Gluten Free

Once not only a staple but a main course, this is one of those side dishes many people can’t get enough of. Serve with something light and lean, like plain broiled fish.

The presence of artichokes in Liguria (the “Italian Riviera”) is enough to make you envious; they’re everywhere, they’re good, and everyone seems to know what to do with them. Here’s a simple dish, assuming you can get your hands on some good artichoke hearts. This is wonderful with either crusty bread or a simple rice dish, like Rice with Onions, Garlic, and Herbs (page 518). See page 98 for squid cleaning instructions if you need them.

Among my favorite squid dishes. Although sautéing, stir-frying, and deep-frying are good, fast techniques for squid, they tend to be messy because of squid’s marked tendency to spatter when cooked in oil. A gentle braise in flavorful liquid and seasonings is the perfect alternative, and this one, with its Provençal spirit, is delicious and warming. See page 98 if you buy squid that hasn’t been cleaned. Crusty bread is a must; keep the vegetable simple.

Even more so than most other people in the world with access to refined sugar, the Swedes and their fellow Scandinavians incorporate it into the most unlikely dishes. In this one, the caramel is not cooked until it becomes strongly bitter, but just slightly so. The butter then mellows it out. Not exactly health food by today’s standards, but a glorious side dish at any feast.

Horseradish, as I’ve noted elsewhere, loses most of its potency when heated. It also retains its flavor, making it a great accompaniment to potatoes in this simple gratin. The trick is finding fresh horseradish—and then peeling and slicing it (some people wear goggles, not a terrible idea). If none of this appeals to you, just make the gratin with potatoes—it’s a beaut either way. Serve with roast chicken or meat. Other vegetables you can prepare this way: any root vegetable or tuber—carrots, parsnips, or turnips, for example—will work fine prepared in this style, alone or in combination.

This should be hot, garlicky, and spicy, a dish you want to serve over rice or with crusty bread; once the shrimp juices have mingled with it, the sauce is irresistible. Although it’s a perfect weeknight dish, this also makes a great appetizer at a dinner party.

The combination of sauerkraut, juniper, and fruity wine is a divine one. You might as well use a German wine to be completely consistent. Best with pork, like Baeckoffe (page 399).

Chipotles are smoked jalapeños, and they’re available dried (soak them in warm water until soft before use) or in cans. When canned, they’re called chiles in adobo; adobo is a red sauce from Veracruz that’s perfect for this dish. Serve this spicy dish with plain white rice and lots of it.

I ate this by the Gulf of Mexico, in a place with pink and avocado-green walls, a mariachi, and an outside shower. It tasted just as good last winter in Connecticut. Serve this, if you like, with Cebollas Curtidas (page 615) or any other relish or salad. Rice is also good, as are French fries.

Along with Cochinita Pibil (page 351), this is among the best uses for the annatto-based Recado Rojo, one of the most beautiful and flavorful sauces in the world. Serve with loads of plain white rice.

Just because I identify a dish with a country doesn’t mean it’s made exclusively there, and chile-fried shrimp is practically universal. So calling this a Mexican dish is a little like calling grilled steak an American dish. But I like to make this with the relatively mild chiles used in Mexico, and I like to serve it with rice and beans, so there it is. This is best made with homemade Chili Powder (page 609), but if you prefer, use a chile powder dominated by ancho or New Mexican chiles, which have warmth but not high levels of heat. Arroz a la Mexicana (page 517) is a great side dish for this, along with a green salad.

The sweetness of coconut milk tames the heat of this quick stew somewhat, but it remains a dish for fans of fiery food. If you cut the number of chiles to one, however, that will change. In any case, you will want a fair amount of plain white rice with this one.

You have an aesthetic choice to make in preparing this dish, which is great as part of a cool meal in summer. Add a couple of Asian-style salads, like Tomato Salad with Ginger (page 173) or Green Papaya Salad (page 174), and you’re in business. The coconut sauce, with its sugar, lemongrass, and chile—all typical Thai flavors— is wonderfully flavorful but stark white. Adding a large pinch of saffron turns it a glorious yellow and adds the distinctive complexity of that spice, a nice touch. If you prefer, you can use some ground turmeric—whose flavor is bitter but not at all unpleasant—or curry powder. Or just leave the sauce as is. See page 500 for information on Thai fish sauce (nam pla).

Tamarind is a large seed pod grown and used in the cuisine of almost every equatorial country. Its pulp is processed into a dark brown paste, which is used as you might tomato paste, concentrated stock, or, for that matter, ketchup—as a simple flavor enhancer that completely changes the nature of the sauce into which it is stirred. You can make your own paste (page 585) or buy the paste now sold in bottles at many Asian stores. (There is also a kind of instant tamarind powder, which is not very good.) The bottled paste is concentrated to increase its strength, so if you use homemade tamarind paste, double the quantity (or add to taste). As for this recipe, you can use the same process to make almost anything in a tamarind sauce, but shrimp, because it requires minimal cooking time, is by far the easiest. I like to brown the shrimp first for a little more flavor, but you could actually start this recipe with the second step and add the shrimp after the onion. The dish is best when quite sour and not—as happens at too many restaurants—a sticky combination of sweet and sour.

A quick little stir-fry, great for a weekday dinner, and especially good if you can get a chunk of country ham, like prosciutto, Serrano, or Smithfield. Great, too, with sautéed Chinese sausages (sold at every Chinese supermarket) in place of ham. With white rice, this makes a nice little meal.

Because this dish has only two ingredients, finding the best shrimp is of utmost importance. In Hong Kong, where only live fish is considered fresh, live shrimp are common. Here you may find them at some fishmongers (especially in Chinese neighborhoods) and even in some Western supermarkets. The wine traditionally used for this dish in the south of China is Mei Kuei Lu Chiew and is quite strong and a little sweet; you can find it at many Chinese markets. Shopping hassles aside, this dish is worth trying. Serve it with an assortment of other Chinese dishes or as a starter.

The usefulness of miso is nearly unlimited, and it can convert the simplest of ingredients into an exotic dish, a secret of much of Japanese cooking. Here the fermented soybean paste is combined with scallops and a little seasoning, then allowed to sit for a while before being grilled or broiled. It’s a traditional dish, in some parts of Japan the home-cooking equivalent of slathering something with barbecue sauce before cooking. For ease of use and strict authenticity, the miso should be thinned—it’s too thick to use straight—with mirin, the sweet, golden-colored wine made from rice (and Japan’s most important sweetener before the introduction of white sugar). Mirin, too, comes in a naturally brewed form called hon-mirin; it’s preferable to aji-mirin, which may be boosted with corn syrup; check the label. But the amount of mirin is so small, and its flavor in this dish so subtle, that you can use a fruity, sweet white wine in its place or even honey. If you can, try this with Asparagus Salad with Soy-Mustard Dressing (page 190) or a plain salad. And a bit of short-grain rice, of course.

More than anywhere else, cooks in Portugal combine seafood and meat with abandon, and it usually works. This dish cries out for crusty bread. If you want a milder garlic flavor, add it along with the tomatoes so it cooks a little longer.

I’d had mussels in New York, even as a child, but never did they look so appealing as they did my first night in Rome, laced with onion, garlic, tomato, parsley, and lemon. Since then I’ve learned to love and prepare mussels in a variety of ways, but I always come back to these. Serve with lots of bread for sopping up the broth.

Every winemaking culture in the world cooks with its local product, but only Spain has sherry. And while sherry is not quite all-purpose, as simple white wine is, it is manifestly more powerful and incomparably more complex; in fact it rivals stock in the character it adds to many dishes. (When Spanish food comes with a good-tasting but anonymous “brown sauce,” you can bet it contains a hefty dose of sherry.) Sherry combined with seafood, olive oil, and garlic, as in this recipe, produces a magically Spanish dish, one that is not only classic but awesome and one you can consider a template for many others. You can spend a fortune on sherry, but since each bottle is the product of several different vintages it is consistent from year to year, and the fact that it is stabilized by alcohol enhances its shelf life (refrigerated, an opened bottle retains flavor good enough to drink for several days, and sometimes even longer if used for cooking). In short, all real sherry is good, and bottles costing ten bucks are more than acceptable. Fino is probably best for drinking, but the slightly sweeter, nuttier Amontillado and Oloroso are perhaps a little better for cooking. As is almost always the case in cooking, the clams you use here should be as small as you can find. Tiny ones the size of a quarter are fun, but the slightly larger cockles or West Coast “butter” clams are equally tender and easier to eat. Mahogany clams or good littlenecks are also fine; do not use “steamers,” whose sand will spoil the dish. In any case, buy only live clams; their shells should be undamaged and nearly impossible to pry open. Rinse them, scrubbing their shells if necessary, to rid them of all sand. Those that do not open during the cooking are fine; just pry them open at the table with a dull knife. Serve this as an appetizer or a main course, with good bread for sopping up the sauce.