Pistachio

Please do not let the bad bologna sandwiches of your youth deter you from trying this sandwich. Good mortadella is silky, flavorful, and because it doesn’t require aging, usually far more affordable than most artisanal sandwich meats. Here, we balance the smooth texture and rich taste of mortadella with the bitterness of grilled radicchio. The Pistachio Vinaigrette (page 181) is a nod to the classic use of pistachios embedded in the meat.

A cheese-and-fruit Danish, the Austro-Hungarian apricot dumpling called Marillenknödel, a Turkish dessert of poached dried apricots with sweet-tangy cream and pistachios . . . some flavor combinations just work well, across cultures and continents. This especially pretty open-faced sandwich is great for breakfast, brunch, a light lunch, an afternoon snack, even a dessert; it’s sweet but not too sweet. The colors, tastes, and textures of puffy white ricotta, velvety golden apricots, silky syrupy ribbons of fennel, crunchy toasted green pistachios, and a grinding or two of black pepper on top create a surprise for the palate and a feast for the eye. We both love putting a big platter of these sandwiches in the middle of the table and watching them disappear. Use slightly under ripe apricots; you can stew them longer than riper fruit and so they will absorb more of the flavors of the spices. Other stone fruits such as plums work well, too. The stewed fruit can be prepared in advance and kept refrigerated in its own syrup for several days.

These elegant nuts are a great accent to summer fruits. If you can find the longer, thinner pistachios from Sicily, use them for this recipe—or any time you’re eating pistachios. They have the best flavor.

Try making this sweet, delicate cookie with any nut. It’s a terrific garnish for ice creams or chocolate desserts.

I’ve always liked the classic combination of chocolate and coffee and have been searching for a unique way to pair the two. In this dessert, the custard is dense and rich, so I wanted the coffee to be light. By using lecithin, I can turn coffee into a cloud.

The technique here is traditional and French. The fresh and dried cranberries and the star anise are modern and provide bright hits of flavor in every bite. You’ll need two 6-cavity Flexipan savarin molds (the 2 3/4-inch size) if you want to match the shape of the dessert in the photograph. But you could also freeze the nougat in a baking sheet and cut pieces to serve.

One summer, the peaches were so amazing that I didn’t want to do anything to them. Unfortunately, you can’t put a peach on a plate and send it out to a customer. So I chose ingredients—mellow cheeses, sweet and crunchy pistachios, and a mild balsamic vinegar glaze—that complemented the sweet raw peach.

Biscotti means “twice baked,” a cooking method that results in the firm, crunchy cookies that have recently become wildly popular here in America. These cookies were eaten by sailors back in Columbus’s day because they last for a long time without going bad. They’re great for dunking in coffee or tea, which is how my mom, nonna, and I would eat them when I was growing up. The citrus zests provide an extra little zing, and really evoke the tastes of Italy. If you want, you could use just orange or lemon; it doesn’t have to be both.

Fennel is best served from fall to spring, when it’s in season, and there are a million different ways to take advantage of its crunchy sweetness. Here, the raw bulbs are sliced and dressed with a nutty pistachio pesto and salty bites of prosciutto. The flavors just pair so well together.

A plain old grilled chicken breast can be a bit uninspired, so we like to jazz up our breasts (who said that?) in this version of grilled chicken salad that has plenty of moxie. The marinade of fresh lemon juice and zest, olive oil, and fresh herbs infuses the chicken with a bright, sunny flavor (so yummy that you’ll want to use the marinade again and again for grilled meats). Here we team the grilled chicken with potatoes, celery, green olives, pistachios, and a creamy mayonnaise dressing for an over-the-top texture-and-flavor combination. This recipe doubles or triples beautifully, so it’s great for special lunches (think birthday parties, anniversaries, or bridal showers). It’s also great with a glass of chilled white wine and a crackly baguette.

A simple way to make spumoni in the shape you remember is to use tall 10-ounce paper cups, like the ones you get when you order a soda. You can make the layering process simpler by spooning in a level layer of vanilla ice cream, then chocolate ice cream, then flavored whipped cream. If you’d prefer to serve one large spumoni instead of individual ones, prepare the spumoni in a 6-cup soufflé dish, layering it into the dishes as described below. Let the frozen large spumoni stand at room temperature 10 to 15 minutes before inverting it onto a serving plate. Cut it into wedges to serve.

Make a Thanksgiving dinner, Southwestern style, any night of the year with this stuffing shortcut.

Serve all of these variations with tomato and onion salad or mixed greens and some good bread.

When I interviewed Gilles Choukroun, one of the darlings of a new generation of French chefs who are injecting playfulness into French food, he had just opened the Mini Palais, a beautiful restaurant in Paris’s newly renovated Grand Palais exhibition hall, across from Les Invalides. In addition to his nascent restaurant empire, Gilles is also the father of Generation C, which stands for “Cuisines et Culture,” a group of chefs who teach cooking to the disadvantaged in Paris. Gilles, whose father is a Jew from Algeria, experiments with the spices and flavors of North Africa to accent his French food. One of his signature desserts is this refreshing citrus-fruit soup. It makes the perfect ending to a North African meal, especially with cookies on the side.

After a recent trip to France, I told chef Daniel Boulud that I wanted to learn more about charcuterie. He suggested that I spend a day with Sylvain Gasdon, the charcutier at his newly opened Bar Boulud in New York. It turned out that some of the trends I had been noticing in French restaurants were the foundation of the menu at Bar Boulud, featuring charcuterie and lighter terrines. I asked Sylvain, who came from Paris to help Daniel, if he would teach me how to make a terrine, one for those who eschew pork. This is it!

This pudding is cooked just like the preceding one but with a few additions.

This is an elegant and decorative way of serving rice at a party.

This wonderful, heartwarming winter drink is hot milk thickened with the starchy ground bulb of an orchid called Orchis mascula. This was sold by street vendors from the large copper urn in which it was made. The stone-colored powder called sahlab (salep in Turkish and Greek) is expensive and not easy to find. I have often bought it in Middle Eastern markets only to discover that it was a fake or adulterated mix. Cornstarch is an alternative which gives a creamy texture but not the same special flavor.