Americans just back from a trip to France echo a common refrain-predictably enough, the subject is food. Not the overt drama of haute cuisine or molecular gastronomy, but the quiet goodness of home-style cooking that's honest and straightforward but certainly not ordinary-unless you define ordinary as a crisp-skinned, moist roast hen au jus fragrant with thyme, or tender, earthy spring asparagus that tastes just as you've always suspected it ought to but were never quite certain.
    Among this cuisine's distinguishing characteristics are its exquisitely simple flavors, its quietly understated eloquence and its ability to evoke a reassuring familiarity even as you taste it for the first time. As long as Americans have been experiencing it-usually in a cozy bistro or at someone's home-we've been trying to recapture it. One who did so successfully is Alice Waters, founder of the award-winning Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley. Her culinary epiphany occurred while studying in Paris in 1965; the experience not only changed her life and shaped her career but has had a profound influence on the way Americans eat and think about food.
    Although this particular genre of French fare is not complicated, it's not easily defined either. Commonly referred to as la cuisine bourgeoise, it can be traced back to François Massailot's Nouveau Cuisinier Royal et Bourgeois, published in 1691, and François Menon's Cuisinière Bourgeoise, which went into print half a century later. Written during an era famous for aristocratic excess, these tomes reflected the growing need for meals that were far less lofty than those served to the ruling class yet no less noble. Wives typically presided over the kitchen during those unliberated times, so it was perhaps inevitable that la cuisine bourgeoise would also come to be known as la cuisine de bonne femme and even la cuisine de bonne maman.
        No matter what you call it, this style of cooking is not a slavish obedience to the lists of ingredients and instructions we've come to rely on as recipes. Nor can it be reduced to specific dishes-say, blanquette de veau or tarte tatin. Rather, it's a holistic way of thinking about food shopping, your supper options and those pesky leftovers. Recipes may still play a role, but so does a cook's inherent know-how in three essential areas: a respect for seasonal ingredients, a sensibility for basic cooking techniques employed in the enhancement of said ingredients, and a thriftiness that silently pervades every gesture.
    Lulu Peyraud, the subject of Richard Olney's Lulu's Provençal Table, has long been regarded the doyenne of la cuisine bourgeoise. At 92, there is still an unfaltering rhythm to her cooking, which has always been inspired by frugality without ever appearing so.
    "Having raised a large family, I have learned a few culinary tricks; for example, to brown a lamb bone before putting it in a vegetable soup to cook. Or how to combine leftovers from a roast lamb with potatoes to make a stew, or those of a roast beef to make a daube. Each housewife can use her imagination and wits to make a good meal out of leftovers!" she says.
    It's an approach that embraces rather than begrudges the fact that an inevitable reality of day-to-day existence is feeding oneself and one's family; it's an appreciation of the fact that doing so can lend a pleasant rhythm to our lives.
    Michel Richard, chef and owner of Citronelle and Central in Washington, D.C., recalls his mother's tactic for cooking for her family in rural France. She often started meals from scratch but shrewdly used only a single pot, elegantly reinventing, say, a small cut of meat as pot-au-feu merely by embellishing it with "cabbage and leeks and potatoes and whatever she found in her garden," he recalls. "And it was delicious." The flavors had time to mingle, the pot required little if any tending, and there was minimal cleanup-a clever calculation on her part given that she had eight children.