Fry

You may substitute beef round steak (have butcher run through cubing machine to tenderize) for venison if you like.

Also known as latkes, these crispy, golden treats are a childhood favorite and are best served with caramelized onions, sour cream, and fresh, tangy farmers’ market applesauce. Allow yourself about twenty minutes to soak the grated potatoes in the cold water to remove the starch. Otherwise, they become gluey as the starch cooks in the potatoes and they won’t get crispy.

A luxurious treat, sweet, crisp crab cakes can be made with lump or backfin crabmeat. Frying the crab cakes just before you plan to serve them will ensure that they don’t get soggy upon standing. Serve crab cakes with scrambled eggs, inside a crusty baguette, or with lemon wedges and Rémoulade Sauce (page 284).

These robust, aromatic sausages pair well with many egg dishes. For best results, most of these ingredients should be chilled before you start. The fat needs to stay separate during the mixing process or the sausages will be mealy. Properly handled ingredients, especially the fat and meat, are the key to good sausages. Both the meat and the fatback should be brought down to 32°F, so place them into the freezer for about an hour. Fatback, which is the fresh unsmoked layer of fat that runs along the pig’s back, is sold at butcher shops. Don’t confuse it with salt pork: They’re not the same thing. The easiest way to get ground juniper berries is to grind them in a spice grinder. If you don’t cook all the sausages in one meal, the patties freeze well for several weeks as long as they are well wrapped. The best thing is to wrap the patties individually in plastic wrap, wrap six to eight of the plastic-wrapped sausages in aluminum foil, then put the foil packages in a resealable plastic freezer bag and mark the bag with the date they were frozen.

Tart apple, smoky bacon, and rich Cheddar cheese all come together for a flavorful autumnal treat with this unique sandwich. Certain elements of this sandwich should be thick—the bacon and the bread—and others should be thin—the apple and the Cheddar. Use a crisp, tart apple such as Granny Smith, Mutsu, or Honeycrisp. Use the best bacon you can find as well. I like to make this sandwich in a cast-iron skillet because it makes for a uniformly deep golden crust, which I cherish above all else in a grilled sandwich.

This classic sandwich relies on good ripe tomatoes, thickly sliced bacon, and top-quality crusty bread. Although you might normally shun iceberg lettuce, this is one instance where its crunchiness is welcome. Feel free, of course, to substitute another lettuce such as romaine.

This sandwich is a French import made by dipping a basic ham and cheese sandwich into a beaten egg before sautéing it in butter. It’s like a savory French toast sandwich. It’s best made in a cast-iron skillet since cast iron distributes the heat very evenly. Ask the deli clerk to slice the ham very thin, and use good-quality French bread.

If there’s anything better than traditional French toast, it’s this crisp, golden variation, made by pressing the bread slices in crushed cornflakes before griddling. Be sure to generously coat both sides of the bread with the cornflakes and use plenty of butter on the griddle. Serve with maple syrup, sautéed bananas (see Banana Walnut Pancakes, page 122), fruit compote (see pages 276 to 278), or homemade jam, such as Strawberry Jam (page 280).

You can serve this brunch favorite as soon as it’s ready, or keep it warm for up to twenty minutes, loosely covered with a clean, damp kitchen towel in a 200°F oven. Avoid using very soft white bread as it tends to fall apart when dipped into the egg mixture. It’s best to use a firm bread such as a large baguette or sourdough loaf. In fact, French toast is a great way to use up slightly stale bread, and you can make this with just about anything from a baguette to brioche to a cinnamon raisin loaf.

As the name implies, this is a workingman’s or -woman’s omelet, bulging with crispy chunks of slab bacon, potatoes, and onions. It’s also great with leeks. There’s no need to fold this before serving. It’s served as is, flat and round, and right out of the skillet. Serve with Zucchini Bread with Zucchini Flowers (page 48).

There is no fish I can think of that doesn’t work with spinach. But where creamed spinach seems perfectly fine with a steak of halibut or haddock, the richer, oily fish such as salmon are more appropriately matched to the leaves in a simpler state. A mouthful of lemon salad, at once breathtakingly sharp, is more than at home on the same fork as a piece of salmon or a bunch of meltingly soft spinach. Bring all three together and you have a dish of extraordinary vitality.

The fry-up has always appealed to me, in particular the bits that stay put at the bottom of the pan, the crusty scrapings that brown rather too much. I call them “the pan-stickings.” One of potato and duck fat is a deep-winter supper of immense pleasure; another of herb-speckled sausage meat and zucchini. This is robust cooking, crisp edged and flecked black and gold. It is not for those days when you want something genteel or elegant. This is the sort of supper to pile on a plate and eat with a cold beer. The latest of my fry-ups is extraordinary in that two generally sweet ingredients come together to produce a deeply savory result. The key here is not to move the ingredients around the pan too much, letting them take on a sticky crust while allowing them to soften to a point where you can squash them with little or no pressure. The caraway seeds, which people tend to either love or hate, are entirely optional.

January 2007. It is not especially cold, but has been raining nonstop for two days. Even the short dash from bus to front door leaves me soaked through and in need of some sort of carbohydrate and fat. Butter and beef dripping seem suddenly more appropriate than olive oil. Even more so the little bowl of duck fat I saved from last Sunday’s roast. Perhaps it was the week before. No matter, it keeps for months. It is said that people used to rub this snow-white fat on their chest to ward off a cold. I prefer to take my duck dripping internally, and set about a simple layered potato dish with thyme and garlic. The addition of the pumpkin was a spur-of-the-moment thing. It works well, adding a sweet nuttiness to the recipe. I like it on its own too, with a sharp and vinegary green salad at its side. It is also a good side dish for meat of some sort and wonderful with cuts from yesterday’s roast, just the thing for a cold roast chicken or duck leg.

Two of these cheese-and-potato cakes are ample for a main course with maybe a spinach or chicory salad to follow.

I had heard about Golden Wonder, the rock-hard potato with a deep honey-brown skin that roasts like a dream, but only came across my first a year or so back, at the farmers’ market. Hard as ice and crisp white inside, the golden one turns out to hate water and will turn to soup if you attempt to boil it. Give it olive oil, butter, or goose or duck fat instead. This is the potato for frying in little cubes with rosemary and salt, and for French fries. If you plant Golden Wonder in April, and are lavish with the water, it will reward you with charming, snow-white flowers flushed with palest lilac and, come September, perhaps the best frying potatoes of all, to be finely shredded and cooked in a flat cake with goose fat and garlic.

Goat cheese—sharp, chalky, a little salty—makes a sound addition to the blandness of a potato cake. The fun is coming across a lump of melting, edgy cheese in among the quietness of the potato. This is what I eat while picking eagle style at the carcass of a roast chicken or wallowing in the luxury of some slices of smoked salmon. It also goes very well with a humble smoked mackerel.