When cooking a pot of garbure, your ladle is your timer. Stick the ladle in the middle of the pot, and if it can stand upright on its own, the soup is ready. Hailing from the southwestern province of Gascony, just north of the Pyrenees mountains, garbure is a rustic soup consisting of a smoked ham hock, beans, cabbage, and seasonal vegetables, all slowly stewed together until thick, rich, and full of smokey flavor. It’s a great classic of French mountain cooking, eaten year-round but best enjoyed on a blustery winter day. Like many now-classic French dishes, garbure was once peasant food. Cooked and enjoyed in rural areas of the southwest of France, its recipe varied from one farm to the next, following the seasons, the produce available in their gardens, and the preserved meat available in their salting tubs. Eventually, the soup became more popular and was adopted by …