French

Cheesy baked potatoes au gratin is the perfect cold weather comfort food and makes a great side dish for any family dinner or holiday meal.

For this towering crepe cake, thin crepes are stacked and sandwiched with an easy pastry cream.

Strawberries and cream, but make it fancy (and in a cake).

This joconde cake is nutty and rich but still light as a sponge cake should be.

This easy crepe recipe calls for brandy, but you can substitute any flavorful spirit or liqueur to customize it to your tastes and pantry.

Though this pâté can be eaten the day it's made, we find it even more flavorful when made one or two days ahead. If you use several small ramekins instead of a pâté crock or terrine, you may need more clarified butter to seal the tops.

Made with nutty meringue, rich chocolate ganache, and vanilla and hazelnut buttercreams, the marjolaine is the perfect cake for special occasions.

While most baked Bries are on the sweet side, with layers of jam or chutney under the crust, this one goes savory with anchovies, garlic, and roasted bell peppers.

The complex flavor of this dish—briny, aromatic, slightly spicy—belies the extraordinarily simple method of actually making it.

Béchamel, a cream sauce bound by a roux of flour and butter, holds up well in the freezer, maintaining the same gooey, melty texture that the freezer too often destroys in other dairy. It’s pivotal for casseroles, such as lasagna (page 126) or the green bean dish (page 125) that falls on so many Thanksgiving menus. It’s the halfway point to sausage gravy (page 122) or cheese sauce. Long story short, béchamel helps bridge the gap when thinking about foods that freeze well. Just like duct tape, you should never be without it.

This omelet is flavored simply with nearly charred onions and fresh chives. To ensure the accompanying frites are soft and pillowy on the inside, they’re cooked in salted water before being fried.

Small, hand-held kouign-amann are common in North America, but this recipe shows off the other way the classic Breton pastry can be made: as a single 9-inch cake.

The ham and cheese-filled loaf is the savory quick bread you didn't know you needed. We love it with Gruyère, but sharp cheddar works just as well.

These crepes are a great solution for using up discarded sourdough starter. Tender and a little bit tangy, they make an ideal blank canvas for sweet or savory toppings like jam, crème fraîche, demerara sugar, or lox.

This isn't really cassoulet, but it is very, very good! Cut into little bars as a pre-dinner bite or serve one toast per person alongside a crisp salad of bitter greens for lunch.

This may sound like some ancient Alpine classic, but it's rather more modern than you'd expect.

Gently cooking salmon fillets in olive oil makes their flesh become extravagantly tender and silky. While confit sounds fancy, this is a mostly hands-off oven method that’s ideal for weeknights.