‘I do not cook, I practice art.’ These words, pronounced by the divine actress Stéphane Audran toward the end of the film Babette’s Feast, give voice to the feelings of many of us when we enter the kitchen. Such were my feelings when I set out to duplicate a dish I had recently tasted at a nearby bistro. The dish? Cod crusted with pistachios, and served alongside a creamy purée of potatoes flavored with horseradish. Simply divine…
Cabillaud aux pistaches / Cod crusted with pistachios
Purée au raifort / Potato purée with horseradish
The bistro was Gustibus, a small place on the Rue St-Sébastien around the corner from me. I had walked past it many times without taking special note. But then a friend visiting from abroad convinced me to try it. The room is warm and intimate, the owner smiling and gregarious. Nadia is also a genius in the kitchen, where she and her husband prepare meals inspired by the cuisine of their native northern Italy.
In this recipe — my interpretation, as Nadia did not reveal her secrets — pistachios are peeled and crushed with a rolling pin, then patted onto the fish. The cod is lightly floured and pan-seared in olive oil. The horseradish purée is a variation on standard mashed potatoes, also very quick and easy to prepare. This versatile purée could accompany many other dishes, from meat or poultry to a vegetarian spread.
Over the last couple of weeks, I have been on a cooking spree, revisiting dishes already on the site in order to update their photos. The first is artichauts vinaigrette, or artichokes with mustard vinaigrette. With artichokes appearing in markets now, it seemed a seasonally appropriate choice. It also allowed me to revisit my recipe for the vinaigrette, an attentive reader having noticed a discrepancy between the amount of oil called for in the recipe and a different amount in the accompanying video. This has now been rectified — thank you, reader! — but the bottom line is, for a sharper sauce use less oil. The French standard version would be with more oil for a satiny, flavorful sauce that doesn’t bite.
The second revisited recipe is porc grillé aux herbes de Provence, or grilled pork chops with rosemary and thyme. With summer just around the corner, this is another seasonal dish, as the chops are best when grilled on the barbecue. But lacking a barbecue, you can grill them in a skillet, as I did on a rainy day in Paris. The combination of garlic and fresh herbs produces an aroma that will draw family or guests to the kitchen to see what’s cooking.
I have also added a bistro classic that was long overdue — écrasé de pommes de terre, or smashed potatoes. This dish, which has become popular on menus in recent years, is actually a throwback to the time when potatoes were roughly crushed with a fork instead of being puréed with a blender, as is usually done in France. These potatoes marry well with just about everything.
Whether you prefer your potatoes smashed, puréed with horseradish or in any other form is not important. For, as they say in Latin, de gustibus non disputatam — there is no accounting for taste. This is the phrase from which Nadia and her husband plucked the name of their bistro. Another translation: enjoy, enjoy.
Happy cooking.
Consider this a Mediterranean version of guacamole. Fava beans (aka broad beans) are cooked to tenderness and puréed with olive oil, lemon and garlic, with a little cayenne pepper for bite. A perfect spread as warm spring days edge toward the sumptuous evenings of summer. Right? That’s what I thought when I made this spread for guests a couple of weeks ago. But I was wrong. April in Paris was a bust this year. Truly the cruelest month…
I first encountered this spread maybe 20 years ago at the home of a Lebanese woman who lived around the corner from me in Paris. A superlative cook, she used canned fava beans for the spread, and this is a fine option in other seasons. You can also make the spread with frozen fava beans, a huge convenience as it allows you to dispense with shelling the beans (and they need to be shelled twice…). But in spring, fresh beans are best.
The other day I wandered into a local lunchtime place and was served the most delectable quiche I’d tasted in a long time. Both light and rich, it veritably hummed with the flavors of spring — in the form of green asparagus and oyster mushrooms. The place was the Rose Bakery. I wrote to them to ask for the recipe, but they didn’t reply. Never mind. I made it anyway.
A dish that can bring down the house — literally — is steak au poivre, the classic French bistro offering of tender beef crusted with cracked black pepper and topped with a cognac-cream sauce. When I embarked on this recipe, my kitchen nearly went up in flames — twice! The skillet I used to pan sear the steak caught fire when I started the sauce, with bright yellow flames shooting two feet into the air. Oh là là…
One recent Sunday during a visit to England, I was lucky enough to be invited to lunch in the picturesque town of Sevenoaks, in Kent south of London. My friends served me a spectacular meal, beginning with a salad of ruby-streaked blood oranges piled on thinly sliced finocchio and red onion, and scattered with Kalamata olives and watercress. Blood oranges would still be in season when I got home to France. I had to have the recipe.
Can you imagine that tiramisu, the ubiquitous feather-light confection, did not exist half a century ago? It certainly was nowhere to be found in Paris when I arrived in the 1970s, having only just been invented (apparently), although its origins are in dispute. What cannot be contested is that this wonderful dessert of sweetened cheese layered with ladyfingers dipped in coffee is not only a crowd pleaser, but easy and fun to prepare.
Sea scallops, Brittany style — dusted with flour, tenderly sauteed in butter and drizzled with a creamy sauce — make a fine winter’s dish. But what does this recipe have to do with the Way of Saint James, the historic pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain? Quite a lot, as it turns out, for the saint known as ‘Santiago’ in Spanish is ‘Saint Jacques’ in French, and along the route he gave his name to the humble scallop.
And why Brittany style? That’s a question I failed to answer, although my best guess is that scallops and butter are popular in the region. Brittany, of course, is surrounded by sea, and shellfish may be found there in abundance. The potato also has an important history in Brittany, where it came into wide use during a famine in the mid-18th century. In this recipe, the scallops may be paired with sliced potatoes, as shown in the photo above, or with potatoes boiled in their jackets. Another nice touch is to serve them in their shells.
It is always a comfort, on a cold, damp Paris day, to walk into a bistro at lunchtime and encounter a plate of céléri rémoulade, the classic French starter of grated celeriac bathed in a tangy mustard mayonnaise. This earthy salad is one of the dishes I longed for when far from France for long periods on journalistic assignments. You won’t find it in Moscow or Manila, nor for that matter in many of the trendy new cafés sprouting up in Paris. But what it may lack in chic it makes up for in flavor. A good reason to make it at home.
Celeriac remoulade can be served on its own as a starter, set on a bed of tender leaves or garnished with fresh herbs. But here in France it is most commonly seen as part of the mixed veggie starter known as 
And speaking of eggs, while preparing this week’s post I took time to revisit another of my favorite classic French starters — 
The French colonial empire once stretched across the globe, with the happy result — once independence was restored to the colonized — that the cuisine of many cultures is now available in France. Poulet yassa, or chicken marinated in a sauce of onions, lemon juice and mustard, is one such happy dish. Originally from the Casamance region of southern Senegal, it is now highly popular throughout former French West Africa, and also in Paris.
Back to Paris… Cold weather has finally set in, prompting me to revisit some of the winter dishes already posted here, with new photos. The first, 
The second is a 
When winter comes to France, it’s time for raclette. This immensely popular dish of potatoes smothered in melted cheese, accompanied by cured meat and pickles, has come down from the Alps to become a favorite nationwide. It evokes memories of ski slopes, where of a snowy evening you could gather with friends to enjoy a restaurant meal of raclette, with a half-wheel of cheese brought to your table and melted under an electric grill.
