French Recipes
1126 recipes found
Omelet Mousseline
This omelet is fluffier and lighter than the classic. It uses Auguste Escoffier’s technique: whipping the egg whites and then gently folding in the yolks. A small amount of heavy cream enriches the omelet, making it a good candidate for a final sprinkle of powdered sugar – or a jam filling. Served sweet or savory, it’s an ethereal dish that truly melts in the mouth. This recipe is part of The New Essentials of French Cooking, a guide to definitive dishes every modern cook should master.
Smoked Sardines Rillettes
Canned smoked sardines are easy to come by, and if you eat fish (especially if you are trying to find ways to eat more fatty fish because of their high omega-3 values), they should be a staple in your pantry. Look for Pacific sardines, which are a Best Choice on the Monterey Aquarium Seafood Watch list. (Atlantic and Mediterranean are poor choices.) Like the other rillettes posted on this week’s Recipes for Health, you can use these as a spread for bread or crackers, or as a filling for peppers or endive leaves or cherry tomatoes. The rillettes also go well with lentils, like the smoked trout rillettes featured earlier this week. The crème fraîche is optional but recommended (you could substitute olive oil or yogurt); I like the way it loosens and enriches the mixture.
Crab Croque-Madame
Every Francophile has eaten a croque-monsieur, which is essentially a hot ham and cheese sandwich, the top spread with a layer of béchamel sauce and grated cheese, then grilled until golden and bubbly. You can get one in any café, where it is eaten from a little plate, either at a small table or standing at the bar, using a knife and fork. A croque-madame is exactly the same, with a fried egg on top. Why is it madame when it has an egg? No one knows. I decided to make a version with crab meat, which I thought would be novel, until I discovered it had already been invented, many times over. It seems there already exists the crab toastie, an American open-face snack made with English muffins. And crab toasties are well known in the British Isles as well. I pushed mine in a slightly creole direction, adding cayenne, tarragon and chives.
Buckwheat Crepes With Asparagus, Ham and Gruyère
In Brittany, large buckwheat crepes are known as galettes and are filled with all sorts of savory ingredients. A classic one is made with ham and cheese. This scaled-down rendition adds sweet asparagus, which goes well with the nutty flavor of buckwheat flour. Traditionally they are served with a glass of sparkling cider. Have them as a first course or alongside fried eggs for a more substantial meal.
‘Bouillabaisse’ of Fresh Peas With Poached Eggs
In the Provence region of France, it is a peasant tradition to make “poor man’s bouillabaisse” with vegetables. For this soup, only fresh peas will work — don’t try it with frozen.
Cassoulet
This slow-cooked casserole of white beans and several kinds of meat has long been considered the pinnacle of regional French home cooking. It takes planning (you’ll need to find all the ingredients), time and a good deal of culinary stamina. But the voluptuous mix of aromatic beans surrounding rich chunks of duck confit, sausages, roasted pork and lamb and a crisp salt pork crust is well worth the effort. Serve this with a green salad. It doesn’t need any other accompaniment, and you wouldn’t have room for it, anyway. This recipe is part of The New Essentials of French Cooking, a guide to definitive dishes every modern cook should master.
Oeufs en cocotte florentine (Eggs in ramekins with spinach)
Oeufs en cocotte forestière (Eggs in ramekins with mushrooms)
Ratatouille and Sausage Potpie With Cornmeal Biscuits
A typical ratatouille recipe has you sauté all the vegetables separately, then combine them. That seemed too laborious for a potpie. So I streamlined the method by making a sauce on the stove with the peppers and tomatoes, stirring in roasted eggplant and zucchini, and sausage for extra flavor, and baking everything covered in dough.
Ad-Lib Turkey Cassoulet
Provençal Garlic Soup With Poached Egg
Herbed Compound Butter
A compound butter — a stick of butter seasoned with herbs, lemon and garlic or shallots — is one of the most versatile things to keep on hand. You can store it in the freezer, then slice it whenever you want to add herby richness to a dish. Use it on steak, fish, chicken or even mashed or roasted sweet potatoes. And feel free to vary the herbs to suit your taste. For a kick, a pinch or two of chile powder or a drizzle of hot sauce would do the trick. This recipe is part of The New Essentials of French Cooking, a guide to definitive dishes every modern cook should master.
Whole-Duck Cassoulet
There is a clear order of operations to this cassoulet. Cut up the duck; remove the skin from the legs and refrigerate them overnight. At this point, you can make the stock or pick up the recipe the next day. But you’ll need the fat from the stock in order to make the confit. And you’ll use the fat from the confit to brown the meat. But this recipe isn’t that demanding; it just takes time. You can do it.
Smoked Ham Hock Cassoulet
Horseradish Crème Fraîche Sauce
This creamy, luscious sauce gets its bite from the combination of mustard and horseradish. Dollop it on steaks and chops, fish, chicken, roasted vegetables (especially broccoli and cauliflower) or a hot baked potato. If you can't get crème fraîche, sour cream is a fine substitute. This recipe is part of The New Essentials of French Cooking, a guide to definitive dishes every modern cook should master.
Sauce Gribiche
This recipe is adapted from “The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food,” the memoir of Judith Jones, the book editor who among many other things first brought Julia Child into print. It comes together in about five minutes and improves cold meats, cold cuts, blanched asparagus, boiled potatoes – almost anything you can think of. Take note: the egg needs to be really finely chopped to achieve the sauce’s optimal texture.
Mark Bittman's Rouille
Cassoulet With Lots of Vegetables
Cassoulet is one of the best of the myriad of traditional European dishes that combine beans and meat to produce wonderful rich, robust stews. This recipe maintains that spirit, but is much faster, easier, less expensive, and more contemporary, emphasizing the beans and vegetables over meat. (That probably makes it more, not less, traditional, since meat was always hard to come by before the mid-20th century.)
Cassoulet Toulousain
Chicken and Pepper Stew
This is an adaptation of a classic French bistro dish, poulet Basquaise. The chicken is cooked in a pipérade of onion, garlic, hot and sweet peppers, tomatoes and, in the authentic version, cured ham, which I’ve omitted. In this version I use skinned chicken pieces. Serve with noodles, rice or other grains.
A Potato Dish for Julia
This recipe is adapted from “The Pleasures of Cooking for One” by Judith Jones, Julia Child’s longtime editor at Knopf, who gave it to The Sunday Times Magazine in 2009. It is easily prepared and a savory accompaniment to a steak or roast, crisp and buttery, with just a hint of garlic.
Puréed Mushroom Soup
Thick and creamy, with no cream, this tastes so much richer than it is. I use a small amount of milk to thin out the soup, but you can also use stock to thin it, if you don’t want to include any dairy.
Mark Bittman’s Bouillabaisse
You can make any soup with water instead of stock, but the soups that drive you wild usually have a beautiful stock as their base. This is doubly true of bouillabaisse, which should start with a stock so delicious that you can barely imagine improving on it. There are a few ways to do this: Grab fish bones when you see them, and make the stock incrementally. Another is to use shrimp shells. A third is to accumulate lobster bodies, which make fantastic stock. In any case, you combine whatever you have with some aromatics (thyme branches, onion, celery, carrot, garlic, peppercorns) add water and simmer for 15 to 30 minutes. Cool, strain and freeze if you like. When you're ready to make the soup, procure your seafood – pretty much any combination of fish and shellfish will do, but avoid dark-fleshed fish – and go forth. From there, it's no more difficult than making a pot of vegetable soup.
Provençal Fish Stew
This dish turns the proportion of fish to vegetables on its head -- more vegetables, less fish. There's enough shrimp and squid to let you know you're eating a fish stew, but enough chickpeas and spinach to let you know it is something different. A puttanesca-like seasoning of garlic, olives, capers, anchovies and tomato paste flavors the braise.