5 Ingredients or Fewer

Spaetzle is harder to spell than make. In fact, it’s one of the easiest and most impressive side dishes there is, a noodle whose dough is about as complicated as pancake batter and that can be crisped up in a pan to create a delicious accompaniment for almost any poultry or pork dish, especially braised ones. Once you get the technique down, you’ve got plenty of latitude with how you flavor these fresh little dumplings. The recipe here is for plain spaetzle, though adding two or three tablespoons of an assortment of flavorings in the first step will infuse them with taste without changing the method at all. Try pureed chives, roasted and minced garlic, chopped shallots, and so on.

A prime example of the simplicity with which you can successfully treat fresh Chinese egg noodles, which are available at many supermarkets.

Where the sesame sauce in the recipe on page 532 makes for a rich, hearty dish, this one is elegant and light. In Japan—where it gets plenty hot in the summer—cold soba noodles, served with a dipping sauce, are a common snack or light meal. Soba are brown noodles, made from wheat and buckwheat, and the sauce is based on dashi, the omnipresent Japanese stock. (You can also serve somen, thin wheat noodles, cold; cook them for a little less time, but also until tender.) Dashi is close to essential here, though you can use chicken stock in a pinch. But dashi is so easy to make (and so good) that if you try it once you’ll become devoted to it.

A somewhat more elaborate procedure than the preceding recipe, to be sure, but super in flavor. See the excellent variation as well. This is practically a main course, good with a vegetable dish and a salad.

This can work as a main course, though it is better, perhaps, as a side dish with poultry or as a filling for Pierogi (page 59). Given real-world options, fresh ricotta might be your best bet for cheese. If all you can find are packaged cheeses, small curd, full-fat cottage cheese is probably the best choice.

Here is kasha, simply prepared with butter. It’s good with olive oil, too, but best with rendered chicken fat.

Farro is a wheatlike grain grown in central Italy (known as spelt here). Barley makes a good substitute; cook it the same way. Here it is combined with a simple pesto; it’s a lovely picnic or summer party side dish, with almost anything.

Couscous, not actually a grain but a form of pasta, cooks quickly. Ideally, it is steamed over a spicy stew, from Stifado (page 336) to Chicken and Lentil Tagine (page 284), and certainly you can do that. But you will probably prepare it more frequently if you treat it somewhat like rice, as I do here. The couscous benefits from a short preliminary toasting, which brings out more flavor (otherwise, what you have is plain pasta); alternatively, turn it in butter as I do in the variation.

Plain barley, cooked any way you would rice, is fine stuff (make sure you buy pearl barley; the wholegrain variety takes forever to cook). But barley with some butter and dried mushrooms is just a fantastic midwinter side dish. Porcini mushrooms are best bought in large quantities; a pound might cost $40 or $50 but will last for years, whereas 1/2 ounce might cost $4 ($128 per pound) and last you a day.

From the land of risotto comes yet another rich, full-flavored (but far simpler) rice preparation; butter is nearly essential here. With thanks to the great food writer John Thorne (see his Simple Cooking Web site, www.outlawcook.com), who first made me aware of the existence of this Lombardian dish.

An unusual and quite useful plantain recipe, usually associated with Cuba. Like many soups, this one can be made in advance and reheated, though you’ll probably want to add a little more lime juice just before serving for freshness. See page 623 for information on plantains.

This unusual soup is popular in the Dutch Caribbean and the island of St. Kitts, where peanuts are called—as they are in much of the world—groundnuts. Though many groundnuts have a stronger flavor than American varieties, you can use any unsalted roasted peanuts—or even peanut butter—in this rich soup.

Unlike the often inedible rice that comes on every combo platter of tacos or enchiladas in this country (and, increasingly and sadly, in Mexico as well), this is the real thing. It’s the perfect side dish with any Mexican meal, especially when paired with Refried Beans (page 438). Whereas Spanish rice gets its color and flavor from saffron, the source here is fresh tomatoes.

Throughout the northern Mediterranean littoral, chestnuts not only grow on trees; they fall to the ground each autumn and are, for many people, a free crop. (They once did the same on this continent, but a blight wiped them out.) The first fall I visited northern Italy, I saw them drop and realized there were more than anyone could possibly eat. As a result, they are used in a much wider array of dishes there than they are here. This is a rich soup, one that can be made in a matter of minutes with cooked, frozen, or even canned chestnuts, and the results are inevitably good. Add a little splash of port just before serving to give this a bit of a kick.

A different type of coconut rice, one that is made fairly sweet but served with savory (even spicy) foods, like Stewed Lamb Shanks with Mushrooms and Pasilla Chile Sauce (page 414). You can add about 1/3 cup raisins or corn or thinly sliced and lightly browned ripe plantains (page 472) or even a bit of cinnamon.

I call this Caribbean because that’s where I first had it, but not surprisingly it’s a staple in much of Southeast Asia as well. Great with jasmine rice, it’s perfectly fine with any other short- or long-grain rice and can be varied in many ways. If you like, garnish with some chopped cashews or peanuts. I love this with spicy stews.

This is the sambal traditionally served alongside Nasi Lemak, usually at breakfast; you might prefer these as a cocktail snack. For more about dried anchovies, see page 25.

Rice and lentils are both daily fare in much of India, but rarely are they cooked together. An exception is made for the quite-quick-cooking red lentils, which are prepared in a manner not unlike that used in the Middle East.

This is one of those soups that contain so few ingredients that it’s really best to use good stock as opposed to canned broth. (On the other hand, the broth should not be too strong, or it will overwhelm the delicate, fresh pasta.) If you already have fresh pasta dough prepared for another dish, you can substitute it for the passatelli, but this stuff is worth making for its own sake—and easy.

A great way to use leftover rice and a nice cooked treatment of kimchi, which you can buy at any Korean market if you don’t want to make your own. Good as a side dish with Korean food, this also makes a fine snack or even a main course (add chicken, pork, beef, or shrimp if you like). The butter is a contemporary feature, but it’s how I learned this (from a Korean-American friend), and I like it that way.