GLOSSARY

I’m convinced that the French were the original everything-tastes-better-with-bacon people. If you were stuck in the middle of nowhere in France with only a gas-station convenience store to shop in, you’d probably be able to find bacon and maybe even lardons (lahr-dahn), short strips of bacon that are about 1/4 inch thick. French cooks often buy their bacon in large slabs, so that they can cut pieces of any thickness to match the dish they’re making. At home, I mostly use sliced bacon, but I cut lardons from slab bacon. Once they’re cut, I blanch the lardons for a minute in boiling water, then drain and pat them dry and sauté them. Lardons make a good topping for soups and salads and are a prime ingredient in Quiche Lorraine (page 157).

Beurre noisette translates as hazelnut butter, but the term is descriptive rather than actual, since no hazelnuts are involved; the butter is heated until it turns a nut brown and smells like hazelnuts and tastes ever so slightly like caramel. We call the same preparation brown butter. Heat brown butter a little more, and you get beurre noir (burr nwhar), or black butter (it shouldn’t turn truly black; rather it should be a deep brown). Beurre noir is most famously paired with skate.

This is a handheld slicer with an adjustable blade that allows you to thinly slice potatoes for a gratin or thickly slice truffles for a snack (if ever you find yourself with enough truffles on hand for snacking). Think of it as a more portable, less expensive (and, in some ways, less complicated) mandoline.

Blanching is a way of quickly precooking greens, removing their raw taste, and keeping the green color. It’s also a way of softening a vegetable or fruit so that it can be peeled — about tomatoes and peaches. To blanch something, drop it into a large quantity of boiling salted water and cook it briefly — depending on what you’re cooking and whether or not you’ll be cooking it again, you might keep the ingredient in the pot for as little as 30 seconds or for as long as a couple of minutes. Immediately after blanching, the ingredient is “shocked” — dunked into a bowl of ice water or rinsed under cold water, to stop the cooking and, in some cases, set the color. I was a reluctant blancher for much of my adult life. And then one day I took the extra few minutes needed to blanch basil before turning it into pesto, saw how it kept its vibrant color, and I became a convert.

This means “good idea.” I use the term at the end of a recipe to introduce a variation, serving suggestion, or related preparation that you might find helpful, clever, delicious, or just plain bonne.

As strange as it sounds, the French use bouillon cubes (chicken, beef, and vegetables) at home all the time — even chefs turn to them when they’re cooking at home. Except when a recipe calls for adding a cube to a dish as flavoring (rather than to create a stock or soup), you can always use homemade stock or store-bought broth, a product that is not easily found in French supermarkets, instead.

A bouquet garni is an herb seasoning for slow-cooked dishes like soups and stews. While there is no set combination of herbs in a bouquet garni, the most frequently used ingredients are parsley, thyme, and bay leaf. If you’ve got celery in the dish, you might add a few celery leaves to the bouquet. And if you’ve got a leek in the dish, then it’s neat, efficient, and flavorful to use a washed leek green as the wrapper for the herbs: tuck the herbs into the green and tie them up with twine. If your bouquet also includes dried spices, such as peppercorns and coriander seeds, it’s best to make a sachet by placing the ingredients in a double thickness of cheesecloth, folding the cheesecloth into a packet or sachet to enclose all the little bits of herbs and spices, and securing the sachet with kitchen twine. If you’re a gadget collector, you might want to purchase a mesh ball on a long thin chain — it looks like an oversized tea infuser — to replace the leek or cheesecloth.

While some French pastry shops sell bread and some bread shops sell a few pastries, the most traditional place to buy bread is a boulangerie. If the bread maker, the boulanger, makes his own dough, kneads, shapes, and bakes it himself, there will be a sign that proclaims him an artisan bread maker. These days, many bakeries sell breads that are prepared elsewhere and just baked on the premises. These breads can be very tasty, but they are not considered artisan breads.

When cook meat, poultry, fish, or vegetables slowly in liquid, you are braising. The most common synonym for braise is stew.