Which 7 French classics really belong in your culinary repertoire?
French cuisine is the cradle of all other culinary developments. At least, that’s what the French think. But we can all agree that French food stands for classic, traditional and seriously delicious, right? In our opinion, these are the seven French classics that every halfway decent home cook should have in their repertoire.
Quiche Lorraine
Savory pie from the days before savory pies were a trendy thing. Filled with bacon, onions and cheese and nothing else. Of course you don’t make the crust with puff pastry, because then you’re immediately disqualified: puff pastry stays soggy, and quiche is made with a salty 1-2-3 dough, using 1 egg, 150 grams of butter and 300 grams of flour. Add a pinch of salt, knead it into a nice dough, and you’re done.
Boeuf bourguignon
Beef, slowly braised in a light red wine (don’t use expensive Burgundy, that would be crazy!) with pearl onions, bacon and mushrooms. Retro? No, a classic – this stew enchants everyone who eats it. Best recipe to start with: Julia Child’s; she may have been American, but she was so crazy about French cuisine that it was contagious.
Gratin dauphinois
Take: potatoes, heavy cream, pepper and salt. And nothing else. Slice the potatoes paper-thin and arrange them like roof tiles in an oven dish, seasoning each layer with pepper and salt. Pour the cream over them and bake for about an hour until golden brown and cooked through. Approximately a gazillion calories, but at least you’ll have something to show for it.
Crème brûlée
It’s all about the perfect ‘crack’ when you tap the crème brûlée with your spoon. Using a blowtorch (perhaps even a paint stripper), you melt the sugar sprinkled over the vanilla custard into a beautiful reddish-brown layer of deliciousness.
Onion soup
Maybe it isn’t even the onion soup that everyone gets so excited about, but rather the baguette with melted cheese bobbing around in it like a little lifeboat. Do you try to push through it with your spoon against the rim of the bowl? Or are you allowed to bring out your knife and fork from the next course already? Those kinds of dilemmas are typically French. And want to drive a Frenchman crazy? Serve him this French onion mac ‘n cheese.
Croissant or pain au chocolat
At the French campsite, you were allowed to walk to the shop with a few loose francs in your hand. Trwaa kraasants ee uun pen oo sjokolaa please! Stork! And then back to the caravan with a paper bag bearing those characteristic grease stains; even a pebble in your water shoe didn’t matter, because soon you’d be sitting in the grass with such a deliciously crisp pastry containing a stick of half-melted dark chocolate in the middle.
Snails
People who are already a little wary of restaurants go completely wild when they realize that those juicy pieces of chicken breast in herb butter, which they picked out of that little dish, turn out to be snails. Whether a little dish of snails is necessarily a culinary highlight is up for debate, but nothing is as typically French as a fat escargot with a smear of herb butter on its head. Bon appetit!
Read also:
- Know before you go: 12 French dishes you might want to avoid
- How to make a classic salade Niçoise
- What we ate in the 1960s, part I
