French Recipes
1126 recipes found
Foolproof Tarte Tatin
Tarte Tatin isn't as American as apple pie, but it's a whole lot easier. With just four ingredients, it's all about the apples: the lovely taste and shape of the fruit are preserved by sugar and heat, with a buttery-salty crust underneath. This recipe from Gotham Bar and Grill in New York has a couple of tricks that make it easier to pull off than others: dry the apples out before baking; start by coating the pan with butter instead of making a caramel; use tall chunks of apple and hug them together in the pan to prevent overcooking.
Gâteau d’Hélène (Coconut Cake)
This coconut cake was adapted from a recipe by Simone (Simca) Beck, best known as Julia Child’s co-author on “Mastering the Art of French Cooking.” She called it “Gâteau d’Hélène: a white cake filled and iced with coconut cream and apricot.” The recipe, published in Ms. Beck’s 1972 book, “Simca’s Cuisine” (Lyons Press, 1998), capped what she called a “carefree lunch” because it could be made ahead. Indeed, this cake is best baked, filled, frosted and refrigerated for at least an hour (or up to two days). Kind of like a madeleine, its layers are purposefully a bit dry, as they need to hold a dousing of orange juice and rum. The whipped cream filling and frosting is soft and dreamy. It’s an elegant celebration cake.
Classic Gougères
These classic gougères are cheesier than many others, with a crunchy, salty crust from a sprinkling of Parmesan just before baking. Take care to serve these straight from the oven when they are still hot and a little gooey in the center. If you want to make these ahead, you can freeze them after forming them into balls, but before baking (it’s easiest to freeze them directly on the baking sheet if you’ve got the freezer space). Then bake them while still frozen, adding a few minutes onto the baking time.
Buttery French TV Snacks
Good butter is the key to these easy, delectable cookies. Before the pastry chef Anita Chu began work on her “Field Guide to Cookies” (Quirk Books), she was a Berkeley-trained structural engineer with a baking habit she couldn’t shake. One of her favorite cookies is the croq-télé, or TV snack, a chunky cookie she adapted from the Paris pastry chef Arnaud Larher. “There is no leavening to lift it, no eggs to hold it together,” she said. “It’s all about the butter.”
Beet and Potato Salad
This is a better version of a ubiquitous salad found in takeout shops all over France. Salade Russe, as it is called, is a mayonnaise-dressed mixture of potatoes, diced carrots, peas and other vegetables, but usually not beets. Yogurt vinaigrette stands in for mayonnaise here.
Egg Mayo
Egg mayo — or oeuf mayo, as it’s called in France — is simply hard-boiled eggs coated with seasoned mayonnaise, but it’s so beloved in France that it has a society to protect it: Association de sauvegarde de l’oeuf mayonnaise. You could season store-bought mayonnaise for this recipe from Priscilla Martel, but at least just once, you should make your own. It’ll be delicious, and you’ll feel like a magician. The dish is beautiful served plain, and tasty dressed with anchovies, capers, snipped chives or other herbs (choose one or more). It’s good as a starter, with a pouf of dressed greens, or as part of a platter of small salads (hors d’oeuvres variées), a picnic on a tray.
Beef Bourguignon
Like coq au vin, its sister dish from the Burgundy region of France, beef Bourguignon is a stew of meat slowly simmered in hearty red wine along with pearl onions, mushrooms and crisp, cubed bacon. Use a good wine here, something simple but drinkable. It makes all the difference in the finished dish. As with all beef stews, this one is best made a day or two ahead; don’t sauté the mushrooms and onions until just before serving. This recipe is part of The New Essentials of French Cooking, a guide to definitive dishes every modern cook should master.
Gâteau Basque
Bixente Marichular, founder of the Musée du Gâteau Basque in Sare, France, says the pastry is part of Basque patrimony: Every family has a recipe, and every family thinks theirs is the best. This version, made with ingredients from an American supermarket, follows the tradition of sandwiching two rounds of rolled-out dough with jam. In the Pays Basque, where the filling is sometimes pastry cream, the jam is usually local black cherry. Once baked, the texture of the “cake” — never mind that it’s about as much cake as Boston cream pie is pie — is a mix of crumbly, tender and chewy. Since gâteau Basque is a casual treat, eating it with your fingers is allowed.
S'mores Pot De Crème
Coq au Vin
A coq au vin is a classic French stew in which chicken is braised slowly in red wine and a little brandy to yield a supremely rich sauce filled with tender meat, crisp bits of bacon, mushrooms and burnished pearl onions. Traditional recipes call for a whole cut-up chicken, but using all dark meat gives you a particularly succulent dish without the risk of overcooked white meat. However, if you would rather substitute a whole cut-up bird, just add the breasts in the last 30 minutes of simmering. If you want to skip the croutons for garnish you can, but they do add a lovely, buttery crunch alongside the soft, simmered meat and vegetables. This recipe is part of The New Essentials of French Cooking, a guide to definitive dishes every modern cook should master.
Roasted Chicken Provençal
This is a recipe I picked up from Steven Stolman, a clothing and interior designer whose “Confessions of a Serial Entertainer” is a useful guide to the business and culture of dinner parties and general hospitality. It is a perfect dinner-party meal: chicken thighs or legs dusted in flour and roasted with shallots, lemons and garlic in a bath of vermouth and under a shower of herbes de Provence. They go crisp in the heat above the fat, while the shallots and garlic melt into sweetness below. You could serve with rice, but I prefer a green salad and a lot of baguette to mop up the sauce.
Scalloped Potato Gratin
Is there anything better than a molten, golden-topped potato gratin? I don’t think so, either. This one stays fairly classic — scented with sage, garlic and nutmeg, then showered with lots of nutty Gruyère. My tweak is in form rather than flavor. Instead of piling the potatoes an inch or two deep in a gratin dish, I shingle the slices in a shallow sheet pan. It gives the whole thing a more elegant look, and you get maximum browning and crunch on top. There’s less of the gooey center, but what it loses in ooze it makes up for in increased surface area for the crisp-edged baked cheese.
Braised Celery With Thyme and White Wine
Inspired by the French method of cooking duck or chicken confit, in which the meat stews slowly in its own fat, this recipe simmers celery in a classically French sauce, with white wine, stock, shallots and herbes de Provence. The celery is first blanched in heavily salted water, which jumpstarts the cooking process and seasons the stalks from the inside-out, then it’s roasted in liquid until submissive and silky, with a texture reminiscent of roasted fennel. Once the celery is tender, the liquid is reduced on the stovetop until just thick enough to coat a spoon. The resulting sauce bears an uncanny similarity to the jus underneath the Thanksgiving turkey, in both flavor and mouthfeel, and the dish is equally at home at the Thanksgiving table as paired with a store-bought rotisserie chicken and some mashed potatoes. Like classic confit, you can prepare it in advance and simply reheat before serving.
Earl Grey Madeleines
Cédric Grolet, the pastry chef of Le Meurice hotel in Paris, is famous for his Instagram feed, which has nearly a million and a half followers, his tattoos and his title: Best Pastry Chef in the World. Mostly, and most rightly, he’s famous for his elegant pastries, so I was surprised when he asked me if I’d tasted one of his simplest, his madeleines. Small sponge cakes baked in shell-shaped molds (metal pans give you the best color and crust), madeleines are known for the impressive bump that develop on their tops. These madeleines, adapted from a Grolet recipe, are made with brown butter and flavored with Earl Grey tea and honey. Like all madeleines, they benefit from a rest in the refrigerator before they’re baked. (Good for the mads, convenient for the baker.) If you can arrange it, serve the madeleines just minutes out of the oven — it’s when their fragrance and texture are at their peak.
Pommes Anna
It’s a marvel still, every time I make this dish, to recognize how the humble potato — the misshapen, dull brown dirty lump — can become this opulent, glistening, colossally elegant jewel with nothing more than attentive care, a sharp blade and good butter. The potato slices want to bend and be supple but not be so thin as to be papery, else they will cook too quickly.
Simple Steamed Clams or Mussels
This straightforward method of cooking mussels or clams produces an excellent dinner in 30 minutes. You can build in extra flavors by varying the aromatic vegetables, the liquid and the last-minute stir-ins. All you need is some bread or simply cooked rice, grain or potatoes to sop up the broth.
Julia Child’s Pork With Allspice Dry Rub
The allspice is really what makes this recipe, adapted from “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” by Julia Child, which was featured in a New York Times article about readers’ favorite recipes from her cookbooks. It is a simple process: make a dry rub, cover a well-marbled pork loin with it for at least 6 hours, and then roast or grill the meat. A few minutes’ preparation before work yields a fine roast for a late supper, or the same time spent on a weekend brings a fine feast in for dinner.
Madame Laracine's Gratin Dauphinois (Madame Laracine's Potato Gratin)
Roquefort, Leek and Walnut Tart
The open-face Alsatian tarte flambée can be as versatile as a quiche. Most often it’s given classic treatment, with bacon and onions on a pastry-lined bed of crème fraîche and fromage blanc. But why stick to tradition? You can make it with mushrooms, omit the bacon and dot it with caviar, add smoked salmon, pave it with zucchini slices, and explore other cheeses, including Taleggio and chèvre. Here’s an assertive version that keeps the bacon but opts for Roquefort cheese, leeks and walnuts. And instead of pizza dough, which is a typical underpinning, for a more expedient result, you can make it with pie pastry.
Vieux Carré
Braised Beef With Eggplant
The food of Provence usually evokes summer, with lovely vegetables, salads, seafood and a whiff of lavender. But there’s a wintry side to it as well. When a fierce mistral wind blows, it’s time to crank out beef stews and roasted meats. This braised beef dish, a pot roast, keeps a Provençal flavor profile, with eggplant, garlic, fennel, rosemary, orange, black olives and tomatoes. It’s prepared to allow the eggplant to maintain its character and not disintegrate. I like to braise a nice piece of tri-tip sirloin, but this recipe will suit any cut of beef you prefer for braising. Serve the dish with plain broad egg noodles dressed with a splash of good olive oil.
Salade Niçoise With Fresh Tuna
In this elegant variation of the classic French salad, seared fresh tuna stands in for the conventional canned sort. The rest of the salad can be assembled a few hours ahead, but the tuna should be cooked and placed on top of the salad just before it is served.
Calvados Sour