Nectarine

This recipe is a way to show off the best summer fruit you can find. If possible, use an assortment of fruits, such as plums, peaches, figs, and berries, but make sure that all the fruit is up to snuff. Rather than striving for variety and ending up with less-than-ideal examples of each fruit, you’re better off with a simpler salad composed of only the most perfect nectarines or gorgeous peaches all alone. The dressing is made by pounding some of the fruit into a juicy vinaigrette. Figs are my favorite for this purpose. They mellow the vinegar and give the dressing body and chunkiness. If you’ve never had a Marcona almond, you may not forgive me for introducing you to them. Rich and dense, this Spanish almond variety is outrageously addictive. If you can’t find Marcona almonds, use toasted regular almonds or pecans.

While living in France, I took some time off from the savory kitchen to explore the sweet side of Paris at Pâtisserie Christian Pottier. Although I was fascinated by the fancy layered creations there, I preferred simpler, homier pastries, like buttery madeleines, crisp millefeuilles, and of course the very French financiers. Invented in a pastry shop near the Paris Stock Exchange, these one-bite cakes provided a quick sweet fix for bankers on the run. They were originally made in small rectangular molds to resemble gold bricks, but financiers can now be found in myriad shapes and sizes all over France. The easy-to-make batter has ground nuts, egg whites, sugar, and vanilla brown butter. At Lucques, we sometimes bake our financiers into round cakes and serve the slices with sugared summer fruit and whipped cream. Try a slice crisped in the toaster the next morning for breakfast.

One summer morning, I decided to make good use of the ripe stone fruit I had picked up at the farmer’s market. I didn’t have any brioche at home, but I did have a loaf of sourdough. It turned out that the tanginess of the bread was delicious with the sweet fruit. And amaretto adds just the right hint of almond.

This artfully composed tart looks like an elegant tapestry, with carefully placed fruit “roses” in a prebaked tart shell. While it is easy to make, it’s essential to use a very sharp knife in order to cut the nectarine slices precisely. You can make the tart shell one day ahead; keep at room temperature, loosely covered.

Thanks to its length and the abundance of glistening fruit, this tart makes a striking finale. The tender cornmeal crust is more crumbly than other types, so do not overmix the dough, and be sure to chill well before rolling. It is also a forgiving dough—you can pinch together any holes or tears when fitting it into the tin.

This glorious galette, or rustic pie, will accommodate just about any fruit, but its open top makes a particularly pretty frame for the jeweled hues of summer’s stone fruits and berries; my favorites are apricot/blueberry for the beginning of summer, and peach/blackberry for the Fourth of July. Fig/raspberry, though not stone fruit, is great in the late summer and early fall. You could trim the dough into a neat round, but I prefer the rustic look of jaggedy edges—and leaving it untrimmed ensures that not a bit of the buttery dough goes to waste. Serve with plenty of fresh whipped cream or vanilla ice cream.

This is my favorite cake of all time. The buttermilk adds a nice acidity and helps create a moist, light crumb that is a perfect complement to the fruit. This works just as well with pears, apples, and stone fruits; for best results, use fruit that is ripe but not too soft.

WHY IT’S LIGHT One crust makes this tart less fattening than a more traditional (read: double-crust) summer pie. It has a higher proportion of peak-season fruit, another bonus for the calorie conscious. Nectarines are featured, but plums, peaches, apricots, or any mixture of stone fruits would work beautifully here.

Cobblers are mostly fruit, with the sweet cobbler biscuits floating on top to soak up all the juices. They are a good thing to make when you have an abundance of fruit and a number of people to cook for. Make them all year round with whatever ripe fruits are in season, either singly or in combination. They are superb served warm for dessert but even better for breakfast the next morning.

Nectarines and apricots are also delicious baked this way.

This dessert is more interesting when prepared with a variety of stone fruits, but if you can’t find one particular type, substitute more of another. You could also use apricots in place of any of the other three fruits.

Start this recipe the night before serving it so that the lavender can soak in the cream and impart a strong flavor. Use fresh or dried lavender, but stay away from ornamental lavender, which is usually treated with pesticides. If you prefer, substitute peaches or nectarines for the apricots.

Nectarines make a particularly enticing summertime granita that definitely merits precious freezer space as the temperature climbs. I patiently wait and wait for the first of the sweetest-smelling nectarines to appear, and then bang—I hit the markets, buying as many as I can. Try serving this granita surrounded by a mixture of raspberries, blueberries, and sliced strawberries sweetened with a touch of honey.

There’s a curious custom in Gascony, a region in the southwest of France known for its full-bodied red wines (its famous neighbor is Bordeaux). When they’ve just about finished their soup, the locals tip a little bit of the red wine from their glass into their soup bowl, mingling the wine with the last few spoonfuls of the broth. I later discovered that this custom is equally good with a goblet of sorbet when I was scrambling to figure out a way to make this rosy nectarine sorbet a bit more special for an impromptu dinner party. I simply scooped sorbet into my guests’ wine glasses at the table and let them pour in as little (or as much) red wine as they wished. It was a big success. If you have time to think ahead, prepare a big bowl of sweet, juicy berries and sliced nectarines, and let your guests add some fruit to their sorbet too.

This is the first ice cream that springs to mind when people recall hand-cranked, old-fashioned fruit ice creams from their past. More than any other homemade ice cream, this is perhaps the most beloved of all flavors and is indeed best when spooned right out of the machine, just moments after it’s been churned. An easy way to peel peaches is to cut an X at the bottom and then lower them in a pot of boiling water for about 20 seconds. Using a slotted spoon, transfer the peaches to a colander and shock them with cold water, then let them cool. Afterward, you’ll find their fuzzy peels just slip right off.

Up until a few years ago, white peaches and nectarines were an oddity in America and finding them was nearly impossible. Happily, they’ve now become fairly common, and you can spot them in grocery stores and farmers’ markets across the land. Their flavor is not as intense as their yellow counterparts, but their delicacy is part of their appeal. Also appealing is how when white nectarines are cooked with their skins and then puréed, the finished mixture is an ivory hue with a faint touch of rosy pink. I came up with this dessert when I was the pastry chef at Monsoon, an Asian restaurant run by Bruce Cost, one of the best cooks I’ve ever met in my life. Unlike American dinners, most Asian meals don’t end with a full-on dessert. So my challenge was to create desserts that customers would find appealing enough to order after sharing spicy, authentic, and sometimes challenging fare—like the turtle soup served with raw turtle eggs floating on the surface, or the sea slugs that tasted (slightly) better than they looked. I had to make sure the desserts would bring people back from whatever culinary precipice we took them to. This fruit sorbet, resting in a five-spice cookie cup and served with berries steeped in sweet plum wine, was the perfect landing pad.

If you’re starting to feel a little, um, bulky as summer approaches, keep this fruity cobbler in mind because it’s a lean, but delicious, dessert. The biscuits are moistened by a healthy pour of buttermilk, and the modest amount of butter provides flavor without weighing the biscuits (or you) down. The other great thing is that the biscuits are made in a bowl and simply spooned over the fruit, rather than rolled out and cut, making this a no-sweat dessert (another plus in summer).

As everyone knows, the best part of an upside-down cake is the caramelized bits of topping and batter that get stuck in the bottom of the pan after the cake is unmolded. Instead of eating these bits, the right thing to do is to scrape them out and smear them back onto the warm cake. If you can do that, you’re a better person than I.