French

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.

This make-ahead dessert is a great choice for dinner parties—the individual servings take very little time to plate and garnish, so you can enjoy yourself while still wowing your dinner guests with an elegant, delicious finale. The recipe’s first step calls for infusing its liquid ingredients with chopped pistachios; though the nuts themselves are later strained and removed, their fresh, delicate sweetness flavors every creamy spoonful of the rich custard. Prepared pistachio paste (available online; see Sources) adds more nuttiness and body.

Though French by definition, these delicate and lemony crêpes are an American tribute, boasting a sweet filling of tart, silky lemon curd and a juicy blueberry compote. The black currant–flavored crème de cassis contributes a sophisticated undercurrent of berry flavor to the compote and enhances its deep purple-blue color. Just as a stack of blueberry pancakes is made that much better by a melting pat of butter, a drizzle of browned butter enhances this dish with its nutty richness.

The apple tart is France’s answer to American apple pie. (Or maybe it’s the other way around, but really, who’s keeping score?) The light and buttery crust is a delicious home for overlapping slices of lightly seasoned apples. Rolling the dough over a bed of sugar fuses the granules to the crust, creating a sugary layer that caramelizes into a tantalizingly crisp outer shell as the tart bakes. I like to serve this with crème anglaise—a silky vanilla-infused pourable custard—flavored with apple’s favorite spice, cinnamon. It adds just the right amount of richness to the elegant tart. A little ice cream on the side—vanilla or caramel, for example—wouldn’t hurt either.

Those of you who love steak tartare—and there seems to be very little middle ground between those who do and those who don’t—will be positively enamored of this dish. This is a time when the quality of your ingredients is paramount—purchase the filet from a butcher whom you trust to give you the best selection as opposed to something prewrapped in the market. The egg for the mustard sauce must also be as fresh as possible as it is used raw. Savory anchovies add an extra layer of flavor to the creamy sauce, which pops with whole grain mustard. Crunchy, acidic cornichons, fresh jalapeño—an American touch—and shallots inject the lush tartare with flavor and texture.