French

These cream puffs are a completely French invention. They look so perfectly beautiful! My children love filling them with whipped cream—and eating them, of course. These are certainly hard to resist.

Update classic peach Melba, one of the most enduring creations of Escoffier, by swapping a dark, slightly salty caramel for the customary raspberry sauce. Ripe peaches are essential to the success of this elegant dessert.

Classic salad, meet the open-face sandwich. Our version includes garlic-scented toast and a versatile, new-school egg salad made with cottage cheese, parsley, and capers.

To see if the puffs are done, look for even color on the tops and bottoms.

Simmer butter until its milk solids brown to unleash its nutty alter ego. Use it to bring deep flavor to baked goods, or as a sauce for fish or pasta.

This classic French dish is originally made without cheese. It is the starch from the potatoes, and the cream and milk, which give the dish its cheesy taste while the leek and garlic gently infuse their flavors into the potatoes. Of course if you prefer you can add some grated gruyère to the top along with the cream.

Here's a soufflé that can stand up for itself. Michel Richard, of Citronelle in Washington, D.C., ignores tales about soufflés that collapse when the oven is opened (a myth). Instead, he focuses on what matters: a well-seasoned base that infuses the soufflé with flavor, and properly whipped whites that achieve optimum volume as they bake. Whip the whites until firm, but stop before they get too stiff, says Richard, or the soufflé will be grainy. And quell your jitters with his 21st-century trick: Add xanthan gum to the whites. It acts as a stabilizer— resulting in the most dramatic soufflé we've made in a while.

Think of this aioli as your secret sauce. Made by transforming egg yolks, garlic, and olive oil into a creamy dip, it's Provence's answer to mayonnaise. The secret is creating a tight emulsion of the yolk and oil. The technique, thankfully, is less scientific: "Add a thin drizzle of oil and whisk like crazy," says Suzanne Goin, chef at L.A.'s Lucques, Tavern, and A.O.C. Her version lets the egg shine by using half flavor-neutral grapeseed oil so the olive oil doesn't dominate. The result is a harmonious sauce with a supple texture (thanks to hand-whisking instead of using a blender) that begs to be spooned onto meat, bread, and fish. Goin serves it with salmon and poached spring vegetables, but no matter what you pair it with, this sauce is the star.

These golden, crunchy croissants that we permit ourselves to enjoy without the slightest remorse on Sunday mornings are not as French as you might think. These pastries, known in French as viennoiserie, indeed originated from seventeenth-century Vienna. In 1683, the inhabitants of the Austrian capital suffered an attack led by the forces of the Ottoman Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa. After months of a terrible siege, they were liberated by Charles V of Lorraine and Jan Sobieski, King of Poland. This victory enabled the Hapsburgs to recover their territories of Hungary and Croatia, and the bakers made a commemorative pastry in the form of a crescent moon, the symbol of the Ottoman Empire. Folk history even accords the bakers a crucial role in reversing the battle situation. As they worked during the night, they heard the sound of the Turkish soldiers preparing a new assault and sounded the alarm. Their version of the croissant was nevertheless closer to the brioche than the croissant that we know today. A century later, Marie-Antoinette is said to have brought this delicacy from her native city to introduce it to the French court. Giles MacDonogh, however, author of a biography of Brillat-Savarin, offers a version that corresponds more closely with the dates when the croissant appeared in France (around 1900). He mentions the arrival in Paris, in 1838, of an Austrian named Auguste Zang, who opened a Viennese bakery at 92 rue Richelieu, only a few numbers away from the Brillat-Savarin building. "The business took off slowly," he explains, but eventually his kipferl cookies began to sell, literally "like hot cakes." The croissant was born. All of his croissants came out of a brand-new steam oven, above which the inscription was written La main de l'homme n'y a pas touché. (No human hand has touched them.) In those days, industrial processes inspired trust! Nowadays, any croissant untouched by human hand is suspect. The dough needs to be kneaded gently, then vigorously, until it can be detached from marble, and pieces of it shaped into a ball. The surface of each ball is then dried with a sprinkling of flour and covered with a damp cloth. Then the waiting begins. The dough is mixed with worked butter, punched down, then folded, turned, and set to rise again. This craftsmanship is becoming rarer, and the challenge is to live up to the legend, to match the taste of these handmade croissants, with their melting, silky layers of pastry.

The King's Cake (galette des rois), in whatever form it took, with a "bean" baked into it, has been the king of desserts on Twelfth Night, also known as the Feast of Kings or Epiphany in France, since the Middle Ages. In those days, the French King's Cake took different forms depending on the region. It was a brioche topped with candied fruits in Provence, a flat galette with cream in the North, a dry cake in Lorraine, a puff pastry round with an almond flavored filling in Lyon. À Paris, it was a gorenflot, a sort of enriched bread raised with baker's yeast, something like a Polish brioche. The ritual of this shared cake is symbolic of the day of the Epiphany, commemorating the presentation of Jesus to the Magi on the sixth of January, but it is also redolent of other pagan traditions linked to the cult of fertility that was so popular with the Romans. The "bean" hidden inside the cake was originally an actual lima bean, a symbol of renewal and fecundity, before it was replaced by a tiny porcelain figure representing the Christ child, then by a host of trinkets. Today, the marzipan-filled, puff pastry round has gained supremacy almost everywhere. And for good reason—few pastries can give such extended pleasure. How delicious when, under its fine butter coating, the many-layered pastry (milles-feuilles), still warm, encounters the silky, fondant marzipan on the palate—a perfect combination of the puff pastry and grainy, ground almonds. No one knows exactly when this so-called "Parisian" cake was born. The invention of marzipan dates from the sixteenth century. The history should be treated with caution, but it is sufficiently delicious to have been inscribed indelibly in the memory of gourmets. In 1588, an Italian marquis named Murio Frangipani marketed gloves perfumed with almonds. There is nothing surprising about this because perfumers were originally glove makers. The essence of Italian frangipani, about which Catherine de' Medici was passionate, inspired the pastry cooks of the French court to create frangipane cream, an equal mixture of pastry cream and almond cream. King's Cake, whether flavored with fruits or almond cream, is a dessert with a history. Certain Epiphanies have been retained in the annals. For instance, on January 6, 1650, at the Louvre Palace, Anne of Austria and her son Louis XIV indulged in the cake, leaving on the table, as was the custom, a share for the poor, in this case the very part that contained the bean. The next morning, there was "no other king than that of the bean," the king having fled Paris to escape the uprising known as the Fronde. Is it because of this unpleasant memory that the tradition of naming the person who finds the bean as "king" for the day was outlawed during Louis XIV's reign, the custom being officially judged to be too pagan? In 1770, Diderot recounted this anecdote in his Encyclopédie, summarizing it with this amusing aphorism: "Signe Denis, sans terre ni château. Roi par the grâce du gâteau." (The sign of Denis [patron saint of Paris] without land or château, King by the grace of a gâteau.) The joy of eating the crown is all part of the pleasure of enjoying King's Cake once a year, and more....

This Mary Kettilby recipe produces a classic Potage St. Germain. The name comes from the Paris suburb of St.-Germain-en-Laye, where young peas, a rarity in the early eighteenth century, were sown in boxes for early-spring cultivation. The addition of onions and spinach provide a traditional French touch, making this soup a flavorsome beginning for spring menu. Calendulas, also known as pot marigolds, make a lovely garnish for this soup. They were used as both a flavoring and a medicinal herb. According to one source, calendulas could be added to dishes in place of saffron, an affordable alternative in the days before saffron was grown in England. Sprinkle the shredded blossoms over the soup just before serving it. Please note that the calendula/pot marigold should not be confused with the African marigold, which is used as an insect repellent in vegetable gardens.

Barigoule is typically a stew of artichokes. This version blends vegetables in a bit of vanilla-scented sauce.

Pork and beans never had it so good. This Spanish riff on French cassoulet pairs large, meaty beans with fresh sausages under a breadcrumb crust. Save time by quick-soaking the beans.

Salade Niçoise meets all-American pasta salad in this all-in-one dish that’s perfect for a picnic or dinner on a hot summer night. The trick is to use the Italian canned tuna; the flavor of water-packed albacore tuna is just not comparable.

This vegetarian version of the classic dish omits the anchovies and replaces the tuna with cannellini beans; navy beans or chickpeas are other options.

As à la meunière means “in the manner of the miller’s wife” in French, it’s no surprise that this preparation often calls for the fish to be coated with flour before being sautéed, to promote browning.

Pot-au-feu (literally “pot on the fire”) is sometimes described as the national dish of France. It certainly embodies one of that country’s primary tenets of cooking: taking inexpensive and widely available ingredients and, with a bit of careful tending-to and extended cooking, turning them into a dish fit for a king. Calling it a one-pot dish, however, is a bit of a misnomer; sure, most everything is cooked in the same pot, just not at the same time (the potatoes are always cooked separately). What you end up with is a multifaceted meal that retains the taste of each of its components. If you want to follow tradition, serve the broth as a separate course, then present the sliced meat and vegetables on a platter. Choose among mandatory accompaniments—fresh horseradish, assorted mustards, cornichons (or gherkins), and sea salt—and be sure to offer toasted bread for spreading with the marrow scooped from the bones.