A Thanksgiving Dinner That Longs for France

Between 2008, when I moved with my family to Lyon, and 2013, when we moved back to New York, we celebrated Thanksgiving with a loose confederation of American acquaintances. Many were there because they had fallen in love with a French partner and settled in the city. Some had married people of other nationalities. For us, the city was an appealing mix of what seemed like everyone from everywhere, and no Thanksgiving ever felt simply American, except, possibly, the one we hosted. I had to order a bird well in advance (the French rarely eat turkey in November) and planned an unapologetically kitschy menu, including classics from childhood: marshmallows on sweet potatoes, canned cranberry sauce (which our son Frederick decided was the best food he had tasted in his life), and pumpkin pie made with Carnation condensed milk, bought at the nearby “American” bagel store (where you also found Coke in a bottle, Froot Loops, and Welch’s grape jelly). The pie troubled our French friends: a sweet tart confected from a savory ingredient? They were also uncomfortable with so much cinnamon, a spice that they mysteriously loathed to the point (in one case) of gagging. For many years, our son George didn’t understand why you would add cinnamon to anything.

Our other Thanksgivings never took place on the actual day (Thanksgiving, obviously, is not a French holiday, and on the Thursday in question people work). Our friends Victor (American) and Sylvie (French) hosted one on a Saturday night, buffet style, where French was the principal language spoken. My wife’s friend Bridget hosted another where she provided the turkey and asked guests to provide everything else. The evening was relaxed—no stress about traditions or obligatory dishes or family members in a low-blood sugar moment (although Frederick was disappointed not to have any jellied cranberry)—and featured some extravagant displays of exceptional French cooking. I have trouble remembering the exact dishes, though, because there was also an abundance of fine Beaujolais. (We drove to the dinner; we returned by public transport.) For my part, I arrived with three dishes instead of one, including pumpkin pie made with a butter pastry, a Port sauce for the turkey, and ingredients for whipping up buttery mashed potatoes in the style of the late, great chef Joël Robuchon. My wife has ridiculed me to this day—was I trying to show off? But I had got excited by what France had taught me about cooking, and by the challenge of applying it to traditional American fare. (And I was probably showing off.)

The menu for this year’s Thanksgiving is one I could imagine making if we were in France now, hosting friends. It is also informed by a longing to be there among them. Since leaving Lyon, we have returned to visit every year. This year we didn’t. Also, after we returned to the United States my mother died, and, for my sister and me, her death has changed how we observe Thanksgiving. Always a family holiday, at least theoretically, it is now a family extravaganza, celebrated with as many family members as possible, and with exuberant quantities of food and wine and game-playing and outright jubilation, as if to shout down our buried feelings of sorrow. This year, we, like many others, won’t be seeing those relatives. The menu I’ve devised is a lot for a family of four, and it is lavish (it includes a truffle!), because we’re celebrating nonetheless, and maybe, too, because we want to keep busy and make a lot of noise so that we don’t notice all the people who are not with us. I’ve made food for six, though, just in case a pair of cousins happen, against all odds, to drop by.

French Thanksgiving Dinner

Serves 6, with leftovers

• Cranberry Sauce with Banyuls
• Quince Sauce with Quince Nectar and Calvados
• Turkey Legs Braised in Red Wine
• Roasted Turkey Breast with Madeira Sauce and Mushroom-Truffle Stuffing
• Purée de Pommes de Terre, à la the Late Chef Joël Robuchon
• Sautéed Fennel with Orange Glaze
• Brussels Sprouts with Poitrine
• Pumpkin Pie

Cranberry Sauce

Cranberry is one of the great American flavors, and the sauce made from it is perfect with turkey. But it is also perfect with just about anything else you will cook this winter, including scallops, pork roast, even omelets. If kept from being too sweet (there is a tendency in most recipes to counter the fruit’s sharp, sour bite with an excess of sugar), the sauce has a brightness and a zing that are like nothing else you will find easily on a winter plate. It is also naturally gelatinous and surprisingly full in the mouth. It is just an outright happy sauce. Make it in abundance. Make it for now and later and for February. You can store it in containers in the freezer.

The French touch: a bottle of Banyuls and a fresh vanilla pod. Banyuls is one of the several fortified sweet wines that you find in southeastern France. The alcohol is high at 16.5 per cent, it costs fifteen to twenty dollars a bottle, and, like the cranberry, it has bright, zingy flavors. (The cook also found it to be a perfectly sound refreshment while finishing the turkey.) Vanilla is one of the fundamentals of the French palate, and not only in pastry; perhaps only the shallot is more pervasive.

• 1 lb. fresh cranberries
• ½ cup sugar
• 1 vanilla bean, whole
• Black pepper, to taste
• ½ cup or more Banyuls wine

1. Wash cranberries and toss with sugar. Add to a saucepan.

2. Split vanilla bean lengthwise (try to split only the top half, leaving the bottom half intact), scrape out the seeds, and add them to the saucepan. Toss the pod in as well. (Retrieve it later and either put it to a second application or dry it out and keep it in a jar with sugar.)

3. Grind a generous amount of black pepper into the saucepan. Add wine, set heat to high, and bring to a boil. Stir once and reduce heat to low. Simmer for 10 minutes, uncovered, stir again, then add lid. Turn off heat. Check after 10 minutes, stir, taste (More sugar? A splash of wine? Black pepper?), and let cool.

Quince in Quince Nectar with Calvados

Like the cranberry, the quince, a relative of the apple and the pear, is an autumnal fruit with complex flavors that makes for a stunning sauce. You often can get quince where apples and pears are grown, and from Locust Grove Orchards, at the Union Square Greenmarket (which should have some on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving). An ancient fruit, quince is unrewarding until cooked and sweetened—the Greeks preserved it in honey—and is so high in pectin that it was probably the basis of early jam-making. (Spanish membrillo, traditionally served with a mild Spanish cheese, is jellified quince.) The fruit is tough, though: cutting it into bite-size pieces might be easier with a saw, and coring one is a little unnerving, requiring such an exertion to extract the pit with your knife that, at the moment of success, the knife is liable to shoot off dangerously (and take, on at least one occasion, a piece of the bearer’s hand with it). But I love the result.

I developed the following recipe in Lyon when I was trying to come up with a novel-seeming sauce for canard au cidre—duck in cider sauce—and then found the fruit so delicious that I couldn’t stop eating it.

• 8 medium quinces
• 2 vanilla beans
• 2 cinnamon sticks
• 1 cup coconut sugar, such as Big Tree Farms, from Indonesia (or substitute brown sugar)
• 1 clove
• Grated fresh nutmeg, to taste (several swipes across a grater)
• ½ cup strong cider (or a floral white wine)
• 2 oz. calvados

1. Peel and core quince, and place peelings and seeds in a saucepan. Add 1 vanilla bean (split in half), 1 cinnamon stick, and water to cover. Simmer for at least 30 minutes and up to 1 hour. Strain the quince water, return to pan, and reduce slowly by half. Set aside.

2. Roughly cut the quince into chunks, put in a bowl, add coconut sugar, and toss to coat. Add remaining vanilla bean (split in half, with seeds scraped out), remaining cinnamon stick, clove, nutmeg, apple cider, calvados, and 6 oz. of the reduced quince water. (See note below for uses for the remaining quince water.) Let sit for at least 30 minutes.

3. Empty contents of the bowl into a pot. Set over medium heat and bring to a simmer. After 15 minutes, check the quince for tenderness with a sharp knife or a pastry needle. If not ready, keep checking every 10 minutes. In my experience, it may take a little time or a long time—it depends on the fruit—but you don’t want it to cook to mushiness. When done, remove fruit from pot, place in a bowl, and set aside.

4. Strain the liquid into a saucepan, set over low heat, and simmer until reduced by at least half—or, for maximum intensity, considerably further, i.e., until a syrup. Allow to cool. I call this “quince nectar”; dress the fruit with it.

Note: Quince water is high in pectin and the surplus can be frozen. It is excellent as the liquid ingredient in pastry. The nectar is killer on ice cream.

Turkey Legs Braised in Red Wine

The turkey in my Thanksgiving dinner is inspired by a French Christmas, which features birds of one kind of another, including capon (the fat, neutered male chicken), in which the legs and breast are cooked separately. I had made capon before, but until now hadn’t tried a turkey this way, and I was astonished by the melting high deliciousness of the legs. The old argument about dark meat versus white—the dark a little sinewy, the white dry and unpleasant to chew—is not one that this preparation will provoke. Yes, you lose the vision of the iconic bird coming out of the oven. But, oh, my, the joyful expression of flavors on the plate! I’m not sure I’ll roast a turkey in the normal way again.

• 1 turkey, 10 to 12 lbs., preferably from a local farm or a careful purveyor like D’Artagnan
• Sea salt
• 2 to 3 cloves garlic, thinly sliced
• A handful each of rosemary, thyme, and parsley, plus a few extra rosemary sprigs, roughly chopped
• 6 small carrots, or 4 large ones
• 4 stalks celery
• Splash of olive oil
• 1 onion, peeled and halved
• 2 shallots, peeled
• ½ bottle or more of hearty red wine, such as Côte du Rhône or Malbec
• 2 to 3 cups reduced brown chicken stock (recipe follows)
• Ground black pepper, to taste
• 2 bay leaves
• 6 juniper berries, crushed

• Butcher’s twine

1. Remove the turkey legs. Before I pick up my knife, I loosen the legs at the joint. Place the bird breast-side down and locate, by touch, the top of the thigh. Then, pressing with the palm of your hand, bear down with the weight of your body until you feel a small pop. Assured butchers can slice down the side of the carcass with ease, but I seem to need a target—that joint, what you need to work loose when you get to it with the tip of your knife.

2. Turn the bird breast-side up. Cut through the skin where the back of the breast meets the top of the thigh. (Be careful not to cut too much of the breast skin, which will be needed later. The skin of the legs is less important in a braised preparation.) With your knife as close to the carcass as possible, cut through the thigh meat (you can bend back the leg, if easier) and remove at the joint. Repeat with the other leg. Place both on a rack and lightly cover with sea salt, garlic, and the chopped rosemary. Refrigerate the rest of the turkey.

3. Wash and prepare the vegetables and aromatics. Scrape dirt from carrots, but don’t peel. Pluck a handful of leaves from celery, and combine with remaining rosemary, plus thyme and parsley, place between 2 celery stalks, and bind with twine to make a bouquet garni. Roughly chop remaining celery.

4. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

5. Set a large oven-proof casserole pot over medium-high heat. Brush salt and herbs from turkey legs. Add oil to the pot followed by one turkey leg (it should sizzle), and cook, untouched, until the meat is thoroughly browned. Flip the leg—I use a flexible slotted spatula to get under the skin in case it sticks. Brown all sides, then remove from pan and set aside. Repeat with other leg. Add carrot, celery, onion, and shallot, and brown lightly.

6. Add bouquet garni to the pot, then pour in the red wine and bring to a boil. Put the legs back in, then add the reduced brown chicken stock. You want the liquid to rise a little higher than halfway up the legs. Add bay leaves and juniper berries, and season lightly with salt and pepper. Heat until liquid simmers; don’t boil. After 5 minutes, put pot in the oven, uncovered. Cook for 10 minutes, then cover pot and reduce heat to 250 degrees. After 30 minutes, confirm that liquid is not boiling and turn the legs over. Repeat at 30-minute intervals, checking liquid and turning legs, until the meat comes easily off the bone, 2 to 3 hours.

7. Carefully remove the legs and set aside. Remove bouquet garni and vegetables and discard. Strain braising liquid into a saucepan, bring to a boil over medium heat, skim, then reduce to a simmer, skimming every now and then if needed, until reduced by half. Taste, seasoning if necessary. Too salty? Whisk in butter. Too meaty? Add a splash of red wine or red-wine vinegar. Set aside. Just before the meal, pour the braised liquid back into the pot and reheat, without boiling, and carefully add turkey legs. Once warm, plate them and dress with sauce, serving the rest alongside.

Brown Chicken Stock

In a basic chicken stock, you put raw bones (carcass, legs, necks, wings, etc.) into a pot, add vegetables, cover with water, and simmer. A brown stock involves roasting the bones before you start. It is seen to be fussier—the roasting takes about an hour, and then there is the pan to clean—but it produces a considerably deeper flavor, a beautiful dark autumnal color, and more gelatin, which gives the sauces you make with it more body—more wobble. It intensifies wonderfully when you reduce it.

• 2 onions
• A handful each of rosemary, thyme, sage and parsley
• 6 stalks celery
• 4 cloves garlic, peeled
• Fresh ginger, peeled and cut into 5 thin slices, 1 to 2 inches long
• 6 carrots
• 1 bay leaf
• 7 pounds chicken bones and carcass, plus (optional) neck and back of turkey
• A spoonful (or two) of honey
• A few splashes white wine

• Butcher’s twine

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees and place a large roasting pan on the middle rack.

2. Set a sauté pan over low heat, without fat or oil. Peel and halve onions. Place each half, cut-side down, in pan and leave to brown slowly. After 5 minutes, peek underneath one; if there is no color, increase heat. Once onions are thoroughly browned (10 minutes? 20? The more slowly done, the better), carefully remove and set aside. Browned, the onions have a deeper flavor and will strengthen the color of the sauce.

3. Make a bouquet garni of the herbs and 2 of the celery stalks and bind with twine. Roughly chop the remaining 4 stalks. Place celery, bouquet garni, onion, garlic, ginger, carrot, and bay leaf in a large pot.

4. With a meat cleaver or heavy knife, roughly chop bird bones. No big deal if you skip this step, but chopping the bones exposes marrow and more bone surface, which yields more flavor when roasted. Add chopped bones to heated roasting pan. (If it’s hot enough, you won’t need fat or oil.) Roast until bones are browned on the bottom, 15 to 30 minutes, and then flip, using a flexible spatula to lift the pieces off the pan without losing the browned skin. Repeat regularly until bones are almost thoroughly cooked. Brush larger bones with honey, for color and caramelization. Continue to brown, but with care—if the bones burn, they are useless. Remove bones and add them to the pot, atop the vegetables.

5. Deglaze the roasting pan by placing it over high heat, pouring in white wine to cover, bringing to a boil, and scraping up browned bits from the bottom. Reduce to about 4 tablespoons. Pour through a strainer or a sieve into pot with chicken bones and vegetables. (If the pan or the reduction smell burned, skip this step.)

6. Fill pot with enough water to cover bones. Set over high heat and bring almost to a boil, then turn heat to the lowest setting and skim. After 5 minutes, the liquid should be less than simmering. You want no bubbles, only a vapor. Continue to cook gently over low heat for 10 hours, or overnight, skimming occasionally, topping up as needed.

7. Pour the brown chicken stock through a sieve into a new pot, set over medium heat, and reduce slowly, by at least half. (You can reduce by more—the result will gain in intensity—but insure that you have at least 5 cups for both the Madeira sauce and the braising liquid for the legs.) Strain into a bowl. Once completely cool, refrigerate.

Roasted Turkey Breast with Madeira Sauce

This preparation of the turkey is not uncommon in France (although home cooks often ask their butcher to do the work for them), and involves removing both sides of the breast as one piece of meat. It will be almost rectangular in shape and can then be rolled up and tied in place with the autumnal mushroom-y truffle ingredients tucked inside. (Given the stresses of the day, you may want to practice ahead of time on a chicken—a perfectly delicious snack.)

The stuffing itself is not the conventional kind that you spoon out of the carcass, because here there is no carcass to stuff into or remove from. It is more like a surprise in the center of your boneless, moist and (one hopes) perfectly prepared roast.

• 2 cups mixed wild mushrooms (chanterelles, cèpes, or whatever you can find)
• 1 shallot, diced
• 2 Tbsp. butter
• Your turkey, with the leg bones removed
• A handful of fresh bread crumbs (recipe follows)
• A small handful of parsley leaves
• 1 truffle (white, black, frozen, any kind you can get, and completely optional)
• ½ cup orange juice, for basting
• Madeira sauce (recipe follows)

• Butcher’s twine
• Truffle slicer (optional), or a very sharp knife
• Basting brush

1. Make the stuffing. Sauté mushroom and shallot in 1 tablespoon butter or olive oil until tender, about 5 or 10 minutes. Set aside.

2. Bone the breast. Remove the wishbone. Cut away the backbone, which can now be pulled off by hand or, if necessary, detached by a judicious snip with a pair of kitchen shears. Remove wings at the joint and save for making stock. (It helps to bend the wing back until the joint appears under the skin.)

3. In effect, only one bone is removed—the large breast plate, or sternum. The tactic: work up from the flanks with your knife, starting near the bottom (basically, where there is meat to be had), and scrape your way slowly to the top, your blade always in contact with the breast plate, so as not to leave any meat behind, and stop at what is called a “keel.” This is the bony divider that separates the two halves of the breast. Don’t cross it. Instead, start in on the other flank. When you again reach the keel, carefully work at the connective tissue with the point of your knife to free up the meat. Voilà! You have a large flap of prized boneless turkey breast.

4. With your fingers, loosen the skin from the breast, but do not remove it entirely. Cut away any gnarly-looking tendons. You can flatten out and even up the meat (the tissue is thicker in the lower half of the breast) by gently pounding it with a meat mallet or rolling pin. (You can also “butterfly” the lower half by carving little wings of tissue where the meat is thickest and flapping them in the direction where it is thinnest.)

5. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

6. Roll the breast. Season generously. Combine mushrooms, bread crumbs, and parsley, and add them in a line down the middle of the breast. Slice truffle atop, if using. Roll up the meat, then turn over carefully and wrap the skin around the roll.

7. Tie the roll. Cut eight pieces of twine to an equal and generous length. Starting at one end, tie each in place with a slipknot at regular intervals. (See video.)

8. Roast the turkey. Add orange juice and remaining 1 tablespoon butter to a small saucepan and heat until butter melts. Put rolled breast on a roasting pan and place in the oven. With a brush, baste every 10 minutes or so with orange juice and melted butter to help brown the skin, until the meat reaches an internal temperature of 158 degrees, approximately 45 to 75 minutes, allowing for variations according to the size of the bird. Leave in the oven, with the door half open, for 5 minutes. Remove and allow the roast to rest for at least 20 minutes before serving alongside the Madeira sauce.

Note: A simpler alternative is to cook the breasts on the bone. Having removed the legs and the rest of the carcass, you are left with a classic roasting cut. You can brine and roast it, or poach and roast it like a chicken, or roast it simply as described above. To serve, cut the breasts off the bone (slice down each side of the keel and then work the meat loose with a slice-and-scrape movement with your knife). Cut crosswise.

Bread Crumbs

• 2-day-old bread

1. Preheat oven to 300 degrees.

2. Tear bread into chunks and spread out on a sheet pan. Bake until dried out but not toasted; the time will vary depending on the moisture of your bread. Remove and empty bread into a large brown-paper bag. (I like to use one bag inside another, to keep the crumbs from spilling out). Using a rolling pin, crush bread into coarse crumbs. Return to sheet pan and transfer to oven. Toast until light golden-brown. These bread crumbs have more texture and flavor than ones store bought or pulverized in a stand mixer.

Madeira Sauce

A basic wine sauce consists of shallots, the fermented beverage in question, demi-glace (a meat stock reduced to a wobbly jelly) if you’re lucky enough to have some, and butter. This version is enhanced by a small (or not-so-small) glass of Madeira, the famous fortified wine from the beautiful Atlantic island of the same name, plus (because it’s Thanksgiving) some more truffle.

• 1 Tbsp. butter, plus 8 Tbsp. (1 stick), cut into pieces for sauce (or more, for a richer sauce)
• 2 shallots, finely chopped
• 1 cup Madeira
• Half a bottle of a drinkable red wine (Beaujolais or Côte du Rhône)
• 1 cup or more reduced brown chicken stock (recipe above)
• Salt and pepper, to taste
• 1 Tbsp. red-wine vinegar (optional)
• A few truffle shavings (optional)

• Truffle slicer (optional), or a very sharp knife

1. Place 1 tablespoon butter in a saucepan over low heat. Add chopped shallot and sweat until creamy but not brown. Add a glass of Madeira and slowly reduce (the liquid will be almost entirely evaporated). Add red wine and slowly reduce to a quarter of its volume. Add reduced brown chicken stock, and slowly reduce that, too! (But only for five minutes or so.) Then, and only then, turn the heat up slightly, but not so much that there is a risk of the liquid boiling, and add remaining butter, one piece at a time, whisking to incorporate.

2. Taste sauce. It should be delicious but may need salt and pepper. It might also be lacking in acidity, in which case add a small shot of red-wine vinegar. Then remove from heat and set aside. When ready to serve, reheat over low flame and whisk in a final small glass of Madeira. At the last minute—i.e., when the sauce is en route to the table—shave some truffle on top, if using.

Purée de Pommes de Terre, à la the Late Chef Joël Robuchon

A basic bowl of mashed potatoes is made with spuds that have been peeled and boiled, then dried out at the bottom of a pot, whipped with a little butter, and mixed with warm milk. Apart from a few technical tricks, the “puree” confected by the chef Joël Robuchon is no different, except in one overwhelming respect. There is not a little butter. According to the recipe in The Complete Robuchon, translated and published in 2008, the ratio of butter to potato is about 1 to 4—that is, half a pound of butter to 2 pounds of potatoes. (For comparison, Joy of Cooking recommends 3 tablespoons.) When I lived in Lyon and worked at a restaurant there, the ratio was more like 1 to 2—a full pound of butter to 2 pounds of potatoes. In fact, the actual ratio Robuchon used in his purée de pommes de terre was probably higher.

It has always been regarded as top secret, what he was putting into his potatoes. Recently, I called Eric Ripert, the chef at Le Bernardin, in New York City, who once worked for the legendary chef. I wanted to confirm other details of the preparation—like, do the potatoes have to be only one kind (la ratte, a variety of the French fingerling), and are you really meant to peel them just after they’ve been boiled? “Yes, la ratte,” Ripert confirmed, and, “Yes, absolutely, peel while steaming hot.” In fact, he added, at Jamin, where he worked in the nineteen-eighties, the peeling of the potatoes had been so urgent that most of the kitchen was called over to help, and the steaming rattes were set upon by every member of the brigade, shoulder to shoulder, peeling and screaming.

“They must never get cold,” Ripert clarified. “Oh, and you don’t use a whisk.”

“When you mix in the butter?” I asked.

“Correct. A spoon. It has to be wooden.”

I wrote down the instruction and then confirmed the butter quantity. “It’s about half the potato, isn’t it?”

There was a pause.

“Eric, surely, everyone knows the proportions. It’s half and half. It’s not a secret anymore.”

There was a long pause. “Actually, it is something else, but . . . I can’t tell you.”

“Why?”

“Because, if I did, he would deny it.”

“Robuchon? He can’t. He’s dead.”

“That’s true. But, no, I can’t. I can’t be the one to break the secret.”

“Sixty percent?” I asked. “Was it seventy-five? Damn! Was it a hundred?”

“I really can’t . . . and he didn’t do it all the time. But I will say this: It was amazing.”

• ¼ lb. good butter (or ½ lb.; or ¾ lb.; or 1 lb.; or 2 lbs.? IMHO, ¼ lb. is a revelation; ½ lb. verges on a vegetable dessert. More than ½ lb.? Haven’t tried it and have no plans to.)
• 2 lbs. fingerling potatoes, preferably la ratte, scrubbed but unpeeled (Mountain Sweet Berry Farm, at the Union Square Greenmarket, sells rattes grown from a Lyonnais spud courtesy of chef Daniel Boulud)
• 2 cups whole milk
• Salt and pepper, to taste

• Potato ricer or a tamis sieve or (best) both a ricer and a tamis
• Pastry scraper or spatula
• Latex gloves

1. Dice butter and refrigerate. Set a mixing bowl in a warm place—e.g., on the stovetop—for later.

2. Set up a peeling station: one bowl for peels, another for peeled potatoes, a third with ice water. Alert family members that you are about to invite them to participate in a nostalgic exercise of a favorite childhood game.

3. Wash potatoes, place in a pot, add water to cover, and boil until a knife or skewer passes through easily, 15 to 20 minutes. Drain, do not let potatoes cool, and rush them to your peeling station. Quickly return pot to stove and set over very low heat, also for later.

4. Peel the potatoes. Summon family members, give each a pair of latex gloves, and demonstrate peeling by hand. (After the demonstration, dip fingers, ever so casually, into ice water.) Move fast, even while apologizing pathetically. When done, crush the potatoes through the ricer and into that pot that has been sitting on a very low heat. Increase it slightly, and stir with a wooden spoon. The objective is to dry out the already pretty dry potatoes.

5. Wash out the bottom of (yet another) pot, keep wet, pour in milk, and set it, too, over low heat.

6. Add butter to potatoes, bit by bit, and stir in vigorously. As more and more of the butter is incorporated, check heat of milk in that pot—if not on the verge of boiling, increase heat. When it boils, quickly reduce to just less than a simmer. Once the butter is fully incorporated into the potatoes, add the hot milk in a slow stream, while continuing to stir. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

7. Place tamis over that mixing bowl that has been warming all this time on the stovetop. Add potatoes to the tamis by the spoonful, and, using a pastry scraper or a spatula, smoosh them through the wire mesh. (It won’t be pretty, but the result will be.) Keep in a warm place, e.g., back on that stovetop. Serve.

Fennel with Orange

I first made this dish in an Italian kitchen, not a French one, but, viewed now, through the experience of my time in Lyon, it reinforces lessons that I was learning there about the possibilities of building sauces from fruit and seems, therefore, not entirely un-French.

• 3 medium fennel bulbs
• Salt and pepper, to taste
• Olive oil, as needed
• 1 cup orange juice
• 3 oz. (6 tablespoons) butter

1. Trim fennel bulbs of fronds and stems. Set a medium pot of water over high heat and bring to a boil. Add fennel bulbs and boil until a sharp knife or skewer passes through (but not too easily—you want some resistance), 15 to 30 minutes. Remove and let cool.

2. Slice fennel lengthwise into thirds. Season with salt and pepper. Set a sauté pan over medium-high heat. When hot, add olive oil and the pieces of fennel. Leave in place until the undersides are browned. Carefully flip the slices and continue sautéing until all sides are browned. Add orange juice and butter. Turn heat down to a simmer and slowly reduce. When the sauce has thickened and the fennel has started to caramelize, set aside until ready to serve.

Brussels Sprouts with Poitrine

The sprouts need to be dry and unsalted. Water steams the vegetable. In this preparation, you want them to brown crisply, on a hot sheet pan in a hot oven, and not to touch them until they do. The poitrine (i.e., pork belly) is largely cooked ahead of time and then added, and when you want to include some of the rendered fat.

• 1 lb. Brussels sprouts
• ¼ lb. poitrine, pancetta, or thick-cut bacon
• 1 ½ Tbsp. olive oil

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees, with a sheet pan on the center rack.

2. Wash sprouts and trim bottoms. Allow time to dry. Dice pork belly, set a small sauté pan over low heat, and add 1 tablespoon olive oil and the pork belly. Stir from time to time. When fat has rendered, pour it off and continue cooking until the pork belly is just turning crispy (my children’s preference—although be watchful: the meat goes from perfectly browned to ruined quickly). Set pan aside.

3. In a large bowl, toss sprouts with ½ tablespoon olive oil, then add them to the heated tray. Roast for 15 minutes, then turn sprouts over with a slotted spoon. Add the pork belly and continue cooking until the sprouts are cooked through, another 5 to 10 minutes.

Pumpkin Pie

You can’t really do a French version of pumpkin pie, and, even if you could dream one up, who would want to eat it? The pumpkin is as essential to Thanksgiving as the turkey, and, like the turkey, it has impressive credentials: they are both among the continent’s indigenous foods. You don’t mess with pumpkin pie.

But I did. I tweaked it Frenchily.

I added vanilla, which some pie recipes seem not to include. One of the ironies of this very American dessert is that its principal flavorings—cinnamon, clove, nutmeg, ginger—come from another hemisphere. So, absolutely: mine would have vanilla, some very French vanilla (which is to say, from Madagascar). I substituted the usual vegetable-oil flaky crust for one made with butter (a pâte brisée). Instead of a can of iconic Carnation condensed milk, which, despite its throwback appeal, is pretty sickly in its exaggerated sweetness, I used crème fraîche, with its welcome acidity. And I used coconut sugar instead of the conventional cane variety, which is not particularly French, but, with its subtle tropical flavors, seemed to complement the pie’s equatorial spicing.

Then there was the pumpkin. There is a popular view that what you get in a can is so reliable that you shouldn’t bother with the fresh. For my part, I like interacting with my pumpkin before I eat it—its size and slippery skin, which makes it a challenge to cut; the business with the seeds; the long roast and how it changes the texture and the aromas during cooking. Also, the draining. Pumpkins have a lot of water, and, once I cook the pulp, I drain it overnight in a sieve—and I like that. I get none of this from the contents of the can, which, frankly, look like dog poop.

I bought a sugar pumpkin, a variety recommended for eating, but then wondered (and felt that this was very French of me): is it really the best? I went to the pumpkin stand at Union Square Greenmarket to investigate. It wasn’t actually the pumpkin stand but was the one with the greatest variety of squash and gourd-like entities (hundreds!), run by JoAnn Banks, the pumpkin-obsessed proprietor of Bauma’s Market in New Jersey. Her view? “Sure, sugar pumpkins are popular because they’re called sugar pumpkins. But the best flavor is in the one that the canning factories like to buy up. This one.” She pointed to a bright orange, impressively round, impractically gigantic example. I made to lift it. It must have weighed twenty pounds. I wondered: how am I going to get it home?

And the name?

“I can’t pronounce it,” Banks said, and handed me a card for a “rouge vif d’Étampes.”

“French?” I asked. (Rouge vif means “bright red.” Étampes is a town outside Paris.)

“French,” she said.

“But pumpkins don’t come from France, do they?”

“Of course not.”

I bought it and roasted it, and the pulp, when cooked, was more pale pink than orange (or bright red) but had a wonderfully delicate texture.

I learned later that the rouge vif d’Étampes appears to have been introduced—or, I should say, reintroduced—to the United States from France. (Who would have thought?) It was popular in and around Paris in the late nineteenth century as the principal ingredient in a prized soup. Washington Atlee Burpee, one of America’s leading farm-seed cultivators, with a reputation for the variety and novelty of his products, “discovered” the rouge vif d’Étampes and, in 1883, brought it to the United States. Is it American or French? Well, both, maybe—or American, with, say, a French accent. (It is worth remembering that this wasn’t the first time one of our indigenous foods was imported here; many of “our” heritage turkeys were bred by British farmers in the sixteenth century.) And the pie? It was pretty good, although I couldn’t say exactly why. Was it the pumpkin or the crème fraîche or the vanilla or the pastry—or everything? But I do know that George loved it. Despite the abundance of cinnamon, he had three slices, eating them with his hands, like a pizza, and asked if we could have more every other week. (“Every week,” he said, “would probably be too much.”)

• 1 rouge vif d’Étampes pumpkin (for 1 lb. pulp after draining)
• 1 ¼ cups crème fraîche
• 2 eggs and 1 egg yolk, lightly beaten
• 2/3 cup coconut sugar (or substitute brown sugar)
• Seeds of 1 vanilla bean
• 1 tsp. ground cinnamon
• Small pinch of ground clove
• Larger pinch of shaved nutmeg
• Pâte brisêe (see recipe in last column, on apple tarts) in a 10-inch tart pan
• Milk, for brushing pastry

• Hand-held blender or food processor
• Pastry brush (or any brush)
• Beans or pie weights, for blind-baking

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

2. Cook the pumpkin the night before. Cut pumpkin in half, scoop out and discard seeds, place skin-side down on a sheet pan, and roast until a knife or skewer passes easily through the flesh, about 2 hours, depending on the pumpkin. Let cool. Scoop out flesh. Puree with a hand-held blender or food processor. Place puree in a sieve set over a bowl to drain overnight in the fridge (if you have room, which I didn’t, so I left mine out). Measure out 1 pound.

3. Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

4. Transfer pumpkin puree to a large bowl. Fold in crème fraîche and the beaten egg and egg yolk. Stir in coconut sugar, vanilla seeds, cinnamon, clove, and nutmeg.

5. Blind-bake the pastry. Brush pastry lightly with milk. Cut a circle of parchment paper to fit over the tart, and fill with beans or pie weights. Place on a sheet pan and transfer to oven. Check after 30 minutes; you want the pastry to brown. If not ready, cook for another 5 to 10 minutes. Remove from oven and cool.

6. Remove pie weights, pour filling into the pastry, and transfer back to oven. Cook for approximately 35 minutes. The pie is done when the filling has a slight wobble when shaken gently; the custard will carry on cooking after the pie is removed.

And the wine? “Beaujolais, obviously,” Jessica Green advises. “A more common recommendation is Zinfandel, America’s delicious homegrown wine—but it has high alcohol. Diners drinking Beaujolais over the course of a long meal are more pleasant to be around than Zinfandel-drinking ones. Plus, Beaujolais is light and lively, while Zinfandel makes you want to take a nap.”