Tart

This tart combines the pleasures of a rich chocolate custard with the crunchy appeal of a chocolate chip cookie. As with most pies and tarts, you have two steps: the crust and the filling. Collect the ingredients for both the crust dough and the filling, but make the dough first. As it chills, prepare the filling.

These creamy tarts will solve the problem of what to serve for dessert when you have company for dinner. Vary the yogurt and fruit combination to suit your family’s preferences.

The texture of the chocolate-amaretto custard is very delicate, so be sure to slice the pears very thin, so you can eat the dessert with a spoon.

When you think about adding flavor to foods in the most healthful way possible, you think about the most intense flavor vehicles you can find. That’s why this recipe calls for vanilla bean. The tiny seeds inside pack a wallop of this most delicate and beloved taste. If you can’t find good strawberries, try whole raspberries or small slices of ripe peach.

When I was a student in Paris, I became hooked on intensely tart yet sweet French lemon tarts, and sampled them at every pastry shop I could find. I still love them, especially when they are bitingly tart.

“I’m not much of a cook,” Michèle Weil told me as she ushered me into her charming kitchen in a residential section of Strasbourg. Fresh basil was growing on her kitchen windowsill, and paintings from the Jewish School of Paris adorned the walls. “But,” she continued, “I have to cook. All French women cook.” A full-time pediatrician and the mother of three boys, Michèle is smart enough to know she can’t do it all. On medical call before we arrived for dinner, she quickly pulled from the freezer a package of hunks of frozen salmon and cod, bought at Picard Surgelés. Then she boiled some potatoes, put the fish in the oven, and opened a carton of prepared Hollandaise sauce, which she microwaved and poured over the baked fish. Putting this together with a green salad with tomatoes and her homemade vinaigrette, she had made a quick and balanced dinner. Like all working women, Michèle has to make compromises. “My mother would never have given you frozen food,” she apologized. “But, no matter how busy I am, I would never buy desserts. I always make them,” she told me as she presented a free-form rhubarb tart that she had made before going to work. It seemed that every Jewish cook I visited in Alsace served me rhubarb, the sour-tasting sign of spring. Unlike Americans, who almost always marry tart rhubarb with strawberries and lace the two with large quantities of sugar, French cooks make a less sweet tart using only rhubarb. They peel the stalks first, which I do not. I think it might be one of those French fetishes, like always serving radishes with butter, or tomato juice with celery salt. Alsatian home cooks also serve their tart with a delicious custard topping made from cream and eggs.

My first taste of a French applesauce tart was in a convent in Jerusalem many years ago. When I was visiting Biarritz recently in late autumn, I was delighted to taste it again, at the home of Nicole Rousso. She learned how to make the tart from her grandmother, who came from the Vosges Mountains. Nicole has a penchant for bio and healthy products, and uses fresh grapes as a sweetener in the applesauce. I love her elegant French touch of thinly slicing an apple and arranging it on top of the applesauce before baking.

My kids would never eat pies until I began making them with graham cracker crusts. I’ve also lost the taste for pastry crust (who needs all that fat?). The miniature size is perfect for fruit fillings that need not be baked or that wouldn’t hold together in a large crust.

The red wine caramel adds a sexy complexity to this classic French staple and the fresh thyme gives it a sweet, earthy depth.

Lemon and blueberry are a perfect pair, like Bert and Ernie. You will need a 10 1/2-inch tart pan with a removable bottom. Serve this year round.

Maple syrup adds a new layer of sweetness to this delicious twist on the classic French dessert.

Customize your favorite store-bought jam with orange zest and Earl Grey tea. Use any leftover dough to make delicious hazelnut cookies: Just roll, cut out, and bake.

This rustic tart, filled with toasted pistachios, hazelnuts, and pine nuts, is a wonderful take on pecan pie.

Four ingredients never tasted so good! Vanilla ice cream makes a great fifth.

This dessert is a favorite of chef Mitchell Kaldrovich's. "When I moved to Maine, I discovered how great the apples here are," he says. Don't forget to finish it with maple syrup and a scoop of vanilla ice cream. Says Kaldrovich: "It makes the dish."

Lauren Fortgang, the pastry chef at Le Pigeon in Portland, OR, spikes ice cream with black pepper.

Inspired by the simple cherry desserts from the Limousin region of France, this baked custard can be served warm or at room temperature. Feel free to use pitted or unpitted cherries.