What's for Dinner, Chéri? — 60 French Dinners

Every dish has one rule

Six minutes, not five. No cheese in it. Rest the steak as long as you cooked it.

Salt the chicken the night before. Get the rule right and the dish works, whatever

else you do to it. Get it wrong and no amount of good butter will save you.

So every one of these sixty dinners opens with its rule, in a box, before anything

else. If you read nothing but the boxes, you will cook better than most people I know.

WHAT IS IN IT

· 60 dinners — the food that goes on the table at seven on a Tuesday or at one on a Sunday

· 60 rules — one per dish, the thing that actually makes it work

· 180 ways — under every recipe: for one person, for a table of guests, and for tomorrow

· Twelve rules of a French dinner, before the recipes, that sit under all of them

· "It is Tuesday and there is nothing in the house" — start from what you have

THE CHAPTERS

· Tuesday Dinners — thirty minutes, one pan: gratin dauphinois, croque-monsieur,

 quiche lorraine, moules marinières, steak and the resting rule

· One Pot, Two Dinners — pot-au-feu, boeuf bourguignon, coq au vin, blanquette,

 daube, cassoulet of a Tuesday

· Yesterday's Dinner, Tonight — hachis parmentier, croquettes, soup from the bones,

 the tourte from the roast

· The Vegetable Is the Dinner — petits pois à la française, purée the right way,

 tomates farcies, pommes boulangère

· Fish on Friday — cod with beurre blanc, brandade, tuna the Provençal way, papillote

· Tarts, Sweet and Savoury — one pastry, learned once; tarte tatin, flan, tarte au citron

· The Sunday Table — roast chicken salted the night before, gigot pink, the cheese course

WHAT IS NOT IN IT

No starters for a photograph. No brunch. No twenty-ingredient lists. No dish that

cannot be eaten again tomorrow as something else. And no cheese in the dauphinois,

whatever your grandmother said.

Every recipe has the weights, the times, and what I do when it goes wrong — because

it does. Half of this book is made from the other half: cook too much on Sunday,

on purpose.

Written from my kitchen, where dinner is at seven and somebody has to wash up.

Colette