This website brings you tested and perfected recipes that tap into the beautiful, simple way that French women cook today. La Bonne Femme is French for “the good wife,” but in French cuisine, it refers to a style of cooking–namely, the fresh, honest, and simple cuisine served at home, no matter who does the actual cooking, femme, mari (husband), or partenaire domestique.

I have developed this site to support my cookbook, “The Bonne Femme Cookbook: Simple, Splendid Food that French Women Cook Everyday.”

Since 1992, I’ve had the great luck to summer nearly every year in France (this was much less extravagant than it sounds, especially in the strong-dollar 90s!). It also helped that I’m a freelance food editor/writer, and my husband is an academic).

Wherever we traveled, we’d spend extended periods of time in one place, where we’d rent a little apartment (two favorites towns: Collioure and Beauliue-sur-Mer). This allowed us to get to the next level, so to speak, of traveling. For several weeks each summer, we got to faire le ménage (keep house) like French people. Which of course, meant cooking at home—and that entailed its own daily rituals: Heading to the markets in the morning, sniffing melons at the produce stands, a badinage with the butcher, choosing the day’s cheeses at the cheese shop, picking up a baguette at the boulangerie, heading to the tabac for a Herald Tribune to enjoy at the cafe…you know, the daily pleasures of everyday French life for a temporary expatriat.

Day after day, summer after summer, it occured to me again and again how simple a good, home-cooked French meal could be. And yet, when I’d return to America and to my job as a food writer and editor, I’d constantly be surprised at the perception most Americans (even food editors) have about French cooking.

If we think of French cooking at all, we envision slaving three days over cassoulet, hunting all over town for veal bones for a reduction, mail-ordering a lobe of foie gras, and plunking way too much butter and cream in all our creations. And let’s face it–there’s also the snob factor. Many of us grew up when our only contact with French food was at a special-occasion restaurant, complete with stuffy maitre d’s, snooty waiters, and bottles of wine that were impossibly difficult to pronounce.

During the rest of the year, I’d write and edit stories and recipes that often featured countless Italian recipes; clearly, Americans had tapped into the easy, everyday pleasures of Italian food. Why not French? It can be just as fresh, simple, and life-enhancing as everyday Italian food.

So that’s what I’m up to here. I want to spread the word about the fresh, vivid, easy-to-master appeal of good home French cooking. For my cookbook, my goal is to offer 250 recipes that I’ve discovered, created, or perfected over the last 15 years. I’ve also had the great luck to stay with French families as their guests—and that opened my eyes to the utterly attainable joys of everyday French cooking. I hope to pass that along to you, first with a few sample recipes on the website, and later, with my cookbook.

Enjoy!

-Wini Moranville