La Recette du Jour

Sounds fairly ordinary, but the unctuous sauce makes it special. An excellent way of stretching a little asparagus to serve a lot of people.

You may be dubious about raw fish, but I can assure you that this tastes superb and is a very elegant and original starter (if you can get hold of the fresh tuna of course). It's very rich -- you only need small helpings.

A popular dish in Tahiti -- very light and delicate. It's made with freshwater prawns called "chevrettes", but any type of fresh prawn will do.

A simple and quick way of preparing scallops. Serves two.

A simple and very delicious Catalan recipe, with almost the same ingredients as ratatouille, but a very different result.

A highly successful dinner-party starter -- not the cheapest of dishes, but quite easy to do and very tasty. You can prepare everything in advance, and then the shells only need 20 minutes in the oven. Serves 6.

Devised by Steve from several different recipes, this is the best sauce for mussels I have ever tasted. It deserves small, fresh moules de bouchot (grown on posts in Brittany). Make sure you have lots of French bread for mopping up the sauce. This will serve six as a starter, or 3-4 as a main course.

Serves 4 as a starter or 2 as a main course. Best with the large Spanish mussels -- small moules de bouchot should not be wasted on this!

The Catalan national dish -- "bread and tomatoes", which I admit doesn't sound very exciting. But with ripe tomatoes and good olive oil, it is delicious. A simple starter; or, in Catalonia, a breakfast dish.

The Polynesian national dish, as prepared on a Tahitian beach.

Note: when not on a beach in Tahiti it is much more practical to just buy coconut milk in a can or package. We found it was thicker than the fresh-off-the-tree variety so you could dilute it a bit with water.

This is an absolutely classic French bistro dish. I still remember eating it in a little café in Violès after an arduous morning's grape-picking.

From Edouard de Pomiane via Elizabeth David, who says it 'makes tomatoes taste startlingly unlike any other dish of cooked tomatoes'.

We had it as a starter but we reckoned it would be fab with some nice fillet steak - or with roast/grilled lamb.

This is loosely based on a recipe in an old Sainsbury's magazine. It's an unusual idea -- a kind of cross between salad and gratin, pretty and refreshing -- a good light summer lunch or starter. You may vary the ingredients depending on what you have.

As recorded in a Yorkshire kitchen. Photos taken in haste, they are too good to leave hanging around!

A surprising soup, a great preservative against winter colds.

Bourride is a classic Mediterranean fish soup which is somewhat less complicated and expensive to make than bouillabaisse. There are various local variations. In Sète they make it with monkfish on its own, but in Marseille they use a mixture of firm white fish. Some people serve the broth on its own, followed by the fish and vegetables with boiled potatoes and aioli. You can put the slices of bread in bowls and pour the soup over them. However this version is restrained and elegant - you could serve it as a first course at a dinner party. It is said that when the Greek gods got bored with Olympus they came to Marseille to eat bourride, this being the only food that was fit for the gods.

Note: don't be put off by the amount of garlic that goes into it. The soup itself tastes creamy rather than garlicky, and it's up to you how much aioli you spread on your bread.

This quantity serves 6-8 people.

Courtesy of Nick Nairn via ChasingDaisy.com. A simple and delicious soup that makes a light meal with bread and some cheese.

A summer recipe par excellence, and very quick to prepare. You might need to adjust quantities, according to taste and the size of the tomatoes.

Here is a quick-to-make soup which sounds implausible but is actually very nice. It can be eaten hot, warm or cold. As a variation, you could use Boursin or similar instead of vache-qui-rit.

An Elizabeth David mushroom soup. It doesn't sound terribly exciting but it preserves all the flavour of the mushrooms -- whether they are humble champignons de Paris or rustic cèpes.

A classic French soup ... delicious if carefully made.

A good warming soup that remedies the sometimes rather bland taste of pumpkin.

Yet another recipe for sea bass, one of my favourite fish. Where bass is concerned, simple is best -- and the success of the dish depends entirely on the quality of the fish. Serves 2.

A summery Catalan recipe for those days when it's too cold to eat in the garden.

This is real traditional French bourgeois cooking. To be truly authentic, it should be served with plainly boiled white rice to soak up the sauce, but pasta or steamed new potatoes are also possibilities.

[note for purists -- strictly speaking this should probably be called Fricassée, not Blanquette, as the meat is browned before cooking]

For 4 people:

Effort versus results: 10 out of 10. It only took me about 10 minutes to prepare, plus another 3 for the buttered cabbage we had with it. Excellent in the pressure cooker; if you don't have one it will probably need about 3 hours.

Years ago, I had a dish of boeuf aux carottes in a suburban bistro in Paris. Accompanied with noodles and a glass of beaujolais nouveau, it was absolutely divine (although I had a strong suspicion it was actually horse). I have tried several times since to reproduce this classic French dish, without success. This version, cooked by Steve recently using a recipe in a magazine, is as close as I have ever tasted -- the tarragon is an inspired touch. Lovely with either noodles or baked potatoes to mop up the sauce.

Chicory is something I never ate in the UK, and thought I probably didn't like. But over the last year I have discovered its virtues, when treated correctly (i.e. water should not come anywhere near it, if you want a result that is not limp, soggy, and unpleasantly bitter). Endives au gratin, where the chicory is pre-cooked, wrapped in ham, and covered with a nice cheesy sauce before being popped in the oven, is easy and obvious, but here's a wonderful Simon Hopkinson recipe that sets it off at its best. Serves 2.

This recipe uses little round courgettes. If you can't get them, the risotto will do equally well in peppers or onions -- or indeed on its own, or as an accompaniment to something else.

Serves 4, or 8 as a starter.

The chicken can be a scraggy old boiler as it's going to cook for ages. Similarly the meat should be cheap stewing cuts -- breast or shoulder of lamb, shin of beef, hacked roughly into pieces. This is not an elegant dish!

Ras-el-hanout is a North African spice mixture. If you can't get it or the French 4-épices, use paprika, cayenne, and coriander to season the stew.

Harissa is a kind of very hot chilli paste.

The vegetables can be varied although I think turnips and carrots are essential for the flavour.

You can cook the chickpeas from scratch yourself, but you have to soak them for ages beforehand. I think it's easier to just use a can or jar (particularly if you didn't think of making the couscous until the night before).

You will need a large stockpot with a lid which will take all the ingredients with room to spare.

This quantity will feed at least ten people.

Daurade is sea bream. You could equally use sea bass for this recipe. Whatever you use, it must be very fresh.

Another recipe picked up and adapted from Marmiton.org. A high score on the effort versus results scale -- if you spread the potatoes and tomatoes out on a large, solid, baking tray they caramelise nicely, leaving a small quantity of syrupy juices and giving the dish an excellent flavour.

Simple to do, and delicious.

A tasty, spicy stew which can be made with squid or cuttlefish -- a kind of poor man's version of zarzuela

This is nothing like real Indian food, but it's very nice nonetheless, and easy to do.

This is a Languedoc speciality traditionally made the day the pig was killed. Nobody keeps pigs these days so it tends to come out on special occasions (although it's not particularly expensive to make). As with most traditional dishes, everyone has their own ideas on exactly how it should be made. Steve went to the charcuterie the other day and asked for some pork and pig's liver to make friginat with. The charcutière told him firmly that what he was proposing to make was not friginat, it was fricassée. Friginat is made only from the neck of the pig, she said. Our two Languedoc cookbooks, with three recipes between them for fricassée and friginat, do not make matters clear. Anyway, since the pig's neck was not available, Steve went home and made fricassée more-or-less according to the charcutière's instructions. This is not fricassée as in cream, chicken and mushrooms, but a pork, liver and kidney stew. It is a surprisingly refined dish, very tasty and much less rich and stodgy than cassoulet.

A classic French dish, very sustaining.

Recipe by Simon Hopkinson. Ideal for a barbecue.

This is a smoky little number adapted from Nigel Slater. Very tasty, but if you cook it indoors I recommend opening all the windows and disabling any smoke alarms you may have. Mr Slater recommends a soothing pile of buttery couscous with it -- in my experience it's a good idea to have some yogurt and cucumber salad on hand as well.

Quick, easy, delicious, and low-fat. What more can you ask? Serves 4.

Red mullet is a very special fish, and this recipe makes the most of it. I usually serve it with a tomato vinaigrette (a vinaigrette dressing gently warmed (not cooked!) in a pan with peeled, seeded and diced tomatoes).

An easy way to delight your guests. If you want extra vegetables, grilled or baked tomatoes are an excellent choice; we had tomates à la crème.