Pearl Onion

You can use 8-inch or longer metal or wooden skewers for this dish. If you use wooden skewers, soak them in water to cover for an hour or so before threading the ingredients onto them. That should help prevent the skewers from burning as they cook. If you are using fresh bay leaves or rosemary, you can use the thin branches from either herb as skewers, flavoring the ingredients even more. Because these branches will be shorter than store-bought skewers, you will probably need to make more and smaller skewers. Also, handle them carefully as they cook—herb branches aren’t quite as sturdy as metal or wooden skewers.

There is not much to peel in celery, just the strings that run along the ribs that can be annoying to eat. To remove them, I take a peeler and lightly run it along the back of the celery rib. Another way to remove them is with a paring knife. When you are trimming the base or the top of the stalk, don’t just chop away, but gently hold the stalk in your hands and cut from the inside of the stalk to the outside without cutting all the way through. Just before finishing the cut, pull the knife toward you and the strings should peel off down the length of the stalk.

As a sign of spring, this salmon dish, made with the first peas of the season, has been handed down from generation to generation since the first Jews left Spain during the Inquisition. I tasted it in Biarritz, at the lovely villa of Nicole Rousso, who comes from a Portuguese merchant family from Bayonne.

In Morocco, they make this elegant couscous with small Mediterranean pigeons, but squabs and small poussins will also do.

A very old Arab dish. It is good to serve yogurt with it.

This homely dish is a favorite in Syria and Lebanon. Good-quality canned chickpeas will do. If you are using them, drain a 14-ounce can and put them in with the rice.

Stifatho is a Greek dish also made with beef. Serve it with rice or potatoes.

Recipes for meat cooked in yogurt abound in medieval Arabic cookery manuals, where the dish was called madira. As early as the tenth century, the Arab writer Badia’z Zaman wrote a tale entitled “Al Madirya” about the dish. Such dishes are still popular in the Arab world. The name of this Lebanese version, which means “his mother’s milk,” implies that the meat of a young animal is cooked in its own mother’s milk. It can be made with chunks of meat or lamb shanks. Serve with plain rice (page 337) or rice with vermicelli (page 340).

You can find tamarind paste in Oriental stores. It gives the onions a delicious, intense sweet-and-sour taste.

A favorite joint for a family roast in Morocco is a shoulder of lamb, and honeyed onions are a specially delicious accompaniment. The lamb is cooked very slowly for a long time, until it is so tender that the meat can be pulled away from the bone with the fingers. In the past, the lamb was cooked on the spit in the family courtyard or taken to the public oven. A shoulder roast of young spring lamb is always fatty, but most of the fat melts away during the long cooking, keeping the meat moist and succulent. If an older lamb is too fatty, carefully remove some of the fat with a sharp knife before cooking. Use the smaller amount of honey to begin with, and add more, to taste.

I have used the ingredients of a chicken tagine as a relish to accompany duck (which is not a Moroccan bird) because the combination of fatty duck with sharp apricots is great.

In culinary school, beef bourguignon is one of the first dishes you’re taught that truly represents French cuisine. It’s basically beef stew with a deep red-wine flavor. The kicker is that it’s one of the easiest recipes in this book. Serve this with creamy mashed potatoes and I swear you will feel like Paul Bocuse, and you don’t have to go to cooking school.

Pot pie has come long way. I recently went to a charity event in New York City, at which David Bowie was the guest of honor. The main course? Chicken pot pie. Go figure! Frozen puff pastry sheets work really well here without compromising the dish, but allow an hour or more to thaw the frozen sheets. Serving individual pot pies makes for a great presentation. You can pick the crocks up at any kitchen store or use 2-cup ramekins if you already have them.

One-pot dishes are all about planning well and laying out your prep in a smart sequential order. The beauty of this dish is the vinegar, which is malty, nutty, and nuanced. I love a Philippine cane vinegar called Datu Puti. Great stuff, super-inexpensive, and readily available at most Asian grocery stores.

If you’re only going to make one pot pie from scratch in your life, this is the recipe to use.

This hearty dish was inspired by frango na púcara, a Portuguese chicken dish that's cooked in a terra-cotta jug. We've streamlined the method, but kept all of the smoky, tangy, sweet flavors. The chicken is even better the next day, when the flavors have had a chance to meld. Serve with crusty bread.

Make this rich stew on a leisurely weekend. You’ll probably get a good three meals out of it, if you follow some of the suggestions below. When buying stew meat at a supermarket, you don’t always know what you are getting, so ask the butcher. If it’s a lean meat, it will need less time cooking (in fact, it will be ruined if you cook it too long), but the fattier cuts can benefit from at least another half hour.

Here is a sumptuous side dish to accompany roast poultry, for the holidays or otherwise: sautéed mushrooms tossed with chestnuts, tender pearl onions, and thyme. Peeling chestnuts is a painstaking task. To save time, purchase vacuum-packed whole peeled chestnuts.

Bison (a.k.a. buffalo) is available at some natural foods stores, specialty foods stores, and farmers' markets.