Cheese

In the 1980s, puréed beets, snipped chives, and swirls of sour cream made a startling chilled soup that became an almost permanent fixture at the café in which I cooked for much of the decade. The most outrageous Schiaparelli pink, it was a picture in its deep white-porcelain tureen. I wish now I had had the nerve to include the finely chopped gherkins whose sweet-sour pickle notes could have lifted the soup from its candy-cane sweetness. One glance at a Russian or Swedish cookbook would have been enough.

A good contrast here between the sweetly warm beets, nutty hemp, and tangy goat cheese. Any crisp, slightly bitter salad leaf will work. The English-grown ivory and crimson chicory, crunchy, juicy, and appealing to the eye, works well but the classic white would be just as welcome.

I have used Taleggio, Camembert, and English Tunworth from Hampshire as an impromptu “sauce” for warm asparagus with great success. A very soft blue would work as well.

Because the cheese may bubble and run out of this bread while in the oven, I advise baking the loaves on a parchment-lined sheet pan rather than directly on a baking stone. Any cheese that does run out onto the pan will be like a crispy little cheese snack, so it won’t go to waste.

You can use any kind of beer in this recipe, as both light and dark brews add subtle flavors that will complement the cheese.

These poblanos are stuffed with tempeh, a traditional Indonesian food made from fermented soybeans. Tempeh tastes rich and meaty when seasoned and cooked properly. The chiles can be either grilled or roasted. You can prepare the filling and even stuff the chiles the night before cooking. For a memorable summer meal, serve with Pickled Mango and Habanero Relish or Mango and Habanero Salsa Cruda (page 183) and grilled corn on the cob.

Apricots seem exotic and rare because they disappear from the market before peaches and plums, their stone fruit cousins. Light grilling keeps their pleasing shape intact, and the fruit’s natural sweetness is accentuated by the fat and sourness of the goat cheese. If you don’t have a grill, sear the apricots in a pan, following the same instructions for grilling. For a sweeter take on this recipe, reduce the salt and pepper and, after topping the apricots with the goat cheese, drizzle them with honey and garnish with a few mint leaves.

This dish pops with the bright flavor of fresh ingredients cooked quickly; but while the final “zap” is quick, preparation of this aromatic salad takes time. Enjoy it: you’ll use several cooking techniques, from searing zucchini to making croutons to preparing favas. For a shortcut, use store-bought croutons or buy shelled favas. Favas need to be peeled twice: First, pull the beans out of the pod by pulling on the stem and unzipping the side; then, after cooking, peel the thin layer of skin from each bean.

Barley replaces the traditional Arborio rice here for a textured, nutty-tasting whole-grain risotto. Soaking the barley overnight reduces its cooking time. Gold beets have a sweet, mellow flavor. When roasted with the skin intact, their beautiful color is preserved. Wait to salt the risotto until you’ve added the ricotta salata; as the name implies, it is quite salty. This aged ricotta does not melt, but instead retains a pleasant firm chewiness.

In this recipe, pungent tomatoes are balanced by goat cheese for a rich fall soup. Goat cheese can seem pricey because, unlike cows, goats roam instead of graze in one spot. Due to their independent nature, goats can’t be put into factory farms, which are cheap for farmers but hard on the environment. Most goat farms are small, family-run, and often highly sustainable operations. Find out about your local goat farm’s practices and use their cheese in recipes like this, where a little goes a long way.

Tortilla Española is an indispensable dish: It makes a great breakfast, goes well in a sandwich, and makes a hearty hors d’oeuvre when cut into small squares. The only challenge is removing the tortilla from the pan intact, but you can cheat by waiting until it’s cold. Embellish the tortilla with Stinging Nettle Pesto (page 115), Cilantro-Jalapeño Sauce (page 184), or plain ketchup. For a light meal, serve the tortilla alongside the Puntarelles with Anchovy Dressing (page 156) and fresh bread.

Buckwheat adds a delicious sour note to crepes and breads. As a crop, buckwheat gives a boost to the environment because it suppresses weed growth and provides nectar for honeybees. It requires little to no chemical fertilization and actually adds nutrients to the depleted soil on which it’s grown. I like to fold these savory whole-grain breakfast crepes in half, but they can also be filled and rolled like sushi. For a spicier version of this dish, add red pepper flakes.

This dish first caught my eye early in my career when I worked as a line cook at Chicago’s legendary Ambria Restaurant. We served it as an appetizer, making everything from scratch, including the pasta—and it was one of our most popular dishes. This is a perfect dish for dinner parties. I promise it will impress your guests. Follow the fresh Egg Pasta recipe on page 109, making sure you include the optional squid ink.

Having grown up on Dede’s Cheese Straws (page 15), I never knew this version existed until I went to culinary school. Like Dede’s traditional Southern version, these savory, buttery bites get their kick from cayenne. If cayenne is too hot for you, simply substitute paprika or pimento (smoked paprika from Spain). Store-bought frozen puff pastry can be gruesome, so choose carefully; I always use Dufour’s, available online and at gourmet markets such as Whole Foods.

Roquefort is a blue-veined, smooth, and creamy French sheep’s milk cheese with a strong smell and very pronounced flavor. It is one of the oldest known cheeses, having been produced in the south of France for almost two thousand years. Only cheeses made according to specific standards of production and matured in caves near the village of Roquefort, France, may be called Roquefort. Similar blue cheeses to try in this dressing include American Maytag Blue, a regional cheese from South Carolina known as Clemson Blue, English Stilton, and Italian Gorgonzola. Try this on green salad, with chicken wings, or with raw or blanched vegetables as a great crudité dip.

Pistou is the French version of pesto. As in Italy, it’s used with pasta or dolloped on soups or stews for additional flavoring. Make this sauce when herbs are plentiful, and freeze some for later. I like to freeze it in ice-cube trays; once the cubes are frozen solid, I transfer them to a sealable freezer bag or an airtight container and freeze for up to 1 month. Pine nuts are traditional, and walnuts are a good choice for a delicious hint of bitterness. But pecans give the sauce a rich, buttery flavor. Try it also with other herbs—parsley, cilantro, or even nasturtium leaves for a little spicy kick.

Meme called this “lemon cheese cake,” which is somewhat confusing since people more often use that name for a New York–style cheesecake. This is one of the recipes that “got away.” Meme often recorded a recipe on a card or on the previously mentioned interior of her cabinets. Trouble is, she only wrote down the ingredients and rarely included instructions. She used to actually cover her version of the cake in lemon curd. Normally, lemon curd is soft and not firm enough to frost a cake. I have tried to make the curd with her ingredients list every way but Sunday with no success. I’m afraid now I will never know. Instead, I fill between the layers with curd and flavor the frosting with it as well. The cake itself is an excellent rich, moist, cake that would also be delicious with chocolate frosting or served with strawberries and cream.

Red velvet cake has inspired as many theories about its provenance as there are recipes in a Junior League cookbook. The question cannot be definitively answered. We do at least know why the cake is red: most red velvet cakes use acidic ingredients—buttermilk and vinegar—and cocoa, which contains a reddish pigment called anthocyanin. The acidic buttermilk reacts with the cocoa and actually makes this red pigment appear even redder. Somewhere along the line, someone decided the cake needed a little more rouge and added red food coloring. Some chefs try to gussy it up using beet juice or deconstruct it into something it’s not. My friend Angie Mosier, who is an incredible baker in her own right, once very aptly described red velvet cake as “the Dolly Parton of cakes—she’s a little bit tacky, but you love her.”