Cassoulet de Toulouse

On Day 1:

1. Prepare all ingredients. Stud one onion with the cloves.
2. Make a rich pork stock: put the vegetables and the first four meats, and the chicken feet in a stockpot full of cold water. Bring to a simmer and simmer all day. At the end, discard the vegetables and the chicken feet, and separate the meat from the bones and reserve the meat, cutting it into bite-size pieces. Put the meat and the stock into containers and cool overnight.
3. Soak the beans overnight.

On Day 2:

1. Boil the beans until tender but not mushy, 45 minutes to an hour should do it.
2. Warm the duck confit in a covered pan until it is soft (it's already cooked). Remove the meat from the bones, discard the bones and let the meat sit in the pot with its fat.
3. Slice the garlicky sausage into 1/4" rounds and the Saucisse de Toulouse into quarters. Chop the bacon.
4. Peel the cold fat off the top of the stock and put it in a skillet. The stock should be translucent and quite gelatinous. Put the cold gelatinous stock in a pot to melt over moderate to high heat. When it's hot, check for flavor and add salt if needed (maybe not needed because of the salt pork). If you have a lot, you can reduce it to concentrate the flavor. If the flavor is weak, you can enrich it with a spoonful of ham or chicken stock concentrate. It should be rich, meaty, and delicious.
5. In the skillet, melt the fat and then cook the bacon until it renders its fat, but do not let it get crispy. Remove the cooked bacon. Cook the sausages. Remove the meats to a bowl or plate and add the reserved meat from when you made the stock.
6. Cook the chopped onion in the remaining fat until it starts to caramelize.
7. Drain the beans and combine them with the cooked onion.
8. Assemble the cassoulet. At this point you should have:
   • A bowl of cooked beans with onion
   • A pan with warm duck meat and fat
   • A bowl with cooked sausages, bacon, and pork from the stock
   • A pot of stock warming on the stove
   • A pot that's big enough to hold everything comfortably.
9. Preheat the oven to 300.
10. Put one-third of the beans in the bottom of the pot, then top it with the pork.
11. Add half of the remaining beans and top it with the duck and duckfat.
12. Add the remaining beans and pour over it the hot stock right up to the top of the beans. If you have remaining stock, keep it warm to refill the bean pot later. The stock in the pot should always come to the top of the means until the end. The fat on top will cook the topmost beans into the famous cassoulet crust. 
13. Bake for 5 hours at 300 degrees F.
14. During the cooking, as the lower beans simmer in the stock, the upper ones are cooking in the fat. After a time, the top layer will look dark and crunchy (see the photo). Gently poke bits of it down into the depths, allowing some beans from below to come and bathe in the hot fat while enriching the flavor of the lower layers. This will stir up the duck layer and maybe the pork layer, but that's OK, this is not a lasagna. Some (IMO fanciful) recipes say to do this seven times, but most say three is enough. That's what I do.
15. Serve hot with a nice green salad and a Cahors, Languedoc, or Malbec wine.