Beverages

This is a fun and unusual way to serve celery root.

These short ribs are everything you want braised meat to be. They are tender and juicy with a rich beefy flavor that is nicely balanced by the sweetness of the carrots. The root beer and birch bark draw on familiar aromatics and tastes but we use them in a slightly different manner. Come to think of it, these short ribs are not too far off from a traditional cola-glazed ham.

Veal breast is a flavorful and economical alternative to the traditional veal shanks used to make osso buco. In fact, it produces a better yield and makes portioning a heck of a lot easier. We’ve braised the breast in apple cider and added some horseradish for a bit of heat and spice. We like to serve this with Sourdough Spaetzle (page 87), but it’s equally delicious with buttered egg noodles, risotto, or a stew of salt-roasted root vegetables. Alternatively, season the veal with nutmeg, lemon zest, ground fennel, and black peppercorns to change up what is soon to become a staple in your kitchen.

In this recipe we use the olive sauce both to glaze the fish during roasting and to serve alongside it. It has an elusive sweet, savory flavor that will have your dinner guests smiling. It’s also a good use of leftover coffee. Leftover sauce is wonderful with grilled steaks and tossed over roasted potatoes.

Mushrooms are well known for their meaty flavor. They are rich in natural umami elements and we enhance that here with the addition of soy sauce and sherry. The finished stock has a rich flavor that can be used for vegetarian soups and sauces or to enhance meat dishes. You can easily turn this into a rich mushroom soup with the addition of some sautéed mushrooms and a touch of cream.

There’s nothing better than melted cheese on a chilly winter evening. A wide range of dishes center around hot cheese, like Welsh rarebit, queso fundido, raclette, and the classic fondue. Fondue hinges upon a few ingredients handled well. Cooking temperature is very important—do not give in to the urge to increase the heat. Have a glass of sparkling water or wine while you’re cooking and enjoy the process. A whisk helps bring everything together smoothly. Your fondue will start out thin and slowly thicken. At times the fat may threaten to break free, but have faith and keep whisking and everything will come together in the end. If you’re the kind of person who likes added insurance, you can toss your grated cheese with a tablespoon (6 grams) of tapioca flour before adding it to the wine. It’s not strictly necessary but will help compensate for a slightly distracted cook. We like to serve fondue with good bread, sliced apples, charcuterie, and occasionally a salad on the side.

While most custard is made with eggs and dairy, classic Japanese chawan mushi is made using stock. There’s no real equivalent to chawan mushi. It is a light and deeply savory custard. The egg-to-liquid ratio is 3:1, designed so there is slightly more liquid than the eggs can hold. This way, as you dip the spoon into the custard, it releases some of its juices and creates its own sauce. Here we’ve used fresh clams to make the broth. Its buttery flavor speaks of our American heritage. We’ve garnished the custards with the clams, celery, and jalapeño instead of cooking them inside the custard, as would be traditional; this preserves the texture of the littlenecks. As with all steamed custards, it’s important to keep a close eye on things because the time difference between a smooth, silky custard and a grainy, scrambled mess is less than you might think.

This is comfort food at its finest. It blends Italian risotto with the idea of American macaroni and cheese to create a dish that is more than the sum of its parts. And because we love the crisp juicy flavor of apples with our Cheddar cheese, we decided to take things a little further and use cider to deepen the flavors of our risotto. That hint of tartness balances out the richness of the dish. If you happen to have them around, fresh chives are a wonderful finishing garnish.

We love the dark, rich flavors of the classic dessert bananas Foster. One time when we had an overabundance of bananas we decided that creating a bread featuring these flavors would be ideal. We used muscovado sugar, an intensely flavored sweetener, to help mimic the caramelized notes of the original dish. We combined baking powder and baking soda to maximize our leavening and ensure a light, tender bread. It’s darned good all on its own, but we’ve also used it for French toast and bread pudding with fabulous results. Leftover bread can be toasted or grilled and slathered with butter for an excellent breakfast or snack.

We like to make whole wheat sandwich bread at home. We use a pain de mie bread pan, a French loaf pan that comes with a lid so the finished bread has perfectly square slices (although whether or not we use the lid depends on our mood). Sometimes perfect squares are desirable; sometimes we prefer a slightly bigger piece of bread. This dough will work either way. As for flour, we are partial to the King Arthur white whole wheat for its flavor, but you can use the whole wheat flour of your choice. This is a wet dough that will bake up into a moist, cakey loaf, excellent for toast and sandwiches.

The sweet-tart flavor of these pink ribbons makes them a wonderful accent. They are fun with cheese courses where their crunch is a nice contrast to the creamy texture of the dairy. Their lightly tangy flavor is delicious with sweetbreads and game. They also make a beautiful garnish for a panna cotta, rice pudding, or slice of cheesecake. Sprinkle them with a little togarishi (a Japanese spice blend) before drying and use them to garnish crab salad. A hint of Old Bay seasoning can make them the perfect accompaniment for bay scallop risotto or fish cakes. Sprinkle them with sparkling sugar and they can become gorgeous tuiles to be eaten alone or perched on top of a sweet lemon tartlet.

Maple vinegar is a favorite of ours for its rich, nuanced flavor. Our version is not a product that can be found commercially, so there is a real reward in trying this recipe at home. Once you have it in your pantry, you’ll easily find many different uses for it. It’s wonderful drizzled over roasted squash or balanced with a touch of cayenne and butter and brushed over corn on the cob or a roasted chicken. It’s amazing simply spooned over a rich, runny piece of brie, accompanied by crisp apple slices, or blended with diced apples and jalapeños as a condiment for meat or game. It also makes for a surprisingly balanced maple martini when combined with ice-cold gin or vodka. The possibilities are endless.

We use organic cider vinegar as a starter because it usually contains a live mother. If you have friends who have made their own vinegar, you can begin with their live vinegar instead. In either case, we start with equal parts, by weight, of live vinegar (vinegar with mother) and wine. Make sure there is enough room in the jar to add more wine as the vinegar develops. Wrap the mouth of the vinegar jar with cheesecloth to prevent vinegar flies from taking a dip and then place the lid back on top. A little patience here will yield great results.

This may seem like an unorthodox flavor profile, but roast chicken brine is delicious. Just as chicken stock is used as the base for myriad soups, this roast chicken brine pairs well with a variety of vegetables and fish. Unsurprisingly, it is also amazing with chicken and turkey. We are lucky enough to be able to buy inexpensive chicken backs at our local Whole Foods. If you can’t get backs or if wings are too expensive, chicken legs or thighs are sometimes an economical substitute. Even if you prefer to eat white meat, using dark meat for the brine will give you the most flavor.

A Römertopf, a porous clay pot developed in the 1960s by a German company, is often used in Alsace and southern Germany for long- simmering stews. These stews may be akin to Alsatian baeckeoffe, a pot of meat (usually beef, pork, and veal along with calf or pig feet) mixed with potatoes, marinated in white wine, and cooked in the oven all day long, on Mondays, when the women traditionally do the wash. Agar Lippmann (see page 258) remembers her mother in Alsace making the Sabbath stew in a baeckeoffe, using a mix of flour and water to make a kind of glue to really seal the lid. When I was having lunch at Robert and Evelyne Moos’s house in Annecy, they used a Römertopf to make a similar lamb stew for me. Eveline ceremoniously brought the dish to the table, and in front of all of us, took off the top so that we were enveloped in the steam and aromas of the finished dish.

To learn how to make the French macaroons that I tasted at many bakeries and homes in Paris, I asked Sherry Yard, executive pastry chef at Wolfgang Puck’s Spago, for guidance. Spending a day with Sherry and her staff, I had the opportunity to witness how American pastry chefs are learning from the macaroon-crazy French. The first of these dainty macaroon sandwiches filled with chocolate ganache was developed by the pastry chef Pierre Desfontaines Ladurée at the beginning of the twentieth century. Today almost every pastry shop in France makes them in a dizzying array of flavors and colors with jam, chocolate, and buttercream fillings. Some pastry shops make certified kosher versions. Here is a master recipe for the chocolate macaroon, with suggestions for making them vanilla- or raspberry-flavored. I have given a recipe for chocolate-mocha filling as well. You can also fill them with good-quality raspberry jam or almond paste. After you have made a few macaroons, use your own imagination to create others. And do serve them for Passover.

In the early twentieth century, a Jewish woman named Geneviève Halévy Bizet, the mother of Marcel Proust’s friend Jacques, held one of the most popular women’s salons in Paris, depicted in Proust’s work. Gertrude Stein, the Jewish writer, along with her partner, Alice B. Toklas, hosted another famous salon, conversing with and cooking for writers and artists during the many years when they lived together in France. One of the recipes Alice liked to serve to their guests was very similar to this prune-and-fig compote. In Alsace and southern Germany, prune compote is eaten at Passover with crispy sweet chremslach, doughnutlike fritters made from matzo meal (there is a recipe for them in my book Jewish Cooking in America).

During World War II , Claudine Moos’s family hid in Lyon, which was the center of the Free Zone and considered to be a slightly safer city for the Jews. One day, her father, a socialist and Resistance fighter, was distributing leaflets against the Germans at the railroad station. The French police, helped by the German SS officer Klaus Barbie, caught him and others, and they were dispatched on the last train to Auschwitz. As they were escorted away, they sang the “Marseillaise,” the French national anthem, at the top of their lungs. Claudine, who was five years old at the time, has memories of their singing voices fading off into the distance. She was raised by her mother, who had also lost her father at a young age. Despite a difficult life, having lost her father and her husband, Claudine’s mother’s last words were “Life is good.” Even in a good life, food could be a challenge. “During and after the war, food was rationed,” Claudine told me in her kitchen in Annecy. “We got ration cards for the milk and eggs. Of course there was no chocolate. I remember my mother coming home with the first tablet of chocolate she could get after the war. How excited we all were!” Regardless of the shortages during the war, chestnuts still fell from trees throughout France in autumn. This rich uncooked cake would have been made from the chestnuts that were collected on the street. The recipe comes from a handwritten cookbook that Claudine’s grandmother gave her when she got married in 1960. The original recipes were measured in interesting ways, calling for a “glass of mustard” and a “nut of butter.” Peeling chestnuts used to be a laborious task. Her grandmother would collect or buy them whole, score them a quarter of the way down, boil them to loosen the skin, and then peel them. For Claudine, it is so much easier these days to make this cake, because she can buy frozen or jarred chestnuts, already peeled. Best made a day in advance, this rich cake should be served in small portions, topped with dollops of whipped cream.

Baba is the yeast pastry that became familiar in Lorraine in the early nineteenth century and is eaten, as described above, by the Jews of Alsace for Purim breakfast; it was sometimes confused with Kugelhopf. The French gilded the lily, dousing the dry baba with rum—a novelty from America. Today babas are baked and served two ways, in either a large or a tiny bulbous mold. I adore baba soaked in rum and order it whenever I can. After tasting an especially light baba in a tiny sixteen-seat restaurant called Les Arômes in Aubagne, I asked the chef, Yanick Besset, if he would give me his recipe, and here it is. As you can see, a good baba dough itself contains very little sugar, the sweetness coming from the sugar-rum bath spooned on after baking.

The original Soufflé Rothschild, created for James Rothschild by Antonin Carême, was a baked soufflé embellished with gold leaf. Since then, there have been all kinds of “Rothschild” soufflés, salads, and other dishes— the name is used to denote extravagance or richness. This frozen soufflé Rothschild was conceived by the famous pastry chef Gaston Le Nôtre, for a grand dinner at the home of one of the Rothschilds. It was served to me at a dinner party in Paris, and is one of the most delicious desserts I have ever tasted. Neither an ice cream nor a sorbet, it is technically a bavaroise glacée, a frozen parfait based on eggs and cream. The best part of this recipe is that it is quite quick to make. Just watch— your guests will sneak back for seconds and thirds!