Cinnamon

Whether you serve these pancakes for breakfast, brunch, lunch, or dinner, they’ll soon become a family favorite.

Adding fresh apple gives this gingerbread a deep sweetness.

This dessert captures all the smells and tastes of fall. Similar to its cousin, pineapple upside-down cake, it is easily prepared in a cast-iron skillet, then turned out on a plate along with its syrup. Sweet potatoes serve as a binder and sweetener in this cake. Serve it with a dollop of tangy crème fraîche or a little warm caramel sauce.

This dessert is always a hit in my cooking classes. The combination of chocolate, cinnamon, and smoky chipotle often appears in Southwest American and Mexican cuisine, and the flavors marry beautifully in a wood-fired cooking environment. If you want a bit more heat, add more chile paste. You can also add a touch of chile powder to the Cinnamon-Caramel Sauce.

Riso nero—black rice—is the dramatic name for a nursery dish offered to children as a light supper or as a sweet after a bit of broth or soup. It is most often just made with rice poached in milk that has been scented with cinnamon and mixed with a few shards of chocolate, the latter giving the dish its name as it melts and turns the rice a deep, dark color. Surely there are lovely similarities between it and pasta in nero della consolazione (page 118). Here I offer its comfort in a more adult version. The same prescriptions apply, though, as this is best presented after a light, reviving soup or, better, after no soup at all, so one can justify slipping one’s fork into the spiced, chocolate depths of a second or third piece of the sweet little pie.

We had been in Puglia and its environs nearly a month. Sapped from our journeys, our palates debauched into slumber from the opiate of too many chile peppers, our wits palled from nightly Circean cups, we needed redemption from the table. We asked each other what would soothe. Surely we needed to stop driving. Fernando wanted pastina in brodo—tiny pasta cooked in broth. I wanted a small custard pie, warm, soft. I wanted bread and butter. We both wanted to be in a place with not one more three-thousand-year-old olive tree. We wanted sympathy more than we wanted supper. And there we were, lost in Otranto. When finally we asked the same giornalaio, newspaper seller, for directions to our intended destination of Melpignano for the third time and got the third different answer, we thought it a good thing to surrender our search for the unnamed, unsigned place there that had been pressed upon us by our friends in Lecce and simply brake at the next and nearest little place with even the thinnest promise about it. Finding it, we tumbled out of the car, shuffled up the drive and asked if there might be a room for us. The cheery little man took our things, showed us up the stairs, started up the heater for the bathwater and began the reverent story of his wife’s genius in the kitchen. I saw Fernando’s face fading a bit toward citrine. Swooning, I tried so to smile at the even cheerier little man through my narrowing vision. He began his pastoral roundelay with her pigeons braised in red wine and juniper, on to her lamb roasted with potatoes and wild mushrooms, before coming to the rhapsody of her way with goats’ hearts poached in white wine and lemon. Fernando was nearly able to deflect him with an inquiry about the era of his handsome stone house before he began the lip-smacking tale of the pigs’ livers roasted on branches of bay. We closed the door. We took a bath. As we were dressing, the cheery little man knocked gently. They were waiting for us—he, his wife the cook, his son the university student, his brother the hunter, his friend the winemaker. They’d thought, since there were no other guests, we might dine together, make a real celebration of the evening. They had laid a beautiful fire and lit candles upon a narrow, wooden, unclothed table set for seven. They were so sweet, so excited by our presence, for their own clever spontaneity, for the prospect of a long winter’s evening to be passed at table. Fernando rallied and began nibbling at a creamy heft of new pecorino sitting on a crisp white cloth next to our aperitivi. I followed the lady into her kitchen, unraveling our adventures in a nervous sort of monologue. Rather than sympathy, she offered her envy. “Beati voi, tutti questi giorni in giro, sempre a ristoranti.” “Blessed are you, all these days running about, always in restaurants.” I thought to be more direct. “You know,” I said, averting my eyes from the legs of lamb she was basting, “what I would like most this evening is to eat something simple and comforting. I feel like a tired child.” She looked at me for the first time, really looked at me, heard me. She wrapped her great, fleshy arms about me, crushing me to her moist, rosemary-perfumed bosom. She had understood. She marched me back to the table with instructions to sit quietly, sipping at the winemaker’s best red and to wait. After a half an hour’s sashaying to and from the kitchen with the first of the feast’s plates, the lady, her broad olive cheeks blushing up to the corners of her dark eyes, carried in a small, white porcelain bowl with its own cover and set it down before me. I lifted the lid, unloosing the scents of cinnamon and butter and perhaps of chocolate, which curled up through a tangle of pale yellow noodles swathed in a curiously dark sort of sauce. “Ecco la pasta in nero,” she exclaimed. “There it is, pasta in b...

Il Pane della Ninna Nanna (Lullaby Bread). Neither very sweet nor pizzalike in the flat, savory pie sort of way, this is a gold-fleshed, orange-perfumed cakelike bread that, if baked with care, will be tall and elegant, its crumb coarse yet light and full of the consoling scents of yeast and butter. Fabriziana is one of the several “middle” names of the Roman countess with whom I learned to bake the confection in the cavernous old kitchen of her villa that looks to the gardens of the Borghese. Ours were clandestine appointments, with our yeast and our candied orange peels and the tattered recipe book of her mother’s cook. You see, Fabriziana had never cooked or baked in her life, had never made anything from a pile of flour and a few crumbles of yeast. Forbidden in the kitchen as a girl, her adulthood has been always too fraught with obligations to permit interludes in front of the flames. But in the years we have been friends, she has always demonstrated more than a kind interest in my cooking, sitting once in a while, rapt as a fox, on an old wrought-iron chair in my kitchen as I dance about. And one day when I told her I was searching for a formula for an ancient, orange-perfumed Roman bread, she knew precisely where to find the recipe. Trailing off in some Proustian dream, she said she hadn’t thought of the bread in too many years, it having been her favorite sweet at Christmas and Easter. Once she even requested that it—rather than some grand, creamy torta—be her birthday cake. She told of poaching slices of it from a silver tray during parties and receptions, stuffing them deep into the pockets of her silk dresses to eat later in bed, after her sister was safely asleep, so she might share them only with her puppy. So it was that we decided to make the bread together. Wishing to avoid the chiding of her family and, most of all, her cook, we chose to do the deed on mornings when the house would be safe from them. It was wonderful to see Fabriziana at play. Flour and butter were forced under her long, mother-of-pearled nails, and her blond-streaked coif, mounted to resist tempests, soon fell into girlish ringlets over her noble brow. With a few mornings’ worth of trial, we baked Fabriziana’s lullaby bread, the bread of her memories. And once, on a birthday of mine, the countess came fairly racing through my doorway proffering a curiously wrapped parcel that gave up the telltale perfumes of our bread. The countess had learned to bake indeed.

During my college years, I’d return home to Los Angeles every summer and promptly—you guessed it—look for a restaurant job. One summer, I did a stage at L.A.’s premier French restaurant, L’Orangerie. I started my stage in the pastry kitchen with Chef Yves. He taught me the classic techniques of crème brûlée, chocolate puff pastry, and soufflés made to order. But my favorite of his desserts was sautéed apples with caramel sauce and crème anglaise. A little less formal and traditional than the rest of his repertoire, that dish was simple, straightforward, and all about the apples. To make our own version of Chef Yves’s apples at Lucques, we cut the apples in half, toss them with lots of butter, cinnamon, brown sugar, and Calvados, and roast them, basting all the time, until they are a deep golden brown and glistening with spicy juices. With a scoop of cinnamon ice cream melting over the apples, this easy-to-make dessert is an elegant way to finish a winter feast.

When we were opening Lucques, we had very little money for the renovation. The space had a decent kitchen but lacked a great oven. Fritz León, one of our purveyors, was hanging out with us one long day of construction and happened to mention a “huge, fantastic” deck oven that one of his other clients downtown was selling for (and this was the key) “cheap.” What more could I ask for? I bought it on the spot. I began to doubt myself when we went to pick it up and found it was so huge and heavy that we had to take it apart just to get it through the kitchen door. It was a monster, and when we finally did get it installed it seemed as if the old dinosaur had a mind of its own. Each deck ran at a specific, apparently predetermined temperature, no matter what setting we mere mortals put it at. The lower deck was at a constant 350°F, the middle at 400°F, and the top at a raging 500°F plus. It wasn’t long before the top deck was christened “the Terminator,” and now I can’t imagine life at Lucques without it. It was even instrumental in the evolution of our pain d’épice, developed by former pastry chef Kimberly Sklar. For a crispy exterior, she sliced the classic Alsatian spice bread and toasted it on the floor of the Terminator before slathering it with butter and kumquat marmalade. At home, you can simulate the “Terminator effect” in a hot cast-iron pan.

Of all winter squash, Kabocha holds a special place in my heart. Rich and sweet, its dense orange flesh is one of my favorite winter flavors. For this soup, instead of sautéing the squash and fennel, I roast them in the oven to bring out their natural sweetness. If you can’t find Kabocha, use another winter squash, such as butternut or Hubbard. The pumpkin seeds, or pepitas, are coated in sugar, paprika, cumin, cinnamon, and cayenne; I think of them as adult Halloween candy. Sprinkled over the top, they give this delicious winter soup a feisty coronation.

Churros and chocolate have a long history at Lucques, and an even longer one in Spain, where they dominate the dessert scene in late-night cafés. The hot chocolate is made thick and syrupy sweet, meant for dipping the piping-hot crullers. In preparation for one Spanish-themed Sunday supper, my former pastry chef Kimberly Sklar experimented with traditional churro recipes from Spanish cookbooks. Though the flavors were good, the Spanish versions seemed a little too heavy and not tender enough for our liking. Then Kim tried a batch of pâte à choux, the traditional French dough used to make such pastries as cream puffs and éclairs. It was the perfect solution. Next we set out to conquer the chocolate. Again, in my opinion, the traditional Spanish hot chocolate was better in theory than in reality. Spaniards love sugar, and their version is just too sweet for my taste. Still thick and rich in the vein of the traditional chocolate, ours is super-chocolaty but not as cloyingly sweet. I like to add a generous pinch of salt, to play up the bittersweet notes of the chocolate. This is a festive, interactive dessert that requires some last-minute attention when it’s time to fry the churros. Make the batter and hot chocolate ahead, and just before you serve dessert, invite your friends into the kitchen to help you fry. It’s fun to watch the dough transform into deep golden brown snakes and then to roll them in the glittery cinnamon-sugar.