David Lebovitz

One assumption that I'm going to make about the French is that they're not afraid to make things au pif, or "by the nose".

I don't know if a precise recipe for sauce vinaigrette actually exists. But if there is, I bet few people follow it very closely. And Romain is no different from his compatriots when it comes to recipes, and rules.

They are both for other people—and don't apply to him.

Vinaigrette is just one of those things. It's a few simple ingredients which come together so well, when done right. Anyone can make it: you just pour, stir, marinate, then taste until it's just right. But the salad dressings in France always taste better to me than elsewhere. So thought I'd follow Romain when he made a true vinaigrette. He was surprised at the idea of measuring anything, so I follow him through the steps, taking a few notes along with way (see Recipe, at the end) and along the way, I learned two French secrets for a great salad dressing.

One is that you must use good Dijon mustard.

Many people who tackle French recipes get stumped by the sugars, which don't necessarily correspond to the sugars available elsewhere. All supermarkets in France carry white granulated sugar and there's often unrefined sugars, such as cassonade, which grocers stock and are widely-available. In America and elsewhere, bakers often have to do a bit of hunting around to find the corresponding sugar.

French brown sugars are quite varied and don't always neatly fit into substitutions. In general, if you have a recipe that calls for brown sugar, you can use moist cassonade, vergeoise, or any unrefined amber-colored sugar that's not granulated. For the sake of these descriptions, moist brown sugar is sugar that clumps together easily if you pinch it. Crystallized sugar is granulated, or free-flowing, and pours easily.

For caramelization, you need to use refined white sugar; impurities in unrefined sugars will cause crystallization. There's some controversy in the pastry community that sugar refined from beets, which the majority of the sugar in France is, will give you difficulty if you try to caramelize it. But I haven't experienced any problems.

I've listed a few places outside of France where these sugars, and others, are available at the end of the post. Depending on where you live, your best bet is to search online or find a store that specializes in baking ingredients for professionals or dedicated home bakers. There are also links to various sugar companies and websites where you can learn more about these sugars.

Sucre cristallisé or sucre cristal

This is plain white sugar, whose crystals are a bit larger than what's considered granulated sugar in the United States. You can use this sugar for almost all baking and cooking applications.

Sucre semoule and Sucre en poudre

This is sugar whose crystals are very fine. In America, this would be similar to what is called superfine or baker's sugar. In other countries it's called castor or caster sugar. Its fine texture means it melts quickly and will give a finer crumb to many cakes, meringues and cookies.

You can make your own by pulsing granulated sugar in a food processor or blender a few times until it's in smaller crystals.

About a year ago, I was having supper in a friend's apartment and everything we ate was simple, and tasted really good. He'd lived on a farm near Toulouse for many years, where he worked for one of France's agricultural organizations. Now he lives in Paris and I was surprised when he told me that the onions we were eating on the tart he'd made were from a panier, or a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) box.

He gets a weekly panier from Les Paniers du Val de Loire. I kept hemming and hawing, thinking how nice it was to shop at my local market and pick out everything myself. But I finally signed up a couple of weeks ago, and got my first panier yesterday.

Living in San Francisco and working closely with a lot of farmers and small-producers in my restaurant career, I have a weakness for hard-working small producers who are trying to do the right thing. I remember a woman showing up at our back door with a box of amazing French butter pears, asking us if she planted more trees, would we would buy them? (We took a bite and said that we'd take any and all that she wanted to bring us, a promise we made good on.) I remember an organic dairy sending us their first samples, and customer reaction made us realize that people weren't ready for the strong taste of farm-fresh dairy products.

And there was Mr. Hadsell, a frail old man who could barely walk, who'd open the kitchen screen door and shuffle inside, balancing a few flats of just-picked raspberries from his backyard. You could feel the warmth of the sun radiating from each basket of plump, perfect berries. Those were the best raspberries I ever had in my life and I hope the lucky customers that got them felt the same.

But elsewhere, it can be an uphill battle to find just-picked, fresh produce, even in a country with strong ties to its agricultural traditions, like France.

When I started this site, I had forums, where people could chat and post messages. Before we took it down (because my brain was about to implode), one of the burning questions on there was this: Is couscous pasta?

My contention was that it wasn't, since it wasn't a 'paste' (or as the French would say, un pâte), which is what I believe—in my limited intelligence—that pasta is.

On the other hand, perhaps it is pasta, because couscous is flour mixed with water, then rolled until little granules form. Theoretically, then, it is a paste before it's broken down into little bits. Which makes me wonder if kig ha farz is pasta, too? (Although back then, no one would have know what that was, so it wouldn't have bolstered my argument.)

Then, to make matters even more complicated, there's Israeli couscous, whose springy, chewy texture wouldn't raise an eyebrow if someone called it pasta.

If you go to Lyon, you'll find Saint Marcellin pretty much everywhere. It's the best-known cheese from that region, and the user friendly-sized disks are inevitably piled high at each and every cheese shop you step in to. Locals bake them at home and slide the warm disks onto salads, and I've not been to a restaurant in that city that didn't have Saint Marcellin on the menu doing double-duty as the cheese or the dessert course. Or both. At the outdoor market stands, you can see how popular they are with les Lyonnais. And if you don't believe me, their presence is so pervasive that I once bought a ticket on the bus in Lyon and instead of change, the driver handed me a ripe Saint Marcellin instead.

Because they hover around €3, I used to pick one up at the fromagerie since they're an inexpensive way to add variety to a cheese platter. The ones I'd buy were decent, although I never heard anyone put a dab on their bread and say, "Good gosh David, that cheese is friggin' amazing!" (Although I'm not sure "friggin" is a well-used word around here.)

Every year I get a slew of requests from people looking for a recipe for Pumpkin Ice Cream. While in The Perfect Scoop I have a recipe for Sweet Potato Ice Cream studded with maple-glazed pecans, there's something about the fall that makes people think of all-things pumpkin. I'm a big fan of sweet potatoes, personally, but old traditions die hard I suppose. And Pumpkin Ice Cream got put on my to-churn list.

As luck would have it, I was leafing through a copy of The Craft of Baking by Karen DeMasco, former pastry chef at Craft in New York City, and landed on a picture of Pumpkin Ice Cream. Quelle chance! So I thought I'd give her recipe a spin in my ice cream machine.

Karen uses canned pumpkin, which a lot of people like to use because it's easy and consistent. But it's not so easy to find in Paris. And even though I'm an outcast for using sweet potatoes, I'm still a bit old-fashioned and like to make my own puree. So there.

I've been living in France for almost eight years and in all that time, I've yet to make even one of these classic French pear tarts. I don't think I've ever been in a bakery that didn't have wedges of this tart in little paper footings, ready to take out and be consumed right away. So I guess because I could always buy one, why make it? But since I had a kilo of almond paste that I bought for another project, a batch of poached pears on hand, and an unbaked tart shell waiting it's turn in my freezer, I decided to give one a go.

This is a wonderful tart: pears fanned out in a golden-brown, buttery pastry shell that's been spread with almond cream, then baked. And after I pulled this one out of the oven, I realized why it's important to make this yourself; because it tastes amazing when still-warm from the oven, and you can use your own poached pears so you can vary the spices to your taste. (However you can use canned pear halves, which many of the French pastry shops do.)

Aside from the almond paste, I also had a jar of quick-candied sour cherries on hand from another baking project (if it seems like I have a lot of baking odds and ends on hand, welcome to my world...), so I used them as well, which is something I haven't seen in any French bakery. I'm thinking of suggesting they use them on my next visit.

For someone who doesn't drink that much, I sure have a lot of liquor on my liquor shelf. I guess I should rephrase that. For someone who drinks an a lot of wine, but not a lot of liquor, I sure have a lot of liquor on my liquor shelf.

The French don't have anything on us Americans when it comes to drinking cocktails, although that seems to be changing a bit. Fruity, sweet drinks won't likely catch on around here, which I'm happy about, but minty Mojitos are popular, fueled on by their love of a fascination with anything Cuban. And one of my commenters got a big laugh out of me when I was explaining in another post the lack of ice cubes in Paris, and she said, "The only time you get a lot of ice in Paris is when you order a cocktail."