French

Years ago I drove through France with English friends on our way down to Provence. We were trying to decide where to stop for the night and couldn’t agree, so we kept passing by pretty country inns until finally it was dark, options were limited, and we were all tired and cranky. We agreed to stay at the very next place we came to that offered rooms, which turned out to be a rather dismal box of a building with very little charm. Just our luck! We went in and asked the woman who greeted us if we could possibly have a meal as well as a room. She told us to take a fifteen-minute walk, and then she would be ready. We stumbled around in the dark, hungry, weary, and not expecting much. When we returned to the house, we were greeted by a lovely platter of crudités, a country terrine with mustard and cornichons, sautéed river trout with lemon, and cauliflower that had been browned in butter. Needless to say, we were lucky after all! I’m sure there was dessert too, but the thing I dreamed about long after was the cauliflower. This preparation is still one of my favorite things to eat.

This, to me, is the essence of French home cooking: a simple sauté and flavorful pan sauce made with vinegar, mustard, and tarragon (the quintessential French herb). If you can’t find fresh tarragon, you can use tarragon vinegar instead and finish the dish with chives, but it’s just better with fresh tarragon. For the best results be sure to use a flavorful Chicken Stock (p. 206). If yours tastes a little weak, start with two cups instead of one (as called for below) and let it reduce longer to concentrate the flavor.

“Fumet” is the French term for an aromatic broth (typically fish or vegetable, though it can also refer to a meat stock) that is simmered down to concentrate the flavors. Making your own fish stock is easier than you think and adds irreplaceable flavor to recipes, such as Gulf Coast Bouillabaisse (p. 220) and Southern Shrimp Stew (p. 228). Whatever you don’t use can be frozen in small plastic containers (for up to 2 months), so you can pull it out for quick seafood pasta, risotto, or poaching liquid for a fresh fillet.

I have always loved leeks, but now they have a particularly romantic context in my life. The first time I met my (then future) husband, Chip, he cooked chicken with leeks, a dish that knocked me out. (I guess I should mention that he worked as a professional chef in New Orleans for ten years.) He blanched the leeks, so they were bright green and pliable, then wrapped them around a stuffed chicken breast. It was the most beautiful, seductive presentation. Since then, every time I cook with leeks I think of that dish—and him. Leeks have an interesting, subtle flavor that suggests asparagus or salsify (a root vegetable). A lot of Americans don’t know how to use them, and they tend to be pricey. But this simple bistro presentation shows that they are worth the splurge. This is the most basic French preparation for leeks, and one of the most delicious. It’s also the recipe that sold me on them forever.

Once you master a classic vinaigrette, the variations in flavor—and the things you can drizzle it over—are endless. What follows are my all-time favorite dressings, but feel free to alter the recipes to include your favorite vinegar, citrus juice, mustard, or herb. You’ll find a range of dressing personalities to suit just about every salad under the sun.

You can prepare the batter through step two up to two hours ahead, then cover and refrigerate. Before baking, uncover and bring the batter to room temperature.

Niçoise salads are usually made with tuna, but we substituted fresh salmon in this version. You can, of course, make the salad with a couple of cans of tuna; look for Italian oil-packed tuna, which has the best flavor.

This classic French sauce also makes an excellent topping for fish, such as seared salmon or trout. For four servings, steam 1 1/2 pounds trimmed asparagus until crisp-tender, toss with butter, and season with salt and pepper, as desired.

This recipe is based on a popular bistro salad. The goat cheese disks can be prepared through step two up to a day ahead. Cover with plastic wrap, and keep in the refrigerator. Brush the disks with olive oil just before broiling.

Depending on the weather, serve this comforting soup hot or cold. You can quickly chill it by placing it into a metal bowl set into an ice bath; stir frequently until the soup reaches the desired temperature.

This is the best cheese fondue I’ve ever had—Megan got the recipe when she was in France. You can use most kinds of hard white French or Swiss cheese, but be sure not to use store-bought grated cheese. Those cheeses are tossed in cornstarch so the pieces don’t stick together. If you use them in cheese fondue, the cornstarch forms a hard lump in the pan. Note that this recipe uses a cup of wine—it’s very French to cook with wine—which is one of the things that makes this fondue classic.

Here’s another recipe Jill and I discovered in France (you know how they love their cute little finger foods). These rolls are light and refreshing, making them great for parties, barbecues, or picnics—anywhere you need something that’s easy to transport and fun to eat.

Seventy-five years of French domination left many influences in the Viet kitchen. Because I grew up eating these stuffed tomatoes on a regular basis, it never crossed my mind that they were adapted from a traditional French idea. It should have: farci means “stuffed” in French and tô-mát is a Vietnamese transliteration of the French tomate. My edition of Larousse Gastronomique offers nine recipes for stuffing tomatoes. Here’s a tenth, flavored with a shot of fish sauce, of course. As a hybrid dish, these savory, slightly tangy tomatoes can be enjoyed with chopsticks as part of a traditional Viet dinner or with knife and fork as part of a Western-style meal. For the best results, select firm, slightly underripe tomatoes that will hold their shape nicely after cooking.

These butter cookies are one of my favorite French sweets in the Vietnamese repertoire. With just a few good ingredients, you can quickly bake a batch to serve alone or with ice cream, sorbet, or fresh fruit. When Vietnamese bakers make these cookies, they don’t normally include currants in the batter because the dried fruit is not readily available in Vietnam. They top each cookie with a raisin instead. Although currants are widely sold in the United States, Vietnamese American bakers still use raisins. I prefer to stir currants into the batter to distribute their chewy sweetness, and the results are closer to the original French version.

Loaded with asparagus and crab, this soup is elegant looking and delicately flavored. Vietnamese consider it special-occasion fare because it features asparagus, a pricey ingredient introduced by the French as an imported canned good. In Vietnamese, asparagus is mang tay, literally “French bamboo,” an apt name as both asparagus and bamboo shoots grow quickly. Resourceful Viet cooks often maximize the asparagus flavor by adding the spears and their canning liquid to the soup. But the taste is nonetheless rather flat, and canned asparagus is mushy. To achieve a strong asparagus flavor, I use fresh asparagus to prepare the soup. Asparagus declines in sweetness as soon as it is harvested, so choose only the freshest. Spring is asparagus season, and at farmers’ markets the spears are sold within twenty-four hours of being cut. To keep them fresh, stand them in a tall container filled with about an inch of water. (If the ends look dry, trim them first.) Refrigerate the container; there is no need to cover it with plastic.

A hybrid dish (cua means “crab” in Vietnamese, and farci means “stuffed” in French), this deviled crab is enriched by butter and employs fish sauce to amplify the brininess of the crustacean. Many cooks stuff the crab shells with the raw filling and then fry them. Because it is hard to tell when the filling is cooked, I was taught to sauté it first, which also yields a more flavorful result. I also forgo frying and instead bake the filling in ramekins, topping them with bread crumbs for a crispy finish. What makes this deviled crab special is fresh crabmeat and tomalley (liver) and fat, which you can only get if you start with a whole crab. (If you don’t like the tomalley and fat, omit them for a less rich dish.) Find the freshest, feistiest crab you can, even if it is not a Dungeness, my local species. Live crabs are available at Asian and other markets, but already cooked crabs will work, too—as long as you have a trustworthy fishmonger. Ask when the crab was cooked. And if it has an ammonia-like smell, it is over the hill, so pass it up. You will need about 1/2 pound of crabmeat.

The easy availability of butter in America was a boon for my mother, who saw endless possibilities for perfecting French pâtés chaud, large puff pastry rounds filled with an aromatic meat mixture. She regularly made the rich pastries from scratch, and they were standard breakfast fare for my siblings and me growing up. As adults, we have scaled back our consumption, making the pastries smaller and serving them as finger food on special occasions. Shaping tiny round pastries is laborious, so we form logs and cut them into diamonds. Unlike my mom, I don’t have the patience or time to make my own puff pastry. Instead, I rely on a local bakery for frozen sheets of all-butter puff pastry or use the frozen puff pastry sold at supermarkets. The latter are usually sold two sheets to a box, with each sheet weighing about 1/2 pound and measuring about ten inches square.

This full-flavored stock is the base of many of our soups and sauces at Bar Americain. Make a double batch and freeze it in 1-quart containers so you always have some on hand. In a pinch, low-sodium canned chicken broth will work in soup recipes. However, because chicken broth is not made with chicken bones and therefore doesn’t contain any gelatin, canned broth is not recommended for any of the chicken stock–based sauces in this book.

OK, in my wildest dreams I couldn’t come up with a more perfect dessert for myself. Bourbon, ice cream, buttermilk, pecans, and light, buttery-crispy profiteroles; it doesn’t get any better for me (except for maybe the Blueberry Lemon Crêpes, page 198 . . . oh, and the Blackberry Soufflé, page 196). For some reason my sweet tooth always leans toward anything southern, and anything with bourbon in it is all right by me.