Main

Sled Dog, a malty, full-bodied craft lager with notes of caramel and chocolate, is the key ingredient in Wagner Valley’s version of Carbonnades Flamande, Belgium’s rich national dish. The hearty stew is an excellent bracer against our cold, snowy winter days in the Finger Lakes.

This unpretentious little bakery and café is a favorite with the locals, and Deb Moglia’s smart-looking sandwiches on fresh-baked breads attract a steady crowd at lunchtime. My favorite is the Apple Reuben, a warmingly satisfying construction inspired by the pastrami-stuffed version, only here it is made with sautéed local apples.

The concentrated, complex flavors of Cabernet Sauvignon provide a good match with chocolate. Chef Arthur Kelly Jr. has incorporated cocoa as a savory flavoring in a Finger Lakes take on the traditional French dish.

Flavor pairing comes naturally when using products that come from the same region, and Lakewood’s assistant winemaker, John Damian, developed this recipe to prove it. The secret to a chicken dish that he guarantees will awaken sleeping taste buds is the combination of fragrant, flavorful local peaches and just enough residual sugar in the wine to give the marinade a lift.

Local rhubarb season overlaps with strawberry season in the Finger Lakes, and that’s enough to fire both the imagination and the grill at Stonecat Café. Culinary wizard Scott Signori slathers this unique sauce over Peter McDonald’s pasture-raised chicken and suggests washing it down with Ithaca Nut Brown Ale.

Cayuga White is an easy-to-like, food-friendly wine, unique to the Finger Lakes region. Joyce Hunt was inspired by the Riesling-like characters in her family’s Cayuga, and she developed a German-inspired dish to match the local wine.

Mama Colaruotolo traces this dish back to her ancestral home in Italy. While it originally called for Italian white wine, she substitutes her family’s Finger Lakes Chardonnay to create a New World masterpiece. The Finger Lakes wine adds distinctive fruitiness to the dish, even better the next day, allowing the flavors to integrate even more.

In Quebec, only two real game meats can be legally sold, caribou from the great north and hare snared in the winter. The taste of these meats is surprising at first, the incarnation of the word “gamey,” but like truffles or blue cheese, it becomes what you crave. Many little classic Parisian restaurants offer this dish in season, and there are as many ways to cook it as there are chefs. The basics are wild hare (lièvre), red wine, shallots, thyme, and garlic. The rest can vary. At Joe Beef, we use both hare and rabbit. D’Artagnan (www.dartagnan.com) ships in-season Scottish game hare that we have tried. It’s gamey all right, but it’s the real McCoy. If you can’t find a hare, you can use all rabbit. Count on two days to prepare this recipe. It should yield six to eight portions, and it freezes well.

You will need a smoker that can be controlled or a grill and a chip box for this recipe and a supply of maple wood or maple wood chips.

We never went hungry as kids. And we have no inherent fear of the next Great Depression or anxiety about canned food. Still, we always want more. Wanting and eating four of the Swedish shrimp-egg things you can buy in the restaurant at IKEA is a good example of that. Another good example is how we would have piled more stuff on this modest toast if we could have fit it: a can of sardines from Bretagne, maybe, or quails stuffed with crab hiding in the corner. Our first reaction on seeing this photo was, “Shit, we forgot clams.” There are thirty items here, and if we do another book, we will put in sixty, we promise (just so we don’t run out of food). Disclaimer: In no way do we aspire or pretend to serve authentic Scandinavian food. This is just our view projected onto a classic. The closest we have been to Scandinavia is Fred Heimlich-maneuvering a Dane who choked on the biggest oyster ever eaten raw. And it was a weird experience because it was like they kissed; they were shy around each other for the rest of the evening. In the list that follows, an asterisk means a recipe is included. If there’s no *, it means the item is straightforward and you can figure it out. We suggest serving the items on rye bread or a baguette sliced lengthwise and buttered. You then eat your open-faced sandwich with a fork and knife. Or, you can do as we do: add condiments and eat it like a military strategist, portioning, placing, moving, and rationing. Regarding yields: the smorgasbord is more of a concept than a straightforward recipe. The smorgasbord shown here serves 4 to 6, and includes every single thing listed. You don’t have to follow our lead (though we would be pleased). Typically we put 4 or 5 proteins and 4 or 5 condiments on the average smorgasbord. Following this rule, each of the small recipes serves four.

This is what we imagine old Scots at the turn of the century in the Montreal’s famed Golden Square Mile neighborhood ate for breakfast: steak, kidneys, kippers, and a few eggs. After a gin festivity, it would be exactly what it takes to get you back on your feet. It’s delicious with a little watercress salad.

Hot, it’s beef stew. Cold, it’s jellied beef stew.

If you’re a fervent practitioner of the nose-to-tail thing, you probably scoff at tenderloin, favoring instead oxtail or udders. In a hypothetical dystopian foodist nation, animals will be bred in humane ways to produce more spleens, livers, and guts than loins and legs. No joke. The meat business wanted pig with more bacon and less shoulder a few years ago, a disturbing enough thought. It’s a common dichotomy and funny somehow. The rich feast on what was once peasant food. Think about it: risotto, polenta, offal, eggs are everywhere. Once again, we don’t omit ourselves from the criticism. In fact, it’s the stuff that keeps us up at night. The fillet comes from the small end of the tenderloin, from a muscle inside the ribs called the psoas major, which reportedly has the function of providing the quadruped with an efficient humping motion. We put filet mignon on the blackboard, get sick of it, and a week later put it back on the board. Cut into thick chunks, hog tied, and roasted, tenderloin is great. One of my favorite dishes, beef Stroganoff, is also best made with tenderloin (I omitted it from this book for fear of being ostracized by the cool chef gang). Also, the River Café Raw Beef (tenderloin, too) is still one of my favorite cookbook recipes.

When we first started cooking, beef was like tuna is today: incorrect to buy and incorrect to sell. But over the last couple of years, beef is finding its place again, especially with the burger courant sweeping the continent. We’ve used sirloins from large companies, but doing so feels a bit like cheating on my wife with a lady boy: part guilty, part disgusting, and yet I still buy it. Since we began purchasing more carefully aged and selected strip loins, this is now one of our favorite cuts. It is tasty, the perfect size, monolithic. The method here is specific to this strip loin, cooked medium-rare. Check the temperature chart (see page 242) for different levels of doneness. Remember that dry-aged meat tends to cook much faster because of its lower moisture content, so act accordingly. And when it comes to cooking, the weight of the steak does not matter as much as the thickness (our steaks each weigh about 21 to 22 ounces/610 to 640 grams), which is why you see only the thickness here. Also, the middle of the steak is where you can see doneness, not on the tip, so insert an instant-read thermometer through the side to the center to verify it is ready. If you must, you can also cut the steak in two to check doneness. Remember, though, you can always cook longer, but not “de-cook.”

We owe it to Riad Nasr and Lee Hanson at Balthazar for the revival of the plat pour deux in restaurants. It’s great for the passionate cook, and great for the passionate diner, as it denotes a more willing, yet easygoing approach. Nicolas Jongleux used to do a guinea hen for two, the breast on the bone with jus truffé, in fine china; vegetables in a silver casserole dish; and a second service of legs with squash gnocchi and mimolette cheese. It was beautiful food made perfect by the antique tableware. Alain Ducasse once said that if you go with a date to the cinema, you don’t go to different movies; the same applies to dining. If you and your companion agree, it can be heaven. Why another book with a côte de boeuf? Because this is the Joe Beef côte de boeuf. A côte de boeuf is a majestic cut. It is 2 1/2 pounds (1.2 kilograms) of natural, aged, carefully butchered steer goodness. In our mind, a côte de boeuf has to be cut by hand, leaving the bone intact. (One, if not the main, difference between European and American butchery is the use of the meat saw. In North America, the cuts are based on sawing parts; in Europe, the cuts are made by knife, every muscle separated.) At Joe Beef, the side dishes keep coming when you order a côte de boeuf: green salad, fries, horseradish, red wine sauce, and marrowbones. This, in addition to the quality of the meat, is why we cannot justify lowering the price.

We remember falling in love with a photograph of petits farcis in an old issue of Cuisine et Vins de France. We’re sure that most chefs our age who had dreamed of cooking professionally since childhood feel the same when they open a vintage copy of Cuisine et Vins de France, or of Georges Blanc’s De la Vigne à l’Assiette. There is no greater food era than when Michel Guérard, Bernard Loiseau, Paul Bocuse, Alain Chapel, Georges Blanc, and Roger Vergé were at the top. Petits farcis are vegetables stuffed with sausage mix, then baked and eaten lukewarm. We make them in the summer when the growers show up with pattypan squashes. What else are you supposed to do with those little squashes other than admire them? The stuffed vegetables are awesome with a mâche salad and partner perfectly with a nice rosé or pastis. Get the smallest vegetables you can find, about the size of a golf ball.

We made this dish because we like the “potato” de gallo idea. (In fact, you can make only the rub and eat it on almost anything, especially eggs.) Make certain that the potatoes are tiny and crisp, so you get that salt-and-vinegar potato chip taste.

Dear World, We’re sorry food has come to this. Like Richard Pryor said, more or less, the double down is God’s way of telling you that you have too much money. But it’s also really delicious.

This red sauce is a steroid ingredient that we use to pump up wimpy dishes like gnocchi or in chicken gravy for a quick sauce chasseur. Most of our sauces are done this way, baked in a good French enameled cast-iron pot. We’re not too fussy about the type of tomatoes we use, just canned and whole; San Marzano will do. If you cannot obtain pig skin from your butcher, then a pig’s trotter, halved lengthwise, works, too. You could also add Smoked Baby Back Ribs (page 153) to the sauce before serving it with the gnocchi.