France Food Guide

Cassoulet

A hearty slow-cooked casserole from southern France containing meat (typically pork sausages, goose, or duck) and white beans, with a distinctive crusty top formed during the long cooking process.

Tarte Flambée

An Alsatian specialty similar to thin pizza, featuring bread dough rolled out very thinly and topped with crème fraîche, thinly sliced onions, and lardons before quick baking in a hot oven.

Quiche Lorraine

A savory open pie from the Lorraine region featuring a pastry crust filled with a rich custard of eggs, cream, and lardons, sometimes including cheese, with endless regional variations.

Pot-au-Feu

A traditional French beef stew where inexpensive cuts of beef are slow-cooked with root vegetables and aromatic herbs to create a rich, flavorful broth and tender meat - considered the quintessential French family dish.

Tarte Tatin

A caramelized upside-down apple tart created accidentally by the Tatin sisters, featuring apples cooked in caramel then baked under pastry and flipped to serve, showing the beautifully caramelized fruit.

Moules Marinières

Mussels steamed in white wine with shallots, parsley and butter. A coastal bistro staple, usually served with frites for dunking in the broth. The plain treatment lets the sweetness of fresh Atlantic mussels come through.

Croque Monsieur

France's grilled ham and cheese sandwich: Gruyère or Emmental, good ham, béchamel, and bread toasted in butter. Add a fried egg on top and it becomes a Croque Madame. A Parisian café fixture since 1910.

Salade Niçoise

Provençal composed salad from Nice featuring tuna, hard-boiled eggs, Niçoise olives, anchovies, tomatoes, and green beans on lettuce. Authentically made without cooked vegetables. A summer staple on the French Riviera.

Soupe à l'Oignon

French onion soup: deeply caramelized onions in beef broth, finished with toasted baguette and melted Gruyère. A Parisian bistro tradition going back to the 18th century, and exactly what you want on a cold evening.

Kouign-Amann

Brittany's butter cake—laminated dough folded with butter and sugar, baked until the outside caramelizes and the inside stays soft. The name is Breton for 'butter cake,' and it takes as much work to make well as a good croissant.

A rich custard under a thin, brittle crust of caramelized sugar. The pleasure is in the contrast: cold cream below, a shell you crack with your spoon on top.

Light meringue-based cookies sandwiched around buttercream, ganache or jam. They come in every color and a wide range of flavors, and tend to be treated as a small indulgence rather than an everyday snack.

Also called a Napoleon, this pastry stacks three layers of puff pastry with two layers of pastry cream (crème pâtissière) and finishes with icing or fondant on top. The name means "thousand sheets," a nod to the hundreds of paper-thin layers you get from laminating butter into the dough—the kind of thing that separates a careful pâtissier from a sloppy one.

A long finger of choux pastry filled with flavored pastry cream—usually chocolate, coffee or vanilla—and glazed with matching icing. The name means "lightning"; nobody quite agrees whether that's because you eat it fast or because the glaze catches the light. It's been a pâtisserie standard since the 19th century.

Little choux balls filled with vanilla ice cream or pastry cream, piled into a pyramid and covered with warm chocolate sauce. They date to 16th-century France and show up most often at celebrations. The appeal is the temperature clash—crisp pastry, cold cream, hot chocolate, all at once.

A homey dessert from the Limousin: unpitted black cherries set into a thick, flan-like batter and baked until golden. Leaving the pits in lends a faint almond note as it cooks. Make it with any other fruit and it's technically a "flaugnarde." Eat it warm with a dusting of powdered sugar, ideally in cherry season.

A small Bordeaux pastry with a dark, crunchy caramelized shell and a soft, custardy middle, flavored with rum and vanilla and baked in fluted copper molds. The recipe traces back to 18th-century Bordeaux convents. Canelés have caught on well beyond France lately, but the best ones still come from Bordeaux's own boulangeries, where the shell-to-center contrast is hard to beat.