Summer

There are two classic styles of slaw—vinegary and creamy mayonnaise—and probably more than a few hundred variations of each. Our cheater slaw combines the two classic styles, which you can easily push to one side or the other. We go light on the mayo and make it sweet and tangy. If you prefer creamier, add more mayo. If you want a vinegary slaw, simply substitute water for the mayo. See the recipe as a blueprint for your own creative preferences. We redesign it all the time by tossing in an extra ingredient or two. The usual suspects are chopped fresh parsley, fresh cilantro, shredded carrots, chopped bell pepper, bits of fresh jalapeño pepper, chopped chipotle pepper in adobo sauce, green apple chunks, sliced green onion, celery, and blue cheese crumbles.

New Orleans–style barbecued shrimp, called “barbecue” even though they have nothing to do with smoke or a grill, are usually prepared in the oven. We do ours in a big hot pot on the stove because this dish is all about the buttery, garlicky sauce. Mass quantities of crusty French bread are required for sopping. We plunk the big pot in the middle of the table and go to town. It’s an exceptionally good time tearing into long baguettes and washing everything down with plenty of cold white wine. Sometimes, we remember the salad.

A traditional low-country boil is a whole lot easier in a kitchen than on a deck with all that huge pot, outdoor burner, and propane tank business. Usually, the corn on the cob and the new potatoes are cooked right in the boil with everything else, but in a regular kitchen stockpot, we think it’s easier to cook the vegetables separately. We like the extra depth that a little bottled smoke adds to the shrimp boil.

This stovetop stew is a loose interpretation of the three-day beachside fest known as the New England clambake, that picture-perfect steaming seaweed pit immortalized each August by every shiny food magazine. How do all those beautiful people stay so crisp and clean after digging a sand pit and hauling rocks? One summer, on the beach in Charlestown, Rhode Island, we were actually asked by the crew of a popular food television program to stay out of camera range until they finished a shoot. Our cluttered site didn’t convey casual flawlessness. Rhode Island Clambake in a Bowl is not only less work, it’s a much cheaper cheater because we’re skipping the lobster. Instead of a plate of steamed seafood with a little piece of corn on the cob, a sausage link, and a stray potato, this stew is meant to be served in bowls, with bread for sopping up the clam broth.

Fresh briny oysters out of a jar satisfy our periodic oyster craving without the hassle of shucking. To cheat, swap the half shell for a casserole dish and dress the oysters with smoky shallots, butter, and lemon. A few minutes under the broiler and you’ve got a seaside party anywhere, anytime. Slurp them up with saltines. Cold beer, sparkling wine, and dry white wine are what we’re drinking.

Stephen Cellar, R. B.’s hungry nephew, asked R. B. where he got that awesome red sauce we had served with burgers at a family picnic. Having grown up in the sophisticated chipotle-buffalo-ranch-bruschetta drive-through era, Stephen didn’t recognize that good old twentieth-century American favorite, “special sauce.” When we grew up, McDonald’s special sauce on a Big Mac was the first condiment other than mustard, ketchup, and mayonnaise that anyone considered for a burger. Way before pesto, sun-dried tomatoes, and made-up foreign-sounding food names, even the pedestrian “special sauce” was fancy enough to attract attention. How long did it take us to figure out that it was just like Thousand Island dressing? The mystery ingredient was chili sauce, that misnamed cousin to ketchup shelved beside the cocktail sauces. It looks and tastes like ketchup, but not quite as sweet or silky smooth and without any apparent chili flavor. For a fancy presentation, serve bunless chopped-steak burgers alongside crisp iceberg wedges and ripe tomato slices adorned with thinly sliced red onion, crumbled bacon, and Fridge Door Special Sauce. Or, slather over burgers topped with lettuce, cheese, pickles, and onions on a sesame seed bun. It’s so old, it’s new again.

These are an excellent choice for late summer when fresh tomatoes are at their besto.

This indoor burger recipe make six burgers (too many for one pan), so use the broiler or finish the pan-seared burgers all at once in the oven. Ground beef is available in plenty of designer styles and fat-to-lean ratios. Use what you like. Remember that the higher fat content varieties like chuck have a rich, juicy taste and a smoother texture than the leaner ones, which tend to be dry and grainy. Chuck will also spatter up your stovetop and broiler a bit more. Either way, good ventilation is important. Burger doneness is an individual right that the government recommends you exercise at 160°F for proper food safety. Whatever temperature you pick, remove the burgers from heat when they are about 5 degrees below that target as the temperature will continue to rise while the meat rests. R. B. himself goes into fits above 130°F. He’s still with us, knock on wood, despite rare burgers and the raw oysters he downs with abandon.

One of our top five cheater recipes was inspired by a summer cookout at the Nashville hideout of songwriter/producer Desmond Child, the genius behind scores of hit songs, including “Dude Looks Like a Lady,” “Livin’ on a Prayer,” and “Livin’ La Vida Loca.” Margarita, a member of Desmond’s Miami posse, is an excellent cook and veteran cheater. The chart-topping single of the incredible Cuban feast was Bar-B-Cuban Chicken. After marinating chicken legs and thighs overnight, she cheated big-time by cooking them in the oven before the party. In a matter of minutes, the precooked chicken was effortlessly seared on the grill in a showy haze before a live audience. Garlic and tangy lemon not only filled the air, they had penetrated deep into the meat (and our clothes). Margarita admitted, “I don’t measure and I always use too much garlic. I say, it’s good? No. More.” “How much garlic do you use, Margarita?” “Too much,” she said. This is our cover of Margarita’s smash hit.

Cava is cheap but good Spanish sparkling wine. It makes a festive version of sangria.

This variety of plum, even when ripe, retains a certain tartness that is offset here by the anise and the almond paste, all of which, when lolling about in the cream, seem made for each other.

Demeter, the goddess of grain, hallowed by i siculi—the warrior tribe that inhabited the island before the Greeks—was all of resplendence, even to the high crown formed from her flaxen braids. It was she who illuminated the magic of sowing seeds beneath the earth and then protecting them, feeding them, and growing them up into ripeness. The tribe’s harvests grew ever more abundantly, the goddess conjuring the sun and the rain and the breezes on their behalf, they honoring her with great bonfires under the full moon’s light and ritual offerings of bread and wine. The island was Elysium, uninterrupted. And then, heaving himself up through a rent in the earth’s crust, Pluto stole Demeter’s daughter, Persephone, as plunder for his abyss. Demeter screeched and mourned and cast Sicilia into darkness. There was nothing to nourish her tribe save the tears Demeter cried down from the heavens. So clamorously did the goddess petition him that Pluto succumbed, vowing riddance to the child as much as to her shrewish mother. He would liberate Persephone. Only then, though, did Pluto take note that Persephone had cut in two a pomegranate, and that she sat slaking her child’s thirst on its juices and its glistening, rosy seeds—a blunder. He howled up at her mother that Persephone had devoured the sacred seeds of fertility, and for this sin he must halve his promise. Just as she had broken the fruit, Persephone would be liberated for only six months of every year. And, as penance, she must, each year and everlastingly, stay six months in the shades of Hades. And so it was that Demeter heralded the sun and the rain and raised up the wheat, thick and golden, from May through October, when Persephone was at her side, leaving the island barren and under an impotent sun from November until April—her half-mourning an allegory of the seasons, of life and of death. In the early springtime, one can see still the great roaring fires lit by Sicilian wheat farmers and whole villages in dance and song, invoking the gods’ promise to keep safe their newly sown fields. Only now, old, sweet Demeter, pagan that she was, has been supplanted by St. Joseph, her powers having been ferried over into his realm. Not so long after a woman in Palermo had told us this story of Demeter, we were staying awhile in Enna, an interior agricultural city. One evening, the man who served our supper of rough-cut semolina pasta with a mutton sauce and thick chops of pork, oven-roasted with wild onions, dispatched to our table his mother—a fine country cook—with the sad news that she’d had not a moment to put together some rustic little tart or other that day. There would be no sweet. Unless, of course, she murmured, we’d like a pomegranate with un cucchiaino di zabaglione—a small spoonful of custard. We agreed. What she brought forth to us on an old plate of cranberry-colored glass were two pomegranates that seemed to be broken rather than cut in two, their crimson juices spilling out from the jagged shells with tiny coffee spoons plunged into the hearts of seeds. Two diminutive porcelain pitchers of some winy custard were laid beside the plate. We were urged to pour the custard over, into the pomegranates. Sweet but not quite sweet against the tart, peppery seeds, the sauce was the color of ambered muscadine, its scent that of crushed violets. It was a plate quietly, achingly beautiful to see and to eat. Later, when we asked her son if we might give our thanks to his mother for the fine supper and, especially, for the pomegranates, he told us that she’d gone upstairs to bed. Thinking to write our thanks in a little note, I asked him, “What is her name?” “Mia madre si chiama Demetra,” said the man. “My mother is called Demeter.” Startled, dazed even, for a moment, the story of Demeter came racing to mind. Thinking the note unnecessary, all we said w...

In the late summer and early autumn, in the interior of the island, the great harvests of pumpkin and squash are preserved by the farmwives in varied fashion. Often the flesh is cooked down to a marmalade and sparked with candied oranges, or poached chunks of it are set to rest in a sweet vinegared brine. Too, thick slices of poached flesh are often rolled around in a sugary syrup and left to dry. Of a most luscious flavor, this candied pumpkin is sometimes used with dark rum and a handful of broken, bittersweet chocolate, to make a tart like the one we were served in the village of Milo. I was dazzled by it. But when I heard of the perplexing process by which the tart’s author had candied the pumpkin (she began by saying that I should gather fifty to sixty pumpkins), I was slightly shaken. I found, though, that simply roasting the flesh of a pumpkin or squash and then bathing it in caramelized sugar gives a flavor similar and perhaps even richer and requires far less drama.

On the curve of Palermo’s Via Papireto, just before the entrance to il mercato delle pulci—the flea market—there sits a watermelon stand and a hand-wrought sign: ICED, SWEET WATERMELON, DAY AND NIGHT. We passed the little place several times each day on our excursions through the great honkings and snarlings of the city traffic. Drawn by its promise, we meant always to stop but never found quite the right convergence of appetite, time, and space in which to park the car. But one Saturday evening, after a long, winy dinner and a dry search for a still-open gelateria, we thought to soothe ourselves with a visit to the watermelon man. Though it was well after midnight, he was there, waiting midst the walls of precisely laid, smooth-skinned fruit, his old Arab eyes illuminated by festoons of pink and green lights. He bid us sit at his one and only tiny, oilcloth-covered table, tucked in the corner farthest from the street. Speaking only in smiles—it was hardly necessary to tell him what we desired—we watched as he chose a melon from those he kept in a basin of iced water and then cleaved it open with a single heft of some ancient tool. Each half he stuck with fork and spoon and, resting the juice-dripping melons on wooden boards, he presented them. He brought a little tin plate in which we might deposit the seeds and two beautifully ironed kitchen-towel napkins. The red flesh was crisp under our spoons and each new excavation brought up a yet sweeter, colder mouthful of it. We ate slowly under the pink and green lights, finally resting our spoons against the great, hollowed shells, triumphant, certain we’d spent well that hour of our lives, certain, too, how perfect, how divine was that food. Lacking a faithful watermelon man, here follows a way to work with a well-ripened, even if not exquisitely fleshed, melon. Perfumed with cinnamon and studded with bitter chocolate and pistachios, it is the traditional ice of ferragosto—the official high summer Italian festival. The gelo is best eaten long after midnight.

Daughter-of-the-wind is her name in Arabic—Bent el-Rhia—the gorgeous island of Pantelleria sits seventy kilometers from Tunisia in the Egadian Archipelago. She is full of sea caves and strange, vaporous grottoes. She wears Neolithic ruins among her palms and oleander. And in the contrada, neighborhood, called Favarotta, we ate swordfish—thin steaks of it cut from the center of the just-caught fish, first rubbed with olive oil and then quickly roasted over a red-sparking grapevine fire. The fisherman/cook laid them over a cool tomato jam and we feasted. Too, we ate yellow-crumbed semolina bread roasted over the then quieter fire, and when its heat was nearly spent, we skewered figs—green ones and the first of the summer—onto grapevine twigs and held them near the fire until their juices were warmed and we ate them with the last sips of Pantelleria’s luscious moscato.

Sitting a few kilometers from the snarls of the city’s traffic, Mondello is Palermo’s beachfront. Less chic than it is drowsy, the tiny port’s center is paved with little trattorie that offer still-writhing sea fish from which one can choose a fine lunch. And at noon, just as bathers and strollers longing for some icy little aperitivo start off for the bars and caffès, a husky, microphoned voice seeming to come from the fat, dark leaves of the old plane trees intrudes on the operetta. With the precision of a corps de ballet, the cast of characters pivots in the direction of a small white truck, chugging slowly, then edging to a stop in their midst. Lo sfincionaro has arrived. In another place, he might be called the pizza man, though his is hardly some prosaic pie. His voice invites: “Just come to see them. They are warm and fragrant. I don’t ask that you buy one. I only invite you to admire them.” We watched as there came a fast gathering of his devoted. Mothers and babies, men in rumply Palm Beach suits, Australian fishermen on holiday, an Englishwoman with a great yellow hat and a silver-headed cane. Children clutching five-lire notes collected, each of them waiting for lo sfincionaro to enfold a great, warm heft of his beautiful onion-scented bread into a sheet of soft gray paper. A traditional confection of Palermo, it is called lo sfincione. It is a crunchy, rich, bread-crusted tart—and close kin to southern France’s pissaladière—that cradles sautéed onions, dried black olives, sun-dried tomatoes, anchovies, pancetta, and pecorino. Fashioning smaller sfincioni and piling them up, newly born, in an old basket and passing them about with jugs of cold white wine can make for a lovely summer supper.

To tear at a beautiful, newborn bread and eat it with fat, salty olives, a potent red wine sipped between them, is a meal everlasting in its innocence and sensuality. Here follows the simplest of recipes that pairs the soft creaminess of roasted garlic with the olives for a lush result. The dish asks only a little dalliance in the oven. Roasting the olives plumps them, renders them voluptuously fleshy, tender. And when whole, fat garlic—caramelized in a long, slow roasting—confronts the salt-tinged meat of the warm olives, the whole becomes quietly paradisiacal. As beautiful as it is, stray for a moment from the red wine idea and consider a fusion, instead, with an iced Marsala Superiore Riserva or Marsala Vergine or Marsala Soleras Stravecchio—altogether different wine from the often industrially produced sweet varieties that find their way to the States and are used to make zabaglione or to splash sautéed veal. The crackling, almost dry golden chill of them leaves just a point of sweetness on the tongue.

A humble prescript that flaunts the goodness of summer tomatoes, that asks their roasting over wood, concentrating, ennobling their sweet juices. Propped, then, on crusty seats of bread with a gloss of good green oil and the grace of basil and mint, they soothe hungers for purity.

After the fast demise of Sybaris, it was Taranto that grew up, the city most splendid of Magna Graecia. And it was there that oysters were first cultivated, for the coddling, I suppose, of true sybaritic cravings. Taranto was and is quite perfectly situated for the business, sitting, rather like an island, between the mar piccolo—the little sea—a coastal lagoon fed by both fresh and sea water and the mar grande—the big sea—part of the Gulf of Taranto in the Ionian Sea. And it is this very shifting in the salinity of the waters around Taranto that builds up the sweetest, fattest oysters. Nothing better can be done to a fine oyster than to slip it down one’s throat, chasing it with sips of some crisp, icy white wine. But here follows a recipe for barely roasting oysters that, if not ennobling them, at the least takes nothing from their own natural goodness.

Mussels unfettered by garlic taste more like their own sweet, turgid selves. On the tiny porch of the seaside bar where we ate this pasta, the cook who was the mussel gatherer who was the bartender who was the pastrymaker added crushed, dried seaweed to the finished dish. He cooked the mussels and the pasta over a fire he’d built of driftwood a few meters from the bar. It was a fairly good-sized blaze, ample enough to heat an old cauldron along with the mussel pot, it bubbling with a potion of wild myrtle berries in which he immersed a great, gray fish net, tinting it, cooking it to a deep, bright blue.