Sausage

Use store-bought or homemade cornbread; we love Jiffy mix (you'll need two boxes).

This recipe is part of the Epicurious Online Cooking School, in partnership with the Culinary Institute of America. To watch it being made, and to learn how to make other Mediterranean classics, check out the video classes.

You can reheat this ooey-gooey dip in a skillet, or keep it warm in a fondue pot.

Here is a recipe I adapted from the cooking of Kurt Gardner, a New York theater man of great culinary passions who has been contributing the dish to our home for years, usually in proportions large enough to feed boroughs. Rare is the month where there is not a frozen bag of this stuff in our freezer, ready to be deployed.

Polish sausage gives the onions and chiles a rich, smoky flavor.

Pork and beans never had it so good. This Spanish riff on French cassoulet pairs large, meaty beans with fresh sausages under a breadcrumb crust. Save time by quick-soaking the beans.

Kale is what makes this pasta a standout. This leafy green is similar to chard and has an assertive flavor that really stands up to the spicy sausages. This was the only way I would eat kale when I was young.

Anytime you add sausage to a pasta dish, you exponentially increase the number of people who are going to love it; by adding vegetables, you turn it into a complete meal, a win-win situation all around.

Stroll through any Italian-American street fair and you’ll smell this classic combo. But while sausage and peppers are great in a sandwich, I think they’re even better tossed with rigatoni. Using turkey sausages instead of the more traditional pork also makes it a little lighter.

Chorizo was one of the first dishes that I learned to cook at home, prompted by a longing for it after visiting Mexico as a youth, where it was usually served for breakfast with eggs. No more dried, tough, salty bacon for me. I was a chorizo convert, and I was determined to have it for breakfast. While there were good local Mexican markets at the time, I found a simple recipe for chorizo in a Mexican cookbook of my mother’s (which I still have almost fifty years later). That homemade chorizo became our Sunday morning ritual. I measured out all the spices—the chile powders, the canela, the cumin, and other seasonings—and added them to the pan along with fresh ground pork. I stirred the mixture slowly, keeping it moist, until it was ready. Breakfast had become exciting again! For this filling, I prefer chorizo that has not been ground too fine and with plenty of fat. You can add additional spices and seasonings like red chile powder or roasted fresh green jalapeños to it while cooking to enhance or alter flavors.

The chorizo that I’ve called for in this recipe is the soft, spiced Latin American chorizo made from fresh pork and easier to crumble once out of the casing, not the hard, cured salami-like Spanish kind (although obviously the Spanish tradition was the basis for the Mexican). Chorizo is very easy to make at home if you can’t find a good one locally. Use ground pork—preferably ground pork butt, which has the correct proportion of fat to lean. Ask at the butcher shop which cut they use; don’t get pork loin, as it is too dry to produce a juicy chorizo. Add good spices and keep the meat moist during cooking by adding water and a little vinegar, and cooking over low to medium heat. Mexican chorizo is available in bulk or links at supermarkets and Hispanic markets and butcher shops.

Chorizo is usually made from pork, but you can find wonderful beef or chicken chorizo as well as an excellent vegetarian chorizo made from tofu. I’ve had a delicious green chorizo in Puebla that was a regional specialty composed of fresh green herbs and chiles blended with pork. The green marinade for the chicken plays wonderfully against the red chile of the chorizo. These hearty tacos are also great served with queso fresco or grated Cheddar or gouda cheese. Quail eggs fried sunny-side up makes a tasty garnish, if you like.

A specialty of the southwest of France, cassoulet—named for cassole, the oval earthenware dish in which it was made—is a rich, slow-cooked bean stew made with white beans, meats (most often pork and sausages), and duck or goose confit. The dish is time consuming—it can take an entire day from start to finish—but is manageable when you break it into three tasks, which can be spaced out over a few days. The first step is to prepare Duck Confit (see page 232). Next the beans (which have to be soaked overnight) are cooked on the stove. Then the confit and beans are layered in a pot, along with pork and sausage, and baked for about three hours.

This is my number-one favorite Pizzeria Mozza pizza, and it’s a direct rip-off of the Norcia pizza they serve at Pellicano. Sausage and panna, or cream, is a classic combination in Umbria. The summer I discovered this pizza I ordered it every time I went to Pellicano, in an effort to figure out what was in the white sauce that was smeared on the crust. When I asked, they told me “panna.” I knew panna was cream, but I couldn’t understand how they could put cream on pizza. Finally, I went back to the kitchen to see for myself, and what I saw was that the cream had been whipped, making it spreadable. Whipping cream for a pizza was such a foreign idea to me that when I started playing with pizzas for the restaurant, I tried to avoid it. I made this pizza with crème fraîche and later with mascarpone—anything not to put whipped cream on a pizza—but the whipped cream was definitely the best.

Pellicano offers a meat lover’s pizza, so I felt I had to offer one, too. Our version should be called a “pork lover’s pizza” because all four of the meats we put on it—fennel sausage, salami, guanciale, and bacon—are pork.

Before we opened the Osteria, Matt made all of the dishes he wanted to put on the pasta menu for us to taste together. When he made this dish—his version of a classic from Puglia—I was absolutely convinced that the pasta program we were committing to was a good idea, and that Matt was absolutely the one to execute it. Evidently I’m not alone because this has been our most popular pasta since the day we opened. The chard you will prepare for this dish makes more than you will need for four servings, as does the Fennel Sausage recipe. It would be a good recipe to double and serve to a crowd—just remember to prepare the sauce and toss it with the pasta in two separate sauté pans.

Look for merguez at specialty stores, or use another spicy sausage in its place.