Cooking By Feel: French Ingredients and Flavors

French cuisine is perhaps the one kind of cooking where almost all of us feel uncomfortable off-roading it without a recipe. Julia Child, Jacques Pepin and other chefs of the last fifty years have put a more approachable face on the intimidatingly disciplined recipes and techniques associated with French cooking, but we still tend to approach it with cookbook in hand.

Can you cook French food without recipes? Can you learn to improvise using French flavors and techniques? Why yes you can, and in fact, that's what much of those French techniques are designed for in the first place.

Here's a look at some classic French ingredients, flavors, and techniques that will help you understand your food a little better and dissect all those coq au vin recipes until you understand them inside and out.

French cooking tends to rely heavily on fresh herbs - a good note for Garden Month.

Flavors and Ingredients
• Sea salt
• Black pepper
• Thyme
• Parsley
• Rosemary
• Tarragon
• Onions
• Celery
• Carrots
• Garlic
• Bouquet garni of herbs
• Bay leaves
• Wine
• Butter
• Cheese
• Stock - beef, veal, and chicken
• Eggs
• Nutmeg
• White pepper
• Mushrooms
• Pickles and cornichons

Meal Basics
• Bread! - A good loaf of bread is essential at French meals
• Lentils and white beans
• Fresh greens
• Potatoes
• Meat, especially chicken, beef and lamb
• Fish

Instruction in French cuisine tends to emphasize the technique - how to cut an onion, how to dice your vegetables, how to build a good pot of stock. This is not just quibbling over details; once you've mastered these basic steps they are like tools in your back pocket to construct a meal from your own imagination.

Techniques
• Word of Mouth: Mirepoix
• How To Dice An Onion: The Video
• Flavor Builders: How to Caramelize Onions
• How To: Make Chicken Stock
• How to Make Hollandaise Sauce

Recipes and Other French Food
• Kitchen Tour: At Home in Paris with David Lebovitz
• Food Shopping in Paris and Montmartre with Chocolate & Zucchini’s Clotilde Dusoulier
• Book Review: Clotilde's Edible Adventures in Paris
• Recipe: Alsatian Cottage Cheese & Onion Tart
• Recipe: Erin's Crepes
• Recipe: Goat Cheese and Lardo with Red Pepper and Honey
• Compote d'Osso Buco
• Recipe: Fennel, Lemon and Garlic Confit
• Recipe: Celery Root Soup with Top Shelf Beet Relish
• Braised Radishes (Again) - This Time with Rice Vinegar and Mint
• My Life in France Book Club
• International Craving: French Macarons, Minus the Plane Fare to Paris
• March Gourmet: French Bistro Cooking
• Mariage Frères Tea

Comments (6)

You guys are really going to town on this whole cook with no recipes thing, I think that they would really make a handy addition to the blog as some sort of FAQ or something that would be available in the sidebar on a more or less permanent basis.

I'd argue that French cuisine would be one of the hardest cuisines for a newbie to attempt improvisation...

I just finsihed reading a book about the Culinary Institute of America and the mantra for the author's learning experience was "technique and ratio."

From what little I know of French cooking, the ingredients and foundational techniques are quite finicky (making a roux, making sauces) - I'd only attempt French cooking with a cookbook in hand.

I tend to limit my French improvisation to ratatouille and selecting French cheese, bread and wine.

I agree with the above poster that French is pretty difficult to do on the fly. In addition to sauce being finicky, French food tents to be more composed rather than a bunch of things thrown together (like say Asian). Thsi requires that each individual component be cooked seperately, and it can get a little hectic!

Also to the list I'd add lavendar and herbs de provence. And good mustard (both dijon and grainy). I make a great French dish thats basically potato, carrot, asparagus, and chicken, rosted in a mixture of grany french mustard and herbs de provence. Serve it with french bread and you'll feel liek you're there!

Yeah--omelets and ratatouille are about the extent of my "off road" French cooking. No, I do make a green lentil salad with Dijon dressing that's pretty much improv at this point, and I managed a French onion soup this weekend without cracking a book. BUT these are all pretty forgiving foods. Omelet, vegetables, salad, soup? I can make a bechemal sans recipe only because I've done it so many times I've memorized it.

Hmmm....the ingredient list above reads like an American ingredient list.

Hence, the fact that Contemporary American cuisine is really French cuisine masquerading as American!

Just kidding. But seriously, French cuisine is THE foundation of Western cooking. Wolfgang Puck, Jacques Pepin, Daniel Bouloud are all examples of expatriates that have become very successful "plugging and playing" the finest American ingredients into the formulas of Modern French cuisine. Puck has altered the cuisine so much that he has created a whole other genre of American cuisine. Bouloud's hamburger is as American as, well, hamburgers.

French cooking shouldn't be intimidating. It's more familiar than you think!

French food is NOT hard to cook, it really is all about very fresh ingredients and light and easy. We eat it almost daily .... yum!