Rustic French Cooking Made Easy: Authentic, Regional Flavors from Provence, Brittany, Alsace and Beyond

Pardon Your French food blogger Le Goff presents regional French fare in this excellent debut collection. Recipes include Macaronade setoise, a hearty combination of stuffed beef rolls and pasta in tomato sauce from Sete, a seaside Mediterranean town; Areilles d’Anes, a rich and creamy spinach lasagne from the French Alps; Cotriade Bretonne, a vegetable-and-white-fish soup from Brittany; and bonnettes, small honey cakes filled with marmalade from Dijon. The majority of dishes—such as galettes-saucisses, buckwheat crepes stuffed with grilled pork sausages and caramelized onions (“the ultimate street food in Brittany”); Basque braised chicken with peppers; and Bisteau, a bacon, onion, and potato pie—come together fairly easily and are well within the abilities of even novice home cooks. Other recipes require more work, but are well worth the time and effort: the Kouign-Amann, a classic cake that is technically a bread dough, is folded over and over again with sugar and butter, a process known as “lamination,” while Le Pastis Gascon is an apple pie in which the apples are marinated in Armagnac, lemon, and orange zest, then layered with phyllo sheets and sugar. This is a superb collection of lesser-known regional French dishes. (Oct.)