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22 of Our Favorite French Recipes

Add a little French flair to your meal rotation with these staple French recipes.

By

Food & Wine Editors

Updated on May 25, 2024

Classic pot au feu — Photo:
Food & Wine / Photography by Carson Downing / Food styling by Annie Probst / Props styling by Addelyn Evans

Don't be intimidated by French food. Once you learn the basics, you can use the skills as a springboard for cooking all kinds of dishes from cuisines across the globe. These fantastic French recipes, from the classic pot-au-feu to comforting croque madame and caramelized tarte Tatin, are full of essential culinary techniques. With a bit of patience and practice, you'll be serving show-stoppers in no time.

01 of 22

Roast Chicken with Sauce Chasseur

Roast Chicken Sauce Chasseur Recipe — Victor Protasio

Chef and food editor Mary-Frances Heck's modern version of Sauce Chasseur is thickened with cream instead of the traditional demi-glace, which allows the flavors of the herbs, tomatoes, and acidic wine to come through. Wild fresh mushrooms take the dish to new heights.

02 of 22

Grilled Onion Lyonnaise

Grilled Onion Lyonnaise — Victor Protasio / Food Styling by Margaret Monroe Dickey / Prop Styling by Shell Royster

This riff on a classic salade Lyonnaise takes the iconic salad from great to even greater. The finished salad of frisée; crisp, meaty bacon lardons; grilled red torpedo onions; and a mustard vinaigrette is topped with poached eggs.

03 of 22

Steak au Poivre with Red Wine Pan Sauce

Steak au Poivre with Red Wine Pan Sauce — Cara Cormack

A perfect interplay of acid from the wine and sumptuous fat, red wine sauce is an ideal accompaniment to a peppercorn-crusted rib eye steak. The well-marbled cut stays more tender than New York strip, and its rich, beefy flavor infuses the pan sauce.

04 of 22

Best-Ever Cheese Soufflé

Best Cheese SoufflÃ© Recipe — Cara Cormack

Chef Alex Guarnaschelli's cheese soufflé includes Gruyère and Parmigiano-Reggiano along with a touch of sour cream and dry sherry. Pair it with a vinaigrette-dressed salad and baguette for an elegant lunch.

05 of 22

Socca with Zucchini and Olives

Socca with Zucchini and Olives — Photo by Greg DuPree / Food Styling by Margaret Monroe Dickey / Prop Styling by Claire Spollen

Socca is a tender pancake made from chickpea flour. Unlike the versions in Nice, which are cooked in copper pans, this one is baked in a cast-iron skillet before it's topped with a summery marinated squash salad.

06 of 22

Classic Pot-au-Feu

Classic pot au feu — Food & Wine / Photography by Carson Downing / Food styling by Annie Probst / Props styling by Addelyn Evans

For this dish, winemaker David Duband braises two cuts of beef — shank and rump roast — with marrow bones and then separately cooks leeks and carrots with more marrow bones until everything is deeply flavorful and tender. When serving, you can mix the horseradish with the sour cream to make a tasty garnish.

07 of 22

Tarte Tatin

Tarte Tatin — Morgan Hunt Glaze / Food Styling by Emily Nabors Hall / Prop Styling by Josh Hoggle

This classic French dessert comprised of caramelized apples in buttery, flaky pastry never loses its delicious magic. It's an easy yet impressive way to feature the season's best apples.

08 of 22

Croque Madame

Croque Madame — Photo by Jennifer Causey / Food Styling by Ali Ramee / Prop Styling by Christina Daley

The French croque madame sandwich is a lesson in extravagance, made with white bread, butter, cheese, ham, Mornay sauce, and a fried egg. It's a luxurious, deeply comforting dish. If you like, turn it into a croque monsieur by simply skipping the fried egg.

09 of 22

Chicken Provençal

recipeChicken Provancal — Photo by Andrew Bui / Food Styling by Max Rappaport

The flavors are bold in chicken Provençal, a southern French braise with a sauce of tomatoes, garlic, rosemary, olives, and just enough anchovy paste to give the sauce depth.

10 of 22

Salmon Niçoise Salad

Salmon Nicoise Salad — Photo by Greg DuPree / Food Styling by Torie Cox / Prop Styling by Missie Crawford

Fresh salmon, briny olives, crisp-tender green beans, and satisfying potatoes all soak up the zippy, perfectly balanced dressing in this variation on a classic tuna Niçoise. Don't skip the anchovy garnish — it provides pops of umami saltiness that take this salad over the top.

11 of 22

Gnocchi Parisienne

Gnocchi Parisienne — Greg DuPree / Food Styling by Victoria Granof / Prop Styling by Christine Keely

These tasty gnocchi are made with pâte à choux — the same dough used for profiteroles, cream puffs, and éclairs — that is poached and then baked. You don't need a light hand to make these, as you do for other forms of gnocchi; in fact, the dough comes together quickly in a saucepan and requires vigorous stirring.

12 of 22

Duck Liver Pâté with Blackberry Conserva

How to Make Chicken Liver Pate — Diana Chistruga

Jacques Pépin's recipe for chicken liver pâté is silky-smooth and simple to make. It's ideal with a cocktail or glass of wine before a meal.

13 of 22

Poached Eggs with Red Wine Sauce

Poached Eggs with Red Wine Sauce — Greg DuPree

In 2018, we named this recipe one of our 40 best. Anne Willan, founder of the prestigious École de Cuisine la Varenne in France, expounded the virtues of cooking with wine and shared her version of classic oeufs pochés en meurette, a Burgundian preparation reminiscent of eggs Benedict. Traditionally the eggs for this dish are poached in red wine, causing them to take on a grayish-purple color. Here, the eggs are poached in water, then assembled with red wine sauce at the end.

14 of 22

French Lemon Tart

French Lemon Tart — Cara Cormack

In this classic citrus tart, the lemony custard is poured into a fully baked tart shell, so there's no need to worry about an undercooked crust or a curdled filling.

15 of 22

Ham Steaks in Madeira Sauce

Ham Steaks in Madeira Sauce — Greg DuPree

For this recipe, Julia Child was inspired by jambon à la morvandelle, the signature dish of Alexandre Dumaine, one of France's most famous chefs in the 1930s, '40s, and '50s. "Although supermarket ham will do, real country ham will give you a dish more like Dumaine's fabled creation," wrote Child. She called the dish — featuring ham steaks basted in a mushroom and Madeira sauce — one of her "fast entrées for fancy people."

16 of 22

Beef Stew in Red Wine Sauce

Beef Stew in Red Wine Sauce — Cara Cormack

For many Americans, the quintessential French stew is boeuf bourguignon — beef cooked in Burgundy red wine. The stew, featured regularly at Jacques Pépin's mother's restaurant, was made from tougher, cheaper cuts of beef, which had to be braised a long time to get tender and to stay moist.

17 of 22

Ratatouille

Ratatouille — Photo by Kelsey Hansen / Food Styling by Greg Luna / Prop Styling by Stephanie Hunter

This vegetable stew from the south of France is a celebration of summer vegetables at the height of their seasonality. Our recipe relies on a simple technique for creating a richly flavorful dish: cooking each vegetable separately. After just a few minutes in the pan, the vegetables release water, deepen in flavor, and become just tender enough to begin to break down.

18 of 22

Quiche Lorraine

Quiche Lorraine Recipe — Matt Taylor-Gross / Food Styling Debbie Wee

Crisp bacon bits and grated Gruyère flavor Julia Child's rich and creamy classic quiche, which boasts a flaky, buttery crust. The secret to the super-silky texture is simple: It's the heavy cream whisked into the eggs for the filling.

19 of 22

Extra-Creamy Chocolate Mousse

Extra-Creamy Chocolate Mousse — © Christina Holmes

What sets French pastry chef Dominique Ansel’s chocolate mousse apart from other versions of the dessert is that he folds in the chocolate just before serving.

20 of 22

Gateway Cassoulet

Gateway Cassoulet — Photo by Jennifer Causey / Food Styling by Chelsea Zimmer / Prop Styling by Christina Daley

"The epitome of slow food, cassoulet is a marriage of rustic yet refined flavors craftily layered and melded together into the ultimate comforting pot of garlicky white beans, snappy pork sausage, and meltingly tender duck confit," writes F&W food editor Paige Grandjean. Here, food writer Sylvie Bigar reduces the active cooking time to a little over an hour, while retaining the long-cooked, richly developed flavor of the traditional recipe.

21 of 22

Vichyssoise

Vichyssoise — Photo by Victor Protasio / Food Styling by Chelsea Zimmer / Prop Styling by Thom Driver

Topped with crunchy garlic croutons, shaved Pecorino Romano cheese, and a scattering of sliced scallions, this creamy chilled potato-leek soup deserves a spot in your summer rotation.

22 of 22

Warm Camembert with Wild Mushroom Fricassee

Warm Camembert with Wild Mushroom Fricassee — © Frances Janisch

Chef Daniel Boulud makes this oozy appetizer with Vacherin Mont-d'Or, a creamy cheese sold at top cheese shops. Here, we use Camembert; it's as rich and runny as Vacherin Mont-d'Or and much easier to find.

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