French

Of all main-course salads, the Niçoise is my all-time favorite, with its fresh butter-lettuce foundation; its carefully cooked, beautifully green green beans; its colorful contrast of halved hard-boiled eggs, ripe red tomatoes, and black olives; all fortified by chunks of tunafish and freshly opened anchovies. It’s a perfect luncheon dish, to my mind, winter, summer, spring, and fall—an inspired combination that pleases everyone.

This is a bare-bones recipe for the simple all-purpose vinaigrette, which you will vary as you wish; you’ll find suggestions at the end of this recipe. Its beauty lies solely in the quality of your ingredients. Note that you will so often see proportions of 1 part vinegar to 3 parts oil, but that can make a very acid, very vinegary vinaigrette. I use the proportions of a very dry martini, since you can always add more vinegar or lemon but you can’t take it out.

Good freezer management makes it so much easier to get away with two-timing. When the freezer door won’t close, we know it’s time for a couple bags of sauerkraut for an Alsatian choucroute (pronounced shoo-KROOT) garni. A French peasant dish from the Alsace region, choucroute garni means sauerkraut “garnished” with an abundance of pork products, or occasionally goose or duck. It’s the perfect freezer purge for using up all manner of cheater pork plus any sausages, bacon, or ham bones. Whatever you find in there will pretty much work with this dish. Choucroute (the sauerkraut) is traditionally slow-baked in a heavy casserole with slab bacon or a ham hock, carrots, onion, garlic, apple, and wine or beer. The seasoning mix depends on the cook (or the pantry), but usually includes juniper berries, bay leaves, cloves, black or white pepper, even cumin and coriander seeds. The sausages, ham, and other meats are added near the end of cooking. Get the bagged or jarred sauerkraut for the freshest taste. While the sauerkraut turns French in the oven, thaw the trove of frozen meats. A fruity, dry Alsatian Riesling is traditional for both cooking and drinking. French and German beers are also a good match. To complete the meal, add boiled potatoes and a green salad.

New Orleans–style barbecued shrimp, called “barbecue” even though they have nothing to do with smoke or a grill, are usually prepared in the oven. We do ours in a big hot pot on the stove because this dish is all about the buttery, garlicky sauce. Mass quantities of crusty French bread are required for sopping. We plunk the big pot in the middle of the table and go to town. It’s an exceptionally good time tearing into long baguettes and washing everything down with plenty of cold white wine. Sometimes, we remember the salad.

A medieval fastness above the Mar Tirreno, Guardia Piemontese is a thirteenth-century village raised up by a band of French-descended, Waldensian heretics in flight from papal justice. Pursued into the pathlessness of Calabria, they resisted the Church’s soldiers then and again and again. Two hundred years had passed when, flush with the dramas of the inquisizione, Pius V dispatched a brigade up into their serene agrarian midst, calling for, in the names of Christ and the Holy Ghost, their massacre. Those few who escaped the flailing of the Church’s swords stayed. And those who were born of them stay, still, speaking a Provencale dialect and celebrating the traditions of French country life, gentling their patch of the earth as though time was a stranger. Too, they are true to their own and simple gastronomic heritage, having obliged no transfusion of the coarser Calabrian kitchen. Here follows a thick mountain soup, so like a Béarnais garbure (a thick cabbage soup from Béarn) even to the blessing of its last smudges with red wine as the French are wont to do à la faire chabrot—pouring a few drops of red wine into the last spoonful of soup, stirring it up and getting every last drop as both a blessing to the cook and a thank-you to God.

The raffinatezza—refinement—of the food of Teramo is legendary. And the Teramani propose that it was, indeed, among them that crepes—called crespelle or scrippelle in dialect—were first fashioned. It was much later, they say, that their delicate, eggy secrets traveled to France via the gastronomic exchange during the epoch of the Bourbons. Often one finds the scrippelle plumped with a stuffing of mushrooms or a truffled paste of some sort, then gratinéed. Sometimes, they are composed into a timballo—a lovely molded cake, its layers spread with savory filling. Though they are luscious and a genuine part of the culinary heritage of the region, these fall too far, for me, from the ingenuousness of la cucina Abruzzese. The following, though, is a version of scrippelle that is more homespun, the one we eat always at a lovely Teramana osteria called Sotto le Stelle, Under the Stars. Our ritual is this. At about eight o’clock, we stop by at the Bar Centrale (the place most intelligently furnished with the splendid labels and vintages of Italian and French wines in all of Italy south of Rome, all of it accomplished with Abruzzese grace and humility by a man called Marcello Perpentuini). There we chat with Marcello and take an aperitivo. A bit before nine, Marcello telephones Antonio, the restaurant’s owner, orders a bottle of wine for us and tells him we’re on our way. We walk the few blocks through the quiet streets of Teramo to the little restaurant. Our wine has been opened, some lush plate of local salame and fresh, sweet pecorino laid on our table with warm breads, and, perhaps best of all, someone back in the kitchen is making our scrippelle.

Savory is possibly the most underappreciated herb in this country. I fell in love with it many years back when I was cooking in France. There, it’s used in the traditional seasoning mix herbes de Provence and added to all types of stews, ragoûts, and sauces. Its aroma—earthy, slightly sweet, and a little bit peppery—reminds me of the brush-covered hillsides where we played growing up. Winter savory, summer savory’s seasonal opposite, is more robust in flavor but would be a fine substitute in this recipe. If you can’t find either of the savories, substitute a combination of equal amounts of thyme, rosemary, and mint. This isn’t a difficult dish to make, but it does require some last-minute multitasking. Have your prepared ingredients—or, as we say in the kitchen, your mise en place—ready to go. Be sure that your herbs are chopped, the vinaigrette is made, the crème fraîche is mixed, and your seasonings are in reach. This dish is a great way to initiate the unconverted to the Church of the Fava Bean. The potatoes and favas are mashed together with butter and finished with pea shoots and a vibrant Meyer lemon salsa. The seared halibut goes on top with a dollop of savory crème fraîche.