Vegetable

Before the era of widespread refrigeration, most of the commercial salmon catch was smoked or canned so it could be stored until the next season. And there was plenty to can in those days, because the salmon population was not threatened by overfishing or pollution of their habitat. As a result, canned salmon became a fixture on grocery store shelves and in home pantries across the United States, and the salmon croquette became a specialty of American cooking. I recall my mother opening a can of salmon for a quick dinner, mixing it with egg, bread crumbs, and some seasonings, patting the mixture into cakes, and sautéing them until golden on both sides. These days, it is not difficult to procure fresh salmon, and that is what I prefer for my croquettes, though always shopping with sustainability of the fish in mind. The price difference between canned and fresh is unexpectedly small, and it takes but a few minutes to cook salmon steaks or fillets—in the oven or in the microwave—for the croquettes. The payoff is, as is generally true, the taste difference: fresh is the best. The croquettes make a pretty focus for a brunch or light dinner menu, as here, or serve them as an unusual side dish for breakfast with eggs cooked any style.

Paella is one of the great composed rice dishes of the world. Many regions in Spain boast of serving the “finest” rendition, but Valencia, its original home, claims the blue ribbon. Many tourist guides acquiesce. Located close by the sea, the city provides its cooks with a daily supply of fresh seafood. Squid, which blackens the rice with its ink, and mussels are abundant and have become key elements in paella valenciana, along with snails and green beans. That repertoire has been expanded to include a selection of chicken or rabbit pieces; small sausages; other shellfish, such as shrimp, crayfish, or cockles; and other vegetables, such as red bell pepper or artichoke, though not all at once. I like to use shrimp in the shell, but if you don’t think your guests will want to peel their own shrimp, you can cook them as directed, then peel them before returning them to the pan. Paella is traditionally cooked over a charcoal fire in a large, wide, two-handled shallow pan called a paellera. As is common in many Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cultures in which dishes, such as shish kebab and gyros, are cooked over an open fire, the paella cooks are traditionally men because the men own fire. Nowadays, the paellera is more often used indoors, and women as well as men cook the dish. It is always a festive offering, worthy of a get-together of any size, indoors or out. No matter who is cooking, the key to a successful paella is the rice. It must be Spanish or Italian short grain.

Crépinettes get their name from the veil fat that is used to wrap them. They were a classic at Pigby-the-Tail, one of the most requested of our sausages for uncountable neighborhood and family potlucks and summer grilling parties. It’s no wonder. A crépinette patty wrapped in its transparent caul with a whole basil leaf showing through is a thing of beauty. Caul fat is difficult to find, though that is changing with the renewed interest in charcuterie (see page 154). If you prefer to keep it simple, here is the modified recipe, caul optional. Made without caul, the crépinettes are equally delicious, though somewhat less mysterious without the umami the caul provides, and the lovely look is simulated by pressing a basil leaf on top of the patty just after cooking.

Shepherd’s pie is a signature dish in the pubs of England and Ireland, sometimes made with lamb, as here, and sometimes with beef, in which case it is called cottage pie. The idea is the same: a simple meat pie made with a mirepoix—onion, carrot, celery—under a top crust of mashed potatoes. There’s no cheese in the mashed potatoes, but when the pie is baked, the crust is somehow enriched through the alchemy of cooking and tastes as though there were. Shepherd’s pie is usually made with leftover cooked lamb. Swapping that for quick and easy homemade lamb sausage is my revisionism, to give the humble pie a fresh and lively taste. Also, to gussy it up, I use tiny pearl onions so the onion element has a more defined presence in the pie. The horseradish is also my whim, to give the dish an acrid lilt that helps lift it above what might otherwise be humdrum fare. Fresh horseradish root is often available in produce stores and supermarkets around Passover for Jewish customers; wasabi root, though not exactly the same botanically, is similar and it is available around the New Year for Japanese customers. Like fresh ginger, horseradish root can be stored in the refrigerator almost indefinitely, as long as it is kept dry.

This lamb, green bean, and tomato soup-stew, known as fasoulia in the home of my childhood, was the by-product of a regular event: my father dissecting a leg of lamb into its parts, from the most highly treasured, neatly cubed pieces for shish kebab to the fattier but still tender parts for grinding into sausage. A sidebar of the ritual was putting the bone and all the gristly bits into a pot, covering them with water, and gently simmering them into a broth for fasoulia. Even though the dish was a by-product of making shish kebab, it enjoyed a humble stature on our dinner table. These days when I desire a taste of lamb home cooking and am not deconstructing a leg of lamb, I use a bit of purchased ground lamb for meatballs. The green beans are key here, and though I usually turn up my nose at frozen vegetables, I make an exception for fasoulia, so that it can be enjoyed throughout the year. I find this soup-stew doesn’t need anything in the way of a side dish. A slice of bread, a spoon, and family company suffice, but Armenians would include pilaf on the side.

Nowadays, dolmas are standard fare throughout the eastern Mediterranean and Caucasus. But it is interesting to ponder how they became so in ancient lands that never had New World ingredients until seafarers carried them to the Old World on their return journeys. To complicate the story, they put ashore in Atlantic ports, so it was still a long trek to get to the eastern Mediterranean. Nonetheless, they did, once again demonstrating the scope and power of food as a pathway of global interconnections. Adding a bed of potatoes as infrastructure in this dolma is a particularly Greek touch, and a good one. The potatoes soak up the juices rendered as the vegetables cook and collapse into them, making a crude sauce on the bottom of the dish. I prefer green bell peppers, but it seems these days red bells are equally, if not more, favored, so I make a mix of them, including some yellow and orange ones that add sunny color to the array.

My love of rice paper began in childhood with candies that came packaged in colorful boxes, mostly pinkish and with children pictured gleefully jumping. Inside were gummy candies, chewable like jujubes, only softer. The fun part was unwrapping the outer paper and getting to the inside wrapping. At first it seemed like another layer of paper, a bit stiff like cellophane. But then you would pop the candy into your mouth and let the wrapping hydrate until soft enough to chew. I always found it a thrill “eating” my way from seemingly inedible paper to edible candy. So it is with rice paper wrappers for Vietnamese spring rolls” What seems at first glance a large plastic disk not for consumption, with hydration becomes supple enough to enfold all manner of comestibles.

Imam bayildi, as this dish of Turkish origin is called in Bulgaria, Albania, and Greece, and its story have a special place in my cooking repertoire and in my heart. It was introduced to me by Susanna Hoffman, my longtime friend and sometimes cookbook coauthor, who is, among other things, an esteemed social anthropologist whose special field of endeavor is Greece. The story of imam bayildi has many versions, but details aside, it is essentially a tale of love and household thrift. A bride new to the house of her new husband, an imam, came with a dowry of olive oil. But there was only a certain amount. And the imam loved eggplant above all other foods. In practice, because eggplant, as it cooks, is a great gulper of olive oil, and olive oil is the equivalent of kitchen gold, the dish was using up too much of the bride’s dowry. What to do? How to please the husband and keep the eggplant rich and unctuous without blowing the kitchen budget? Susanna solved the dilemma by having the thoughtful bride coax the eggplant into softening with the addition of some water, thereby requiring less of the precious olive oil and with equally excellent results. Was the imam thrilled? Did he faint as the original story line suggests? We don’t know, but we presume the clever, money-minded bride kept her place and the imam was happy. In yet another, latter-day telling of the story, I call the beef and eggplant filling a sausage and the eggplant shells the casing, and imam bayildi winds up in a new sausage cookbook.

Partially cooking the potato and chilling it before grating serves two purposes: the potato gets thoroughly cooked within the sausage mix, which it won’t if it is added raw, and the sausage doesn’t turn out soft and mushy, which it will if the potato is cooked and mashed first. I prefer to get a jump start on this dish by preparing the potato a day ahead and chilling it overnight. But if you’re in a rush, several hours will do the trick, in which case, use the freezer to hasten the chilling. Rather than the standard Swedish accompaniment of mashed potatoes, I serve the sausage with a side of colorful, almost candylike roasted beets topped with sour cream.

In this pan-African menu, disparate parts of the continent are melded in a culinary way. The sausage is inherited from the Dutch colonialists in South Africa; the cashews, which were first brought from Brazil by the Portuguese, import a taste of Nigeria on the west coast and Mozambique on the east coast; and the spiced butter, called niter kibbeh, wafts in gently from Ethiopia. The rice and collard greens are pan-global.

In the annals of folk medicine, watercress soup is said to be good for soothing a dry throat or for when a general system-cleansing tonic is needed. Here, the nip and pep of watercress infuses chicken broth made rich with slivers of shiitake mushroom and plump sausage-filled wontons to produce a new take on wonton soup that is both healthful and delicious. Hydroponic watercress, meaning watercress grown in water and without soil, closely resembles watercress you might pick alongside a running stream in spring, but it has finer, more delicate stems and far less dirt and sand on its leaves. It is often available year-round in supermarket produce sections.

In a showcase dish for slow-cooking-meets-quick-and-easy, sausage and lentils come together in a hearty combination for cool weather. The slow part is making the sausage, which is actually a cinch and can be done days in advance. The quick-and-easy part is that the dish cooks in about half an hour. Of all the many, many kinds of lentils, which vary in size, color, and their use in cooking, French green lentils are perfect for preparations such as this one where you want the lentils to cook up soft to the center while retaining their shape and not collapsing into a puree, as would be desirable, for instance, in an Indian dal. The soupçon of balsamic vinegar is stirred in just before serving so its tang and aroma remain bright and boldly present, not faded into the background.

There’s almost no turn in Tuscany that doesn’t provide some sensory joy. Driving its curvy roads through low hills gently swelling up from narrow, verdant valleys, you discover olive groves that produce some of the world’s finest olive oil and vineyards that yield some of the world’s most renowned wines. Exploring the region’s old towns and cities on foot, you wind your way through dozens of museums full of famous artworks and wander into back-alley churches and quaint shops stacked with Tuscan treasures. And everywhere, there is fabulous food. The Tuscans have long produced delicious salumi, that special form of pork cookery, called charcuterie in France, that comprises prosciutto, mortadella, soppressata, salamis and other cured meats, along with fresh sausages particular to the region. In this recipe, sundried tomatoes, basil, and mozzarella flavor fresh pork sausage to deliver the taste of Tuscany.

On my brief sojourn in the Toulouse area, I traveled to many local villages and towns acclaimed for their charcuterie. Among them was Castelnaudary, a small village built of stone, close by the fairy-tale-like medieval castle of Carcassonne. The castle was a thrill; even more so was the cassoulet I enjoyed in Castelnaudary, known as the cradle of cassoulet. I mustered the nerve to ask the chef what his secret was. He graciously shared his version of “the cassoulet secret”: The kind of beans you use is crucial. They should be lingot beans, also called white kidney beans or cannellini beans, or coco beans, which resemble slightly elongated navy beans. Both are sweetly buttery and cook up soft and tender enough to soak up juices, but still hold their shape. Then, the beans must be allowed to cool completely in their cooking liquid before assembling the cassoulet. Overnight is best. Stuffed whole duck legs (drumstick and thigh combination) make a delectable sausage star for a faux cassoulet. To sidestep the lengthy process of curing the duck overnight then braising it in duck fat to make confit, the whole legs are sprinkled with a salt and herb seasoning and refrigerated for a few hours to allow the seasonings to imbue. The sausage is then stuffed under the thigh skin, making a single package of sausage and duck meat.

Tomatillos are a member of the nightshade family, which includes New World tomatoes and potatoes and such Old World relatives as eggplants. Although those wide-ranging kin have become familiar around the globe, tomatillos remain something of a country cousin, not much appreciated or grown outside Mexico and its neighbors to the south in Central and South America and to the north in California and the American Southwest. Tomatillos are an everyday must in Mexican cooking and dining, however, especially for one of Mexico’s great table sauces, salsa verde. Here the sauce, usually used as a dip for tortilla chips, becomes the medium for simmering meatballs. Make this recipe in summer, when tomatillos are in season. Canned versions are available, but they should be reserved for thickening chile verde and the like, much as okra is used in southern cooking.

Omelet, frittata, egg tortilla—all are different words for essentially the same thing: eggs mixed with vegetable and/or meat bits and cooked into a cake or pancakelike round. The advantage of this version is that it follows the Spanish or Italian custom of baking the assembled dish. That means no intimidating calisthenics to flip the cake to cook the second side. I serve this informal dish in its cooking skillet, but it’s also easy to lift it out onto a platter.

A glory of black beans, in addition to such qualities as their beauty and healthfulness, is that they don’t need to be presoaked: they easily yield to softening when boiled straightaway. Then, they are ready to accept all manner of embellishments, such as sausage, Mexican spices, and sweet-sour-hot chipotle cream.

Of all the winter squashes, butternut is my favorite. Not only is it easy to peel for soups or gratins, but its flesh is also exceptionally creamy and sweetly invites a sausage filling. Stuffed with pork and chestnut sausage, these squash boats can stand alone as a main course, with steamed rice and a sturdy-leaf green salad for side dishes. They also make a notable side dish for a holiday turkey or crown roast. For precooking the squash, I like to take the microwave advantage. It’s ever so much faster. But for finishing the dish, I use the oven because it produces a toastier, more visually appealing look.

These are dead easy to make and have endless applications in the kitchen. Use them to baste or brown ingredients and they will add pizzazz and excitement to stews and roasts. Likewise, they will jazz up a panful of onions or other vegetables for a soup or sauce and impart character to fish dishes. Herb oils come into their own when drizzled over summer or winter salads; they are also excellent used in mayonnaises and dressings. The basic principle is to choose robust flavorings and leave them for long enough to impart their mighty characters to the oil. Always use a good-quality oil as your base (see pp. 30–31). In all cases, to prevent the oil from becoming rancid, store in a cool place and use within 6 months.

Contrary to what you might think, making a fine vegetable broth is not a matter of tossing any vegetable matter into a pot and boiling it up. The vegetables you start with need not be picture perfect, but starchy vegetables, such as potatoes, should not be part of the mix or the broth will turn out murky, and brassicas, like cabbage and broccoli, are also not good to use or the broth will not be clear tasting. Then, don’t stint on the amount of vegetables for the amount of broth you would like to wind up with. One tomato and one chard leaf do not a tasty broth make. There should be enough water so that the vegetables barely float, but not any more. Cook the broth until the vegetables are very soft but not disintegrating; this helps make a clear broth. Following is a mix and method I use to make a good-size batch of vegetable broth that is rich enough to serve on its own as a bouillon or use as a base for any soup.