Around My French Table (3 page)

When Marie-Cécile Noblet, a Frenchwoman from a hotel-restaurant family in Brittany, came to live with us as an au pair for Joshua, our infant son, I was working on a doctoral thesis in gerontology but thinking I wanted to make a change in my life. Within weeks of her arrival, I was spending more time in the kitchen with her than in school with my advisors.

Marie-Cécile was a born cook. When she made something particularly wonderful and I asked a question, she'd give me a perfect Gallic shrug, put her index finger to the tip of her nose, and claim that she'd made it
au pif,
or just by instinct. And she had. She could feel her way around almost any recipe—as I'd later see so many good French cooks do—and she taught me to trust my own instincts and to always have one tool at my side: a spoon to taste with.

I
T WOULD TAKE ME A DECADE TO
make my passion my work, but shortly after Marie-Cécile arrived, I put aside my dissertation, left my job in a research center, and got a position as a pastry cook in a restaurant. A couple of years later, I landed some assignments as a food writer: I became the editor of the James Beard Foundation publications and was hired to write for
Elle
magazine. Best of all, I got to work with the greatest French chefs both here and in France.

It was the late 1980s; some of
les grands,
as the top chefs were called, were shaking up haute French cuisine and I had a front-row seat at the revolution. I worked in Jean-Georges Vongerichten's first American kitchen when he banished butter from his sauces and did away with long-cooked stocks in favor of light pan
jus,
vegetable purees, and his then-radical flavored oils. I tagged along with Gilbert Le Coze, the chef-owner of Le Bernardin, a new breed of seafood restaurant in New York City, as he strode through the Fulton Fish Market picking the best of the catch and teaching other city chefs how to get the most out of fish, like monkfish and skate, they'd once ignored. And I was lucky enough to spend some time with Alain Ducasse learning how he worked the sunny ingredients and the easygoing style of the Mediterranean into his personal take on rigorous French cuisine.

These amazingly talented chefs and others like them were adding flavors from all parts of the world to their cooking and, in the process, not only loosening up French cooking, but making it more understandable to us Americans—more like the melting-pot cooking that's the hallmark of our own tradition.

I was dazzled by their brilliance, but I was fascinated by something else: the unbroken connection to the cooking of their childhoods. After making a startlingly original ginger sauce for his famous molten chocolate cake, Jean-Georges urged me to taste a cup of thick lentil soup, because it was made exactly as his mother would have made it (my version is on
[>]
). Having prepared a meal that included a kingly amount of precious black truffles, Daniel Boulud told me he couldn't wait to have hachis Parmentier, a humble shepherd's pie (see
[>]
). And Pierre Hermé, France's most famous pastry chef, after making a chocolate dessert that was masterly, revealed that its haunting flavor came from a jar of Nutella (just as it does in his tartine on
[>]
).

F
OR YEARS I CONTINUED TO TRAVEL BACK
and forth between New York City and France. Then, thirteen years ago, I became truly bicontinental: Michael and I moved into an apartment in Paris's 6th arrondissement, and I got the French life I couldn't ever have really imagined but had always longed for. Finally I could be a regular in the small shops of my neighborhood and at the vendors' stalls at the market, and nicest of all, I could cook for my French friends, and they for me.

Now I can chart the changing seasons by what my friends and I are cooking. When asparagus arrives, dinner at Martine Collet's starts with pounds of them, perfectly peeled to their tips, steamed just until a knife slips through them (see
[>]
), piled on a platter, and flanked by two bowls of her lemony mayonnaise. In early fall, when the days are warm but the nights are a little cooler, Hélène Samuel makes her all-white salad (
[>]
), a mix of mushrooms, apples, celery, and cabbage dressed with a tangy yogurt vinaigrette. When the cold weather is with us for real, Paule Caillat can be counted upon to serve Parisian gnocchi (
[>]
), a recipe passed down to her by her Tante Léo. And throughout the year, we lift the lids of Dutch ovens to reveal tagines, the beloved spice-scented Moroccan stews (try the one for lamb with apricots on
[>]
), or slowly braised
boeuf à la mode
(
[>]
) with a sauce gently seasoned with anchovies, or chicken braised in Armagnac (
[>]
), or an all-vegetable pot-au-feu (
[>]
).

What's being cooked in French homes today is wonderful partly because it's so unexpected. One week you might have a creamy cheese and potato gratin (see
[>]
) just like the one a cook's great-grandmother used to make, and the next week you'll be treated to a simply cooked fish with a ginger-spiked salsa (
[>]
) taking the place of the butter sauce that would once have been standard.

I love this mix of old and new, traditional and exotic, store-bought and homemade, simple and complex, and you'll find it in this book. These are the recipes gathered over my years of traveling and living in France. They're recipes from friends I love, bistros I cherish, and my own Paris kitchen. Some are steeped in history or tied to a story, and others are as fresh as the ingredients that go into them; some are time-honored, and many others are created on the spur of the moment from a basket full of food from the day's market.

This is elbows-on-the-table food, dishes you don't need a Grand Diplôme from Le Cordon Bleu to make. It's the food I would cook for you if you came to visit me in Paris—or in New York City, where all of these recipes were tested. The ingredients are readily available in the United States; almost everything can be bought at your neighborhood supermarket, and the techniques are straightforward and practical, as they must be—French home cooks are as busy as we are.

Holding this book of recipes, a record of my time in France, I have the sense of something meant to be: the reason that Michael and I ended up with plane tickets and a strawberry tartlet all those years ago.

About the Recipes

All the recipes in this book were made with large eggs, unsalted butter, and whole milk unless otherwise specified.

Just about every time you cook or bake, you've got to make a judgment call—it's the nature of the craft. I tested these recipes over and over and wrote them as carefully and precisely as I could, but there's no way I could take into account all the individual variables that will turn up in your kitchen. I couldn't know exactly how powerful "medium heat" is on your stovetop, how constant your oven temperature is, how cool your steak is when you slide it into the pan, how full your skillet is when you're sauteing, and a million other little things that affect the outcome of what you're making. And so, I've given you as many clues as I can for you to decide when something is done, and I've often given you a range of cooking or baking times, but the success of any cooking—whether from this book or any other—depends on using your judgment. Don't cook something for 15 minutes just because I tell you to—check it a little before the 15-minute mark, and then keep checking until it's just right. I always feel that when I send a recipe out into the world, I'm asking you to be my partner in making it, and I love this about cookbookery. I trust your judgment, and you should too.

Gougères
[>]

Goat-Cheese Mini Puffs
[>]

Saint-Germain-des-Prés Onion Biscuits
[>]

Cheez-it-ish Crackers
[>]

Pierre Hermé's Olive Sablés
[>]

David's Seaweed Sablés
[>]

Mustard Bâtons
[>]

Herbed Olives
[>]

Sweet and Spicy Cocktail Nuts
[>]

Hummus
[>]

Lyonnaise Garlic and Herb Cheese
(aka Boursin's Mama)
[>]

Guacamole with Tomatoes and Bell Peppers
[>]

Eggplant Caviar
[>]

Tzatziki
[>]

Sardine Rillettes
[>]

Salmon Rillettes
[>]

Tuna Rillettes
[>]

Arman's Caviar in Aspic
[>]

Dilled Gravlax with Mustard Sauce
[>]

Mme. Maman's Chopped Liver
[>]

Back-of-the-Card Cheese and Olive Bread
[>]

Savory Cheese and Chive Bread
[>]

Dieter's Tartine
[>]

Tartine de Viande des Grisons
[>]

Two Tartines from La Croix Rouge
[>]

Goat Cheese and Strawberry Tartine
[>]

Pissaladière
[>]

Provençal Olive Fougasse
[>]

Socca from Vieux Nice
[>]

PROVENÇAL OLIVE FOUGASSE
(
[>]
),
HERBED OLIVES
(
[>]
),
AND MUSTARD BÂTONS
(
[>]
)

W
HEN YOU'RE AN AMERICAN IN PARIS,
there's nothing more flattering than to have French people ask you to share your recipe for one of their national treasures. Of all the things I make for my French friends, this is the one that gets the most requests.

The easiest way to describe gougères is to call them cheese puffs. Their dough,
pâte à choux,
is the same one you'd use for sweet cream puffs or profiteroles (
[>]
), but when the
pâte à choux
is destined to become gougères, you fold in a fair amount of grated cheese. In France, I use Gruyère, Comté, Emmenthal, or, just for fun and a spot of color, Mimolette, Gouda's French cousin; in America, I reach for extra-sharp cheddar, and sometimes I add a little smoked cheese to the mix.

Gougères are made everywhere in France (and can be bought frozen in many stores), but their home is Burgundy, where they are the first thing you get when you sit down in almost any restaurant. In Burgundy, gougères are often served with the local aperitif, kir (see box,
[>]
); chez Greenspan, while I serve them no matter what I'm pouring as a welcoming glass, my favorite sip-along is Champagne. I love the way Champagne's toastiness and gougères' egginess play together.

Although you must spoon out the puffs as soon as the dough is made, the little puffs can be frozen and then baked straight from the freezer, putting them in the realm of the doable even on the spur of the moment.