Molasses

Sprinkle a ring of chopped toasted walnuts around the edge of the pie before serving.

"I love cooking with the new recipes every month when Bon Appétit arrives," writes Gabriella Hughes of Windham, Maine. "One dish I'd really like to make is the gingerbread with lemon icing from Standard Baking Co. in Portland, Maine. Could you request it?" Serve these tender gingerbread muffins with whipped cream for teatime or dessert.

This is the most often requested recipe in my repertoire, and I've passed it on to many, many people. It appears so often on Bay Area menus (sometimes called Dave's ginger cake, which, I admit, amuses and flatters me) that I sometimes think I'm responsible for too much of a good thing. Then I order it, taste it, and decide not to worry: This simple cake is wonderful.

Legend has it that these cornmeal and molasses rolls are named for a New England fisherman's curse on his wife: "Anna, damn her!" Regardless of what she may have done to upset her spouse, she was a great baker.

Working on this book has taken us new places, and also back to explore taste memories from the past and from travel. Sometimes we've stumbled on childhood tastes, and sometimes we've gone looking for them. This dark gingerbread is from scribbled notes I found in an old cookbook of my mother's. I don't know where she got the recipe, but I do know that she made it regularly, especially in winter, when its rich, warm scent would draw us into the kitchen at dinnertime. Serve it as a snack or for dessert.

The name Indian pudding comes from the addition of cornmeal here — early colonists called most everything made with corn "Indian." Originally the pudding was cooked in a pot over the open hearth and was very dense. This is a lighter version baked in a modern oven, but we kept the traditional step of pouring milk or cream over the top of the pudding before cooking it.

These cookies are also great made with regular semisweet chocolate chips.

Instead of serving coffee, alter the usual dessert routine by offering a glass of Cognac or dry Sherry with these apples.

This dark, moist cake gets its deep flavor from blackstrap molasses, which may not sound appealing on its own but is wonderful in this cake.

Here we take two of the best treats from days gone by and combine them in one dessert. The cookies are also superb on their own.