I have many memories of late-night gratinée parties in our Lyon restaurant kitchen or at our house when I was a young man. When my brothe...

If I had to choose one soup from among all my favorites, it would probably be leek and potato soup, potage Parmentier, named after the French agronomist Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, who developed the culture of the potato in France in the eighteenth century.

I enjoy making pizza from scratch and occasionally make a pissaladière, the famous pizza from the south of France. Garnished with rendere...

I enjoy making pizza from scratch and occasionally make a pissaladière, the famous pizza from the south of France. Garnished with rendere...

I enjoy making pizza from scratch and occasionally make a pissaladière, the famous pizza from the south of France. Garnished with rendere...

A family tradition and summer ritual for me is catching grenouilles, or frogs, a pastime I enjoyed with my brothers every summer of our y...

I rarely used basil in France. In the cooking of the 1950s, it was considered unusual and esoteric. Tarragon, chervil, parsley, and chive...

Codfish is called morue in French, and what we call bacalao or salted codfish in the United States is morue salée in French. When I was a...

I was born near Lyon in the town of Bourg-en-Bresse, famous for its “chickens of Bresse,” which have white plumage, red combs, and blue f...

Sweetbreads from veal are my favorite of the variety meats. Gloria's two favorite offal are calves' brains and pig's feet, both of which ...

I have always loved corned beef, even the canned version I tasted in France at the end of the Second World War, when we occasionally got ...

For many Americans, the quintessential French stew is boeuf bourguignonne or beef Burgundy, beef cooked in Burgundy red wine (although it is often made with other wines instead of real Burgundy). In my aunts and my mothers restaurants, the stew was featured regularly and was made from the tougher, cheaper, fattier cuts of beef, which had to be braised a long time to get tender and stay moist. In classic restaurants, chuck was often used. The beef was browned and the juices deglazed with red wine and brown stock or reduced brown stock (demi-glace), and the stew was finished with lardons (browned pieces of diced bacon), mushrooms, and tiny boiled onions. For my beef stew, I like to use a special piece of the shoulder called a flatiron, sometimes called a chicken steak, blade steak, or underblade steak. This long, narrow piece from the center of the shoulder is extremely lean and has gelatinous sinew in the center. It is excellent sauted or grilled for steak. The meat is very tender and moist, and it makes an ideal stew. This stew is also very good made with chuck, which is the continuation of the rib eye into the shoulder. Instead of cutting the meat into small cubes, I cut it into large chunks, serving a couple of pieces per person. I do not use stock, demiglace, or even water. I make my stew strictly with red wine, and my preference goes toward a fairly robust, heavy wine in the style of the southern part of the Rhne Valley, like a Carignan, or an Australian or American wine, like a Syrah or Zinfandel. After I brown the meat on top of the stove, I add the liquid and finish it up in the oven for about 1 hours, so it cooks equally all around. It is best made and served in a beautiful cast-iron pan. For the garnish, I use small, round, flat cipollini onions, flavorful but expensive whole mushrooms, like small creminis lardons made with pancetta and baby carrots, which are not conventionally part of beef Burgundy. This rich winey beef stew is always a hit with my chef friends.

Big fat stalks of asparagus mean spring to me, along with dandelion salad, rhubarb, fresh trout, and strawberries. I like my asparagus th...