New Years

It was in Paris in the 1960s that I first tasted buckwheat blini. My friend Nanou took me to a tiny, chic Russian restaurant near the Champs- Élysées. Russians, many of them Jews, came to France at the end of the nineteenth century, not long before the Russian Revolution, and congregated in restaurants like this one. We ordered the elegantly presented blini, and ate them daintily with smoked salmon and crème fraîche. Twenty years after Nanou died, her son Édouard got married. The wedding party took place at Maxim’s, where we drank lots of champagne and danced until the wee hours of the morning. I was touched to taste blini with smoked salmon and crème fraîche, the same appetizer that Édouard’s mother and I had enjoyed so many years ago. For me, it was as though she were present at the wedding. This recipe was adapted from Lynn Visson’s The Russian Heritage Cookbook.

The elegant Gilbert Simon invited me for tea in her beautiful apartment in Nîmes, a city in the south of France dating back to the Roman Empire. Born in Lyon, Madame Simon, who is in her late eighties, married a Jewish “Nîmois” whom she met at a dance. But then the Nazis came in 1942 and started taking Jewish families away. “We left before they could find us,” she told me. “They were searching for my husband because he was a doctor here, working in the Resistance.” When they left Nîmes, the Simons hid in the mountains. “We found a house to live in with our two little girls. The peasants sold us vegetables; sometimes they killed a lamb; they brought us cheese and butter. When we returned to Nîmes, it was very difficult. There were not very many Jews left.” Today the majority of Jews are Sephardic, having immigrated to Nîmes in the 1960s from North Africa. Thinking back to happier and more prosperous times, this is the pâté she made through the years for her own family on Friday nights and the holidays, as well as for Jewish students who stayed with her while studying in Nîmes or nearby Aix-en-Provence.

One of my cousins was married to a Kashmiri gentleman, and for the period when he was working at the United Nations in New York he had brought along a manservant. My cousin let me have him once a week to cook and clean. His repertoire was limited—he could only cook dishes he had learned from my cousin, such as this simple Kashmiri staple, which we loved. Soon he was making it week after week, and it remains one of our favorites. In Kashmir, collard-type greens and rice are eaten as commonly as beans and rice in Central America, the season for them lasting from spring (when the greens are tender) until the snows start to fall in early winter (when the greens get coarser). Note: Young greens will cook faster. So if you are using them, start with half the stock and add more if needed. Serve with rice and either a dal or a meat curry.

Before cooking, the meat-spice mixture requires a rest in the refrigerator to bring all the flavors together and to give the kebabs their requisite melt-in-the-mouth tenderness. If you cannot get a baking pan of just this size, something a bit smaller or a bit larger will do. (You could also use a 6-inch-square cake tin and cut the kebabs into rectangles—in which case, bake for only 30 minutes.) Serve these pâté-like kebabs with drinks, offering flatbread pieces or crackers to eat them with, or serve them as part of a meal with vegetables or salads. They need an accompanying chutney, such as the Peshawari Red Pepper Chutney, page 243, or the Bengali-Style Tomato Chutney, page 244.

Black-eyed peas and nourishing greens, two foods well-loved in Southern and “soul” cookery, have flavors that team companionably. Serve with baked sweet potatoes, fresh corn bread, and sliced tomatoes.

In this dish a hunk of ham is left whole as it cooks with the peas. Not cutting it up is very country.

This vinaigrette is more like a chunky sauce, and is also great as a topping for bread toasts. Don’t refrigerate the vinaigrette—the fat from the bacon turns from liquid to solid.

You can’t argue with tradition, but you can update it. The cocktail sauce is also great with cold poached shrimp.

People love these, and the salmon caviar gives this classic an updated twist.

Classic, old-school New Orleans flavor, slightly updated. Because of the expense of the oysters, these are better for smaller crowds, 10 to 12 people max.

Everyone will be blown away by how simple these are. They will be the runaway hit of the night. The moisture and sweetness of the grape inside the cheese is a flavor burst.

You don’t need complicated dishes to enjoy the wonderful flavor and aroma of black truffle—bread and butter will do, as this easy recipe proves. Fresh black truffle, if available, always makes great truffle butter. And fresh Norcino truffle, the Umbrian variety plentiful in season around the city of Norcia, considered the finest black truffle in Italy, makes the very best butter. Fresh is always better, but you can use a good-quality jarred Umbrian black truffle. Black truffle from other countries like France is good as well. It’s sold by many specialty-food stores and Internet vendors, at a range of prices.

We found this recipe in Jerry Thomas's 1862 How to Mix Drinks or the Bon Vivant's Companion, in a recipe for a single serving. It called for Holland gin—or genever, as we know it today—and was probably a very popular drink. The back story is that when planning our first End of Prohibition party we were searching for punch recipes that could be served in teacups. So we started going through books and shot a few ideas back and forth until we found papa Jerry's recipe. We replaced the genever with Plymouth gin, and with a few more tweaks we got it perfect. The decorative ice block adds a great visual effect.

PAT You won't find a collard green—or a green of any kind, for that matter—that Gina hasn't mastered and found a dozen ways to cook. She's queen of the twists on greens. The idea for this particular twist came from stuffed cabbage with a vinegary red sauce—but we think this is even better than that recipe. Don't you?

Good-quality smoked bacon and fresh collard greens are the keys to this indulgent riff on creamed spinach.

Are you flush with folate? Too-low levels are linked with osteoporosis, depression and more. Black-eyed peas are a top source of the vitamin.

You are, no doubt, familiar with the so-called trinity of Louisiana cookery: onions, celery, and bell pepper. Susan Spicer of New Orleans, a self-described eggplant freak who cooks in an internationally inflected Creole style, has honed a new sort of trinity: eggplant, oysters, and tasso.
Here, tasso, an intensely flavored smoked pork of Cajun origin, serves as a seasoning, in the same way that a smoked pig trotter flavors a pot of greens. Although Spicer recommends that you serve scoops of this gratin as an appetizer, consider yourself warned: We have done the same. And no matter what we served to follow, it paled in comparison. Your guests might be happier with a large helping of this Creolized casserole and a salad.

This is a Web-exclusive recipe for Epicurious from Chef Robert Harrison of Mills Tavern in Providence, Rhode Island. It's a great dish to make any day of the year, and perfect for a Super Bowl gathering or any party. If you don't have time to make quince jam, or can't find quince, you can substitute any fruit chutney.

I thrive on discovering new flavor combinations, and Sea is a great example of a totally thrown together idea that worked out beautifully. That day I was really in the mood for some crab salad, but I wanted to do something untraditional. One of my purveyors had sent me some Tuscan cantaloupe to try, so I first made a melon emulsion. Then I tossed the crabmeat with my Colvin Vinaigrette (which is basically good on anything). I thought that avocado would be great with the melon, so I started with a little melon on the plate, then I layered sliced ripe avocado and the crab mixture with a huge quenelle of caviar I had on hand to top it all off. Honestly, it was like heaven. I had so much crab that I made two mini ones for my two friends downstairs, and they were like, "What the hell is this flavor combination? This is amazing!" Give it a try—it's elegant and just incredibly good.