This Week's Most Popular Recipes

This week’s most popular recipes were mostly French—French Apple Cake, French Mashed Potatoes, French Walnut Tart—with some Spaghetti and Meatballs and Japanese Cheesecake for good measure. One thing they all have in common? They’re the epitome of (admittedly elegant) beige comfort food—perfect for chilly fall nights.

French Walnut Tart

“The best pecan pie ever, except without pecans,” a reader writes of this French walnut tart. “Like eating the most elegant pecan pie you could imagine,” says another. “Next-level amazing.” This is the Dordogne region’s famous tarte aux noix, which encases locally-abundant, toasty walnuts in a buttery honeyed caramel. The result is a beautiful balancing of sweetness and subtle bitter notes, superb when lightly sprinkled with flaky sea salt.

French Mashed Potatoes

Everything we know about mashed potatoes goes out the window with this recipe for super-light Pommes Purée. You overbake the potatoes instead of boiling them. You rice them into hot milk with white pepper—it looks like porridge. You overwhisk them, which would normally create gluey potatoes. Then you add massive amounts of cold butter, which should be melted. Everything you're doing is wrong, but at the last minute, the melted butter emulsifies into the potatoes and they develop a shiny gloss, silky texture, and become incredibly creamy and light.⁠

French Apple Cake

This is the cake for apple pie filling lovers: French Apple Cake is less cake than a pile of sautéed apples, suspended in an airy, bouncy crumb that bakes up with a thin, crisp crust. “It is a last-minute dessert thrown together without a recipe,” Chris Kimball writes. “When one requests exact measurements, French cooks explain the process with a disdainful flick of the head, an exhalation of cigarette smoke and a phrase of discouragement: ‘N’importe.’”

Original Spaghetti and Meatballs

In towns across the Abruzzo region in central Italy, we learned to make a local specialty: pasta alla chitarra con pallottine, the ancestor of Italian American spaghetti and meatballs. Pasta alla chitarra, the pasta used in Italy, is a long strand shape that’s squared off instead of round like spaghetti, and the meatballs are marble-sized orbs that get tangled in the pasta and are so small they don’t require cutting (pallottine translates as “pellets” or “small balls”). Pasta alla chitarra is available in many supermarkets, but if you’re not able to find it, bucatini works nicely, as does spaghetti, but ideally, use a brand that is bronze die-cut, which leaves the noodles with a rough, porous surface that better grips the sauce.

Japanese Cheesecake

Japanese cheesecake, otherwise known as “cotton cheesecake,” is the opposite of New York-style cheesecake; it's more of cheesecake-sponge cake hybrid. Chris Kimball visited Rikuro’s, in Osaka, where cakes are cranked out at an amazing pace and volume. They lived up to the legend. The fluffy texture—known as fuwa fuwa in Japanese—is achieved by incorporating whipped egg whites into the batter, similar to a soufflé technique. The cream cheese is typically mixed with egg yolks, milk, and a small amount of flour, then carefully folded with stiffly beaten egg whites to create an airy, cloud-like consistency.

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Claire Lower

Claire Lower is the Digital Editor for Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street, with over a decade of experience as a food writer and recipe developer. Claire began writing about food (and drinks) during the blogging boom in the late 2000s, eventually leaving her job as a lab technician to pursue writing full-time. After freelancing for publications such as Serious Eats, Yahoo Food, xoJane and Cherry Bombe Magazine, she eventually landed at Lifehacker, where she served as the Senior Food Editor for nearly eight years. Claire lives in Portland, Oregon with a very friendly dog and very mean cat. When not in the kitchen (or at her laptop), you can find her deadlifting at the gym, fly fishing or trying to master figure drawing at her local art studio.