Recipes for Real French Food Sans Fuss

ON A RECENT Tuesday afternoon, a dozen tiny tartlette crusts in fluted black metal molds released a buttery gust as Susan Hermann Loomis pulled them from the oven. These were nothing fancy, she wanted me to know. “Working people do the best cooking in France,” she said, “because its deliciousness is so direct and its techniques in the kitchen are so approachable.”

Under the low pewter skies of a winter day in Normandy, rain beat softly on the glass conservatory roof over the big, beautiful kitchen. In her half-timbered 12th-century house, a former convent, Ms. Loomis teaches small groups of students from around the world to prepare meals as the French actually do at home. After cooking my way through “In a French Kitchen”—the latest of her 10 books, out in paperback this month—I’d finally decided to make the pilgrimage myself.

An American, Ms. Loomis studied at the famous La Varenne cooking school in Paris in the early 1980s and has been living in the small Norman town of Louviers since 1993. Though she’s mastered the most intricate, demanding and time-consuming of the grand French recipes, that’s not where her heart is. “The French food I love best runs to those dishes that celebrate the country’s superb local seasonal produce,” she said. “The emotional and gastronomic connection between the cook and the farmer is still very much alive [in France], and even during the winter, the markets in Normandy are wonderful.”

For proof I needed look no further than the tender baby lettuces she stripped and washed to make a salad for our lunch. It would accompany the big fluffy matafan—a puffy, savory cake of flour, eggs, milk, bacon, chives and Gruyère cheese—that filled the kitchen with more buttery perfume as it baked in a high-sided copper pan in Ms. Loomis’s willow-green six-burner Cometto range. “In old French slang, matafan means ‘hunger beater,’ ” she said. Hearty, delicious and healthy, this dish is also surprisingly uncomplicated to make.