Alcohol

Don't rush the browning of the onions—it's essential to the finished soup's flavor.

Egg whites are shaken into this gin-based sour, where they take on an airy, velvety texture.

Strisce means strips—any long pasta will work—and Chiantigiana refers to the Tuscan wine used to flavor the sauce.

Mix this New Orleans classic hours ahead of time, and serving it is as simple as pouring a pitcher of lemonade.

Sparkling wine and Jamaican rum make for a compelling riff on the Negroni. Plus, it's a quick finish once it's batched.

June 24 is the Nativity of Saint John the Baptist, the traditional day to harvest green walnuts for making nocino, a delicious liqueur invented at a congress of witches, according to Anna Tasca Lanza, the doyenne of Sicilian cooking. Lanza's witches were Italian, but other countries from Croatia to France to the chilly Teutonic regions equally claim greenwalnut liqueur as their own. I learned to make it at the Institute of Domestic Technology, a cooking school in Altadena, California, where I also teach. When you harvest the nuts—working barefoot, according to some folklore—they are smaller than eggs, smooth to the touch, and crisp like apples, because the shells have not yet hardened. The nutmeats, at this stage, are jelly. Like most liqueurs, nocino is easy but requires patience. You slice the nuts and cover them with strong booze, sugar, and spice, and allow the mixture to infuse for forty days, until it is nearly black. The real test of patience begins after you bottle it. Ten-year-old nocino is said to be the best, and certainly you would never drink this summer's batch before cold weather sets in this fall. Mature nocino has a complex flavor of nutmeg, allspice, coffee, and caramel. Drink it neat as a digestif, or use it to flavor desserts. A few tablespoons of nocino lightly whisked into a cup of heavy cream will cause it to seize, as if magically transformed into cooked custard. The thickened cream is called "posset," and can be used as a sauce alongside cakes or other desserts. My nocino recipe is based on those from the Institute of Domestic Technology and Lanza's Sicilian cookbook The Garden of Endangered Fruit. Its fundamentals are green walnuts, 80-proof grain spirits, and sugar. (My secret ingredient is coffee beans.) You can change the aromatics if you like, but use small quantities, because the spices can take over. Green walnuts are sometimes available at farmers' markets, or can be ordered online at www.localharvest.org.

Key when making this batter: Be sure your beer and club soda are ice cold, and chill the batter if prepping ahead.

Sherry is an "It" cocktail ingredient, with enough heft to build a drink around but still relatively low in alcohol.

Greetings, comrade. This quasirevolutionary sorbetto is so bone-chillingly good that there'll never need to be another cold war. It's one of the flavors we were developing for our "Dictators of Cool" collection, which included our old favorites Adolf Hitler (The Great Licktator), Colonel Gaddafi (Cone El Gaddafi), and David Cameron (Fake 99, after a British ice cream cone).

This is one of those sleeper recipes that's more complex-tasting than it sounds. Each element is supereasy to prepare and can be made days in advance, but the finished dessert is a stunner.

Persimmons are one of the hallmarks of fall. From the time the temperature drops until the holidays, persimmons start making their way to the local farmers' market. The waiting game can be almost unbearable, but once they are finally ripe, the reward justifies the wait. My favorite thing to do with persimmons is to press the ultra-ripe fruit through a fine-mesh strainer, discard the skin and seeds, and shake the resulting pulp into my fall Margaritas.

Earthy mushrooms, wine, and tomato bring out the best in this tender game meat. The mushrooms, with their meaty texture, round out the portion, so you get an extra-generous amount on your plate. If you can't get venison, pork tenderloin works well, too.

Corpse Revivers were once a category of drinks, what might now be categorized as "hair of the dog" cocktails. The most famous of these is the Corpse Reviver No. 2, of which Harry Craddock wrote in his 1930 Savoy Cocktail Book, "Four of these taken in quick succession will unrevive the corpse again." By the end of the twentieth century, No. 2 was the only Corpse Reviver anyone could remember, if in fact they knew any at all. In this variation on No. 2, absinthe replaces the gin, and St-Germain fills in for Lillet—a Corpse Reviver of the future.

The Suffering Bastard is a 1940s tiki standby that was originally made with bourbon and gin as its base. This variation utilizes cask-strength True Blue corn whiskey from Balcones Distilling in Waco, with a nod to that city's famous teetotaling population.

On a really hot day, freeze fruit for an hour or two prior to serving—it acts like sweet ice cubes.

Use a pre-made custard as your base and paddle in a sweet-and-boozy cherry and bourbon topping.

Good ginger beers are made with actual ginger and deliver a nose-tingling hit of spice along with bubbles. Look for Fever-Tree, Reed's, or Fentimans brands.

Just as easy and fun to cook as they are to eat, mussels deserve a spot in your weeknight dinner rotation.