Thanks, Gwin, I agree--I think it's important to distinguish from French home cooking and even neighborhood restaurant (bistro) cooking, which can be as simple as a vegetable soup, steak and fries, or roast chicken with roast vegetables, and French haute cuisine, fine (high) cooking, that may involve many pots, many pureed and strained items, truffles, and possibly a duck press. There are also many foods that most people in France eat casually but simply don't make at home. I've done both types of cooking and gravitate towards the simple, but the problem comes from conflating the two. No one's getting home from work in the evening and making a pate en croute, but they may be picking up a slice from the shop near the train station. But out of context it gets confusing. Because a lot of these recipes show up together in French cookbooks, especially those written for markets outside of France, a lot of people are unnecessarily intimidated.
