional to deglaze the pot from the previous cassoulet in order to give a base for the next one. This has led to stories, such as the one given by Elizabeth David, citing Anatole France, of a
Sausage between "fresh", "cooked", and "dry" sausages seems to be more or less accepted: The distinct flavor of some sausages is due to fermentation by "Lactobacillus", "Pediococcus", or "Micrococcus" (added as starter cultures) or natural flora during curing. Other countries use different systems of classification. Germany, for instance, which produces more than 1200 types of sausage, distinguishes "raw", "cooked" and "precooked" sausages. In Italy, the basic distinctions are: The United States has a particular shelf stable type called pickled sausages, commonly sold in establishments such as gas stations and delicatessens. These are usually smoked or boiled sausages of a highly processed