Recipes

Dorie Greenspan · NYT Cooking

This winter in Paris, my husband went out every morning, walked to Circus bakery and returned home with an apple pie, a really good one. The rustic pie — a cross between an American open-face pie and a French galette — is made with a sturdy, rather wet dough. Chill the dough overnight and it will be a dream to work with. The filling is a generous mound of unpeeled, thinly sliced, lightly sweetened apples, flavored with an abundance of lemon juice and zest and, so surprisingly, not a speck of spice. At Circus, the palm-size pies are pentagonal. The dough is lifted up around the apples, pinched and pressed into shape. To learn to make the pastry at home, I watched Circus’s bakers at work. I loved how each had a particular way of forming the pies. But, most of all, I loved that no matter how they shaped them, in the end, they all looked beautiful. My pie looks beautiful and yours will, too.

Dorie Greenspan · NYT Cooking

Gougères, small cheese puffs made from the same neither-sweet-nor-savory dough you’d use for cream puffs or éclairs, are my favorite pre-dinner nibble with wine. They’re slightly crusty on the outside, custardy on the inside and, because I add mustard and chopped nuts, surprising. The traditional cheese for these is French Comté or Swiss Gruyère, but lately I’ve been using shredded sharp American Cheddar, which makes them a tad more tender and gives them a little edge, nice in a morsel that’s meant to whet your appetite. I like these a few minutes out of the oven, but room temperature puffs have legions of fans as well. It’s good to know that raw puffs freeze perfectly (pack them into an airtight container as soon as they’re solidly frozen) and bake perfectly from the freezer. Arrange them on a lined baking sheet and leave them on the counter while you preheat the oven.

Dorie Greenspan · NYT Cooking

When my Paris friend, Bernard Collet, told me about this cake, a favorite for over 60 years in his family, I was expecting something tall, soft, frosted and fit for candles. I expected a gâteau but got an icebox cake: four layers of cookies held together with four layers of frosting. The cake, originally a back-of-the-box recipe, was created for a French tea biscuit called Thé Brun, but I could never find them, so I used Petit Beurre cookies. Lately I can’t find them either, so I use old-fashioned Nabisco Social Teas. You can use whatever cookies you’d like, but they should be plain, flat, square or rectangular. Depending on the size of your cookies, you might need fewer of them; depending on how big or small you make the cake, you might need to juggle the number of layers or the amount of frosting. It’s a recipe made for improvisation.

Dorie Greenspan · NYT Cooking

The first time I made this lemon concoction, I called it “goop,” and still haven’t found a better name. My inspiration was an offbeat lemon jam I’d had in a Paris bistro. The jam, which I think was served with mackerel, was thick, velvety, salty, tangy, only a bit sweet and made with salt-cured preserved lemons. Haunted by the flavor and not patient enough to wait a month for lemons to cure, I cooked ordinary lemons, some with their peel, in a sugar-and-salt syrup, then blended them into a kind of marmalade, the goop. It’s excellent swiped over cooked fish, seafood, chicken or vegetables. The syrup, fragrant and full flavored, is terrific in marinades and great mixed with a little goop, sherry and cider vinegars, honey and oil to make a vinaigrette for beans, grains and hearty salads. I guess that goop is technically a condiment, but I call it a transformer. It’s that good.

Dorie Greenspan · NYT Cooking

These scones, created by Joanne Chang for her Flour Bakery & Cafe in Boston, are studded with fresh blueberries, sweetened with maple syrup and made with a blend of whole-wheat and all-purpose flours — but don’t think of them as health food. They’ve also got crème fraîche and plenty of butter. They’re big. They’re glazed. And they’ve got a singular texture: tender, like a layer cake, but also flaky, like a traditional scone. It wasn’t until I made them myself that I realized that their texture is different because the technique is different: Most scone recipes call for the butter to be rubbed into the flour mixture until it’s coated with flour. In Ms. Chang’s recipe, half the butter gets this treatment, which makes the scones characteristically flaky. The other half of the butter is beaten into the dry ingredients so that it becomes the coating for the flour, making the scones tender. Dorie Greenspan

Dorie Greenspan · NYT Cooking

This was one of Julia Child’s favorite dishes for a working lunch. For decades, Julia was on the road more than she was home and, when she returned to her beloved kitchen, she craved simple foods. For Julia, the important ingredients for this sandwich were the tuna (it had to be packed in oil) and the mayo (she preferred Hellmann’s). Her longtime assistant, Stephanie Hersh, said, “The rest was up for grabs.” Make it with capers, cornichons and chopped onion, a squirt of lemon juice and some herbs, serve it open-face on an English muffin or between slices of white bread, and you’ll have Julia’s midday signature. Dorie Greenspan

Dorie Greenspan · NYT Cooking

Like their inspiration, lemon meringue pie, these cookies have three elements. They’re built on simple, slice-and-bake French shortbread cookies, rich, buttery and flavored with vanilla. The shortbread base is almost classic, except that the cookies are baked in muffin tins, so they’re straight-sided and deeply golden brown. The “filling” is lemon curd, and the topping is crunchy bits of meringue. You get crumbly, velvety and crackly, sweet and tart in every bite. These cookies were created for an imaginary friend, Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, the hero of 16 Louise Penny novels, and a man who considers lemon meringue divine.

Dorie Greenspan · NYT Cooking

The spices in this cake from “Live Life Deliciously” by Tara Bench (Shadow Mountain, 2020) are, indeed, those you’d use if you were mulling cider or wine. They’re the flavors of fall and winter, and especially of the holidays; that their aromas linger in the kitchen is a bonus. They’re warm and hearty enough to hold their own when blended with the cake’s apple cider and molasses (use an unsulfured brand, such as Grandma’s). The batter is very thin, but it bakes up sturdy, easy to cut and ready to be generously filled and covered with cream cheese frosting. The cake is lovely on its own, but it welcomes extras. Ms. Bench decorates hers with almond and candy Christmas trees, but a little crystallized ginger or chocolate is nice too. Dorie Greenspan

Dorie Greenspan · NYT Cooking

Here’s a recipe from France, where savory loaf cakes are often served with drinks before dinner. This one started with bits of goat cheese and snips of dried figs, and then moved closer and closer to the Mediterranean. It’s got fruity olive oil, a handful of parsley (for brightness), a little rosemary and thyme (to set the mood and further establish the locale), some honey (always good with goat cheese) and scrapings of clementine zest (for surprise). You can use a neutral oil, if you’d like, olive or dried tomatoes instead of figs, basil instead of parsley, lemon instead of orange, or experiment with other cheeses. The loaf’s pleasantly crumbly, and best enjoyed cut into thick slices.

Dorie Greenspan · NYT Cooking

Baked alaska is beautiful, elegant and dramatic. It’s easy to make; it’s convenient (it must be made ahead); it’s got ice cream (enough said); it’s got meringue — which is the same as saying it’s got magic. It looks gorgeous whole and just as gorgeous sliced; it’s creamy and icy cold inside, marshmallowy all around and warm on the edges. In other words, it’s perfect. This one was made in the colors of the French flag to celebrate the 117th birthday of the French nun, Sister André. Reverse the colors for the Fourth of July — it’s what the creator of this recipe, Zoë François, did originally — or use whatever flavors of ice cream you love; the loaf pan will hold 2 quarts. Dorie Greenspan

Dorie Greenspan · NYT Cooking

Bixente Marichular, founder of the Musée du Gâteau Basque in Sare, France, says the pastry is part of Basque patrimony: Every family has a recipe, and every family thinks theirs is the best. This version, made with ingredients from an American supermarket, follows the tradition of sandwiching two rounds of rolled-out dough with jam. In the Pays Basque, where the filling is sometimes pastry cream, the jam is usually local black cherry. Once baked, the texture of the “cake” — never mind that it’s about as much cake as Boston cream pie is pie — is a mix of crumbly, tender and chewy. Since gâteau Basque is a casual treat, eating it with your fingers is allowed.

Dorie Greenspan · NYT Cooking

This coconut cake was adapted from a recipe by Simone (Simca) Beck, best known as Julia Child’s co-author on “Mastering the Art of French Cooking.” She called it “Gâteau d’Hélène: a white cake filled and iced with coconut cream and apricot.” The recipe, published in Ms. Beck’s 1972 book, “Simca’s Cuisine” (Lyons Press, 1998), capped what she called a “carefree lunch” because it could be made ahead. Indeed, this cake is best baked, filled, frosted and refrigerated for at least an hour (or up to two days). Kind of like a madeleine, its layers are purposefully a bit dry, as they need to hold a dousing of orange juice and rum. The whipped cream filling and frosting is soft and dreamy. It’s an elegant celebration cake. Dorie Greenspan

Dorie Greenspan · NYT Cooking

Egg mayo — or oeuf mayo, as it’s called in France — is simply hard-boiled eggs coated with seasoned mayonnaise, but it’s so beloved in France that it has a society to protect it: Association de sauvegarde de l’oeuf mayonnaise. You could season store-bought mayonnaise for this recipe from Priscilla Martel, but at least just once, you should make your own. It’ll be delicious, and you’ll feel like a magician. The dish is beautiful served plain, and tasty dressed with anchovies, capers, snipped chives or other herbs (choose one or more). It’s good as a starter, with a pouf of dressed greens, or as part of a platter of small salads (hors d’oeuvres variées), a picnic on a tray. Dorie Greenspan

Dorie Greenspan · NYT Cooking

Created as a first birthday treat for a little girl, these are a sweet example of something that is simple but memorable. The look is adorable: a cake sized for a baby’s hand, covered in a soft white-chocolate glaze and finished with sprinkles. The taste is primarily vanilla — that’s the extract and white chocolate at play — and there’s a sly hint of rose, added as much for mystery as for bolstering the best qualities of the fresh strawberry that’s tucked into the cake’s middle. But it’s the cake’s texture that’s most confoundingly wonderful. It’s tender and chewy, with a compact crumb still light enough to bring you back for another serving. When it’s not a baby’s birthday, skip the candles and have the cakes with espresso — or even Champagne.

Dorie Greenspan · NYT Cooking

This is a simple dish: chicken that’s a little bit braised and a little bit roasted in a covered Dutch oven. The seasonings — garlic, onions, herbs and lemon — are basic and border on assertive until they cook together, when their aromas intensify and their flavors soften. Putting half the aromatics in the pot with oil and wine, tucking the other half inside the chicken and cooking in this enclosed, steamy environment means that everything that goes into the pot goes into the chicken. When the chicken’s cooked through, pour off the pan juices, crush the tender garlic and add sharp mustard and vinegar to make a vinaigrette that’s as good over salad greens as over the chicken.

Dorie Greenspan · NYT Cooking

This cake, adapted from “Baking With Dorie” (Mariner Books, 2021), is comforting and surprising. The ingredients that give it its name, miso and maple syrup, are strong characters, but they prove themselves good team players. When baked, their flavors are warm and satisfying, mellow and not immediately knowable at first. They hover in that space between sweet and savory. Coarse-crumbed — admirably so — and sturdy, the cake is easy to slice, easy to serve at breakfast and easy to pick up and nibble in the afternoon. It’s as good with butter and jam as it is with a little cheese. And it keeps well: It’ll hold at room temperature for about 4 days.

Dorie Greenspan · NYT Cooking

Every part of this simple galette has its charms. The crust is easy to pull together and since it’s rolled out flat — no crimping or fluting — it’s doable even if you’re not a pie-hand. The topping is thin slices of sweet potato and apple brushed with maple syrup. And the filling is a hidden gem, a mix of cream cheese, Parmesan and maple syrup spiked with chile powder. Here, it’s piment d’Ville, a California chile grown from the seeds of piment d’Espelette, native to French Basque Country. This type of chile is warm and toasty, a little hot and a little sweet and a jazzy partner that swings sweet and savory, just like the rest of the galette.

Dorie Greenspan · NYT Cooking

A cross between an American chocolate chip cookie and a French shortbread, this treat was inspired by one created by François Perret, the pastry chef of the Ritz hotel in Paris and its patisserie, Le Comptoir. Chewy and crunchy, this cookie as big as a cake is as much fun to eat as it is to make. The base is sweet, tender and caramel-flavored from turbinado sugar. You also catch a bit of nuttiness: That’s the almond butter that’s mixed into it. It’s delicious and intentionally plain because all the excitement is on the top of the cookie, which is paved with chopped almonds and chunks of chocolate, dabbed with caramel and sprinkled with fleur de sel.

Dorie Greenspan · NYT Cooking

These little cookies are a bunch of good things all at once: crunchy and chewy, sweet and salty, craggy and never neat, or ever the same, which is just as they should be. The must-have ingredients are melted chocolate, either dark or white (or both), and cornflakes. The coconut is optional, and the cranberries are up for grabs — you can swap them for raisins or small bits of other dried fruit. Since these require nothing but melting and stirring, and because the ingredients are so basic, these can be a spur-of-the-moment cookie, a boon when there’s often not enough time.

Dorie Greenspan · NYT Cooking

Poppy seeds belong to the small-but-mighty clan of ingredients: Their flavor is nutty, their aroma earthy, and their color, a gorgeous blue-black, dramatic. Even though they’re minuscule, they crack pleasantly under a light bite. Sprinkle poppy seeds over something sweet or savory and you add interest. Give the seeds a star turn and you add surprise. Although this simple loaf cake includes vanilla extract and lemon juice, it’s the flavor that you get from an abundance of poppy seeds that brings everyone back for more. The cake can be served plain, but it’s pretty spread with white icing and speckled with seeds. Remember that because poppy seeds are oily, they can go rancid — store them in the freezer and taste a few before using them.

Dorie Greenspan · NYT Cooking

This almond cake is based on financiers, the small, usually ingot-shaped cakes first made in Paris in the late 1880s. The pastry chef Lasne created and named them for his stockbroker clients, keeping them easy and neat to eat on the run — no fuss, no muss. Made with egg whites, ground nuts and a lot of melted butter, the recipe is invitingly riffable. My favorite take is the tigré, a round, chocolate-speckled cake topped with a dab of ganache. Years ago, I misread the name, and I’ve called them tiger cakes ever since. My play on the tiger is a large cake, a little less rich than the original, run through with chopped chocolate and covered with enough ganache to leave telltale smudges. Stockbrokers beware.

Dorie Greenspan · NYT Cooking

Deeply chocolaty like devil’s food cake, speckled with sugar on the outsides and filled with soft chocolate or jam in the centers, these cookies are a double pleasure: delightful to eat and fun to make. While “thumbprints” is an adorable name, it’s a misnomer: You use every part of your hands to form these. The cookies need to be pinched, patted, rolled around and poked before they’re sent into the oven. It’s a great project to do with kids — small thumbs are perfect for forming little dimples in the dough. What you fill the centers with is up to you. Chocolate with chocolate is great — naturally pink ruby chocolate is particularly pretty — and jam is delicious, too.

Dorie Greenspan · NYT Cooking

This tall and tender Bundt cake pulls off the trick of being cozy and zingy at the same time. It gets its soft crumb from yogurt (although you could use sour cream or buttermilk) and its pop from puckery fresh cranberries and a mix of cardamom, coriander and ginger. It’s festive with a cranberry icing and classic with a dusting of powdered sugar. And it’s a cake that can go through the seasons — think about swapping the cranberries for dried fruit in the winter and berries in the summer. It’s great with blueberries.

Dorie Greenspan · NYT Cooking

This is the kind of savory cake that you make once and then play around with for years to come. In this version, there are chopped roasted red peppers, small chunks of ham, some herbs and three cheeses (mozzarella, Parmesan and fontina). The cheeses could be Cheddar and Gruyère and a semisoft, easily meltable cheese of your choice. The batter could have chopped Calabrian chiles or pepperoncini (go easy on these hot peppers), a different mix of herbs, scallions or shallots for the chives and pancetta or bacon bits for the meat (or you can skip the meat). Cut the cake into fingers to have with wine or serve it alongside soup or salad. And if it goes a little stale, simply toast it.