Sausage

Turkey sausage—especially the hot and spicy kind—is excellent in this dish. Wild mushrooms add a hearty flavor that complements the sausage, but common white mushrooms do just fine here as well. To use dried mushrooms, place in a bowl, cover with boiling water, and steep while you prepare the rest of the ingredients (ten to twenty minutes). When softened, drain well and slice. If using frozen spinach, try to break the block into a few pieces to spread around in the pot. If it is simply too hard to break, don’t worry. It will still cook fine, although you may find you need to cook the meal another five to ten minutes for the polenta to soften completely. As always with these recipes, use your nose as your guide.

Sausage and beans make a hearty winter meal If you don’t have fresh tomatoes on hand, use a drained 14-ounce can of diced tomatoes instead. If you don’t have flageolets, other beans to try include Great Northern and cannellini beans. To make this a lower-fat dinner, use turkey or chicken sausage instead of pork. Health food stores typically have many types of sausages available at the meat counter. Experiment with flavors such as applewood-smoked sausage, habañero chile, or spicy Italian.

This full and satisfying meal is Jamie’s dream salad—heavy on the sausage and spuds. What’s not to love?

One of Bobby’s favorite soups on the menu at The Lady & Sons is Confederate bean soup, a rich mix of baked beans, sausage, and cream. We skip the cream here to make a lighter version with just as much flavor as the original. It’s a hearty meal in a bowl and a dream come true for anyone who loves franks and beans.

We got this recipe from our good buddy (and Bobby’s neighbor) Michael Peay. He remembers his mom always used to make more than he and his brothers ever could eat because their house was so popular with their friends, especially around dinnertime. This stew, full of good porky sausage and plenty of tender cabbage, was his favorite childhood meal.

Any recipe that includes the words creamy, spicy, and sausage is going to get our attention. For this number we just add peas for a little sweetness and color, then serve it over rigatoni. Not only is this dish satisfying and elegant, but you can have it on the table in the time it takes to cook the pasta.

We first wrapped our faces around some authentic cheesesteaks and hoagies when we were shooting an episode of our Food Network show, Road Tasted, at Campo’s Deli in Philadelphia. Once we got a taste for Yankee-style sub sandwiches, there was no going back. Grilled onions, peppers, and meat plus melted cheese all piled onto a nice big roll—you can’t improve on that! Now you don’t need to be in Philly to savor this supreme sandwich experience.

When I host cooking school weekends at my place, I often do a Lowcountry Boil on Friday nights for my usual “meet and greet” session, where the folks attending can get to know one another—and me—a little bit. This is a specialty of the Lowcountry areas like Charleston and Savannah, where the people live near the water and have access to plenty of fresh shrimp. But of course you don’t need to live near the water to enjoy it. The traditional way to serve this is to basically dump it—spread it, if you will—across a large picnic table that has been covered with newspaper. You may want to fancy up the serving situation, but it’s fine to keep it casual, too. You can just tell your guests that’s how they do it down South.

A pork chop is just a bone-in slice of the pork loin, which is located beneath a hog’s ribs and against its backbone. It’s a great piece of meat to sink your teeth into, which is why so many people like a pork chop—but it doesn’t have a lot of natural fat. This means that it needs some help in the flavor department. Here’s how I do it. It’ll be the best pork chop you ever had. No joke.

The world of sausages is large and consists of any kind of meat mixture (or fish, or even vegetable if you want to get loose about it) that is stuffed into a casing, and they’ve existed as a way to preserve food—let’s be honest, it started with meat—since antiquity. Sausages encompass everything from American hot dogs to French saucisson, to German bratwurst, to Italian salami, to Portuguese chorizo, to an entire system of traditional British sausages. In southern Georgia, the sausage of choice is smoked sausage. I’m talking about Polish kielbasa-style sausage that’s made with coarsely ground pork, seasoned heavily with sage, garlic, and black pepper, and then is smoked to perfection so that it comes in big, fat, brown-red rings. It’s salty and lusty and really good with a cold pilsner. It’s also very, very versatile. Here are my two favorite ways of enjoying smoked sausage.

It may seem crazy even to think of making a cassoulet for oneself, although this one may be large enough to share with a friend. But if you have all the different elements, it’s not much more than an assembly job. You just have to think ahead. So, when you have that Small Roast Pork Tenderloin (page 42), set aside three or four little chunks of the flavorful cooked meat (they can be frozen and labeled “for future cassoulet”). Then plan on having Braised Shoulder Lamb Chops (page 48), which is always more than I can eat in one sitting, and use that extra braised chop (it can also be frozen), along with a lot of the good juices, to be the mainstay of your cassoulet. One can usually get a good pork sausage these days; even if you have to mail-order it, it’s a staple item worth keeping in the freezer. So there you are: start your beans the night before, and put this heavenly bean dish together on a wintry day off, letting it fill your kitchen with its tantalizing aromas. You won’t regret it. When I suggested to Julia Child that she include a recipe for this great dish in Mastering the Art of French Cooking, there really weren’t any good fresh garlic sausages available to buy, so Julia agreed that she had better work out a formula for making them at home. Several days later, I went up to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the Childs lived, to work on the book with her, and I found that one wall of the kitchen was covered in notes on the work she had done to develop a formula for the authentic garlic sausage for cassoulet. Her research had taken her back to early French charcuterie books, and she’d made notes on each of her testings, ending up with her own carefully worked-out recipe. I gasped at her meticulous research, and then asked tentatively if maybe this might not be beyond the reach of the American home cook, but she reassured me. “No, not at all,” she said. “It’s really as easy as making hamburgers.”

One of my favorite suppers is a good sausage with warm potato salad. I love the way the sausage juices mingle with the tender new potatoes bathed in a mustardy vinaigrette—a very French taste that makes me nostalgic.