Shallot

If there is any dish that could be served with every meal, every day, morning, noon, and night, it’s butter leaf lettuce salad. Eggs Benedict with butter leaf lettuce salad; cheeseburgers with butter leaf lettuce salad; pasta alla carbonara with butter leaf lettuce salad. Or, for a snack, just butter leaf lettuce salad. Its acidic elegance balances out the heartiness of any meal. The trick is the dressing. Making your own vinaigrette is among the biggest single improvements you can do in the kitchen—it becomes a distillation of your aesthetic defined by acid, oil, sweetness, and salt. Jennifer’s mastery of the vinaigrette has done more to promote the advancement of cuisine in our house than anything else: the shallots discover a plump, inner sweetness in the vinegar; the olive oil expresses its spicy-green spirit in response to the pepper; and the mustard emulsifies so that the dressing coats the lettuce in silkiness. Then the Maldon, strewn across the surface of the dressed salad—a glittering fencework of flakes perched along the crests and vales of lettuce—snaps like static electricity to stimulate the palate—a flash of pungency that illuminates everything so quickly and clearly that it is gone before you have time to fully comprehend what happened. This is Maldon’s raison d’etre: to reveal and amplify, then vanish, leaving you with only the desire for another bite.

Whether in food or in adventure, our great life-affirming moments often come when nature and sentience find themselves suddenly on intimate terms. Gulping a fresh oyster from the half-shell can be as exhilarating as sailing headlong into white-capped seas with only the song of steel-cold air in the rigging to keep you company. This is why I never tire of the fall season’s promise for new discoveries in oysters. I recently discovered the Totten Inlet Virginicas from the southern Puget Sound: minerally, fresh, and clean with a consistently firm meaty texture. Introducing Shinkai deep sea salt to the Totten was an opportunity for a culinary adventure I could not pass up. The mineral flavors of the oysters amplify the abundant steely flavors already apparent in the salt, and bring to light glints of sweetness and kelp that you might never find on your own. A drop of mignonette and a pinch of Shinkai deep sea salt; the sea god Neptune never had better.

A simple green salad, this one is made special by the unusually good vinaigrette. The dressing can be made up to three days ahead and stored, tightly covered, in the refrigerator.

Whereas most meats give us a choice of cooking on the bone or not, wild rabbit is one that really needs its bones if it is not to be dry. It is not the meatiest of choices, so you need to be generous with quantities here. Rabbit bones are small, and it’s important to watch out for the tinier ones. The turnips in this provide all the carbs you need to soak up the sauce. It just needs some purple sprouting broccoli on the side.

Banana shallots (sometimes known as torpedo), the most generously proportioned and mild tasting of the shallot family, roast superbly, their translucent flesh almost melting inside their skins. I have eaten them this way with creamy goat cheese mashed with herbs (thyme, tarragon, chives) and with a lump of good, mouth-puckering Cheddar too. Yet they will also stand as a vegetable. I think it worth including them here for that alone.

I have eaten these onions, at once caramel sweet and pickle sour, with bread and cheese, and that is really what I meant them for. But they also make a sticky accompaniment for a roast—maybe a fillet of lamb or pork—and are good on the side with cold roast beef, kept pink and sweet. I serve them warm rather than hot or chilled.

This lightly pickled mackerel is “cooked” through by the acid in the vinegar. Use high-quality fish, and keep it refrigerated until you marinate it. Use a glass or ceramic baking dish as metal can interfere with the pickling process. Both Spanish and king mackerel are fished using low-impact methods, and populations in the Atlantic and the U.S. Gulf of Mexico are thriving. They reproduce in high numbers and mature quickly, so mackerel are considered safe from overfishing. Start this recipe the night before serving so the fish has time to marinate.

This dish first caught my eye early in my career when I worked as a line cook at Chicago’s legendary Ambria Restaurant. We served it as an appetizer, making everything from scratch, including the pasta—and it was one of our most popular dishes. This is a perfect dish for dinner parties. I promise it will impress your guests. Follow the fresh Egg Pasta recipe on page 109, making sure you include the optional squid ink.

I reach for my immersion blender when I prepare pureed soups. If you don’t have one, a regular blender is fine, but use it with care: let hot soup cool for about ten minutes before blending, or the steam could force the lid off. Don’t fill the blender carafe more than halfway or the whirling soup could force off the lid and spew out. Finally, hold the lid on tightly with a heavy-duty kitchen towel. You’ll find many types of winter squash in your produce department. For this sweet-savory soup, reach past the standard acorn and butternut varieties for something new like carnival, delicata, or kabocha for a different feel and flavor.

There is no doubt that if you used only exotic mushrooms this tart would be delicious. However, white mushrooms, easier to find and less expensive, are fairly bland and will take on the flavors of other types. I suggest using a variety, including white button, for a balance of flavor and cost.

This dish takes a bit more prep time than your average throw-everything-in-a-pot slow cooker recipe, but it’s well worth it. This luscious ragù can be served as a side for grilled steak or lamb, as a topping for pasta or rice, or as an entrée with a green salad and crunchy bread.

Normally, you would make these on skewers, but for a party it’s much easier to broil all the meat and then serve them on toothpicks.

The flavors in this wonderful chutney make it a good choice for brightening just about any dish.

When you have bought more mushrooms than you are going to use up in the week ahead, a simple way to keep them is to dice and sauté them, what the French call duxelles. You can then pack the sautéed dice in a small freezer bag and dip into it whenever you want a tablespoon or so to add to a sauce, a soup, an omelet, whatever.

I’ve loved shirred eggs ever since I first sampled them in a Paris brasserie years ago. But I didn’t know exactly how to make them until I came across the carefully instructive recipe in Julia Child’s masterful tome, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, where they were called oeufs sur le plat or oeufs miroir (in deference to their shimmering surface). Here’s my favorite version, which I invariably make when I have plucked the packet of giblets from the cavity of a chicken. It should always include a plump liver—the cook’s treat.

Steamed mussels make a lovely dish to eat alone slowly, plucking the plump flesh from the shells as messily as you like and sopping up the heavenly liquor with chunks of French bread.

Here is a quick way to make a delicious, intensely flavored mushroom soup that isn’t too rich, because it is thickened with cooked rice rather than cream.

I can’t resist a piece of calf’s liver when I see it—all too infrequently—in the meat counter. It’s even better if you get it from a considerate butcher who will cut an even-sized 1/4-inch slice and spare you the finicky job of removing the outside membrane. Liver in a winey sauce is particularly good on a cold winter night; somehow I always feel my red corpuscles are strengthened by its rich meatiness. I like it with some potatoes alongside. If you have a couple of cooked potatoes, you can brown them in a little butter while the liver cooks, or if you don’t have them on hand, try grating a medium raw potato through the coarse holes of a grinder and make a quick potato pancake.