Casserole

No potluck meal or barbecue is complete without baked beans. These cook for a long time but need very little attention. The result is well worth the wait.

Roasting brings out the best flavor in both the broccoli florets and the onion slices in this side dish.

You’ll attract an audience when you take these yummy potatoes out of the oven. The star of the meal, they go well with almost anything. Try them with grilled flank steak and zucchini.

Fresh lemon juice, capers, basil, and olive oil provide your palate with a taste from the Greek Isles.

Instead of making the traditional recipe for this southern holiday favorite, give our version a try. It tastes just as good but is much lower in sodium and contains no saturated fat.

This is a grown-up mac and cheese with lots of rich Italian flair. Using three flavorful Italian cheeses and incorporating pancetta makes this hearty dish the ultimate comfort food. You can use a different shape of dried pasta as long as it has a cavity to hold the creamy sauce. Try other cheeses, too.

Often people are intimidated by the thought of making a soufflé, but soufflés are actually quite easy to make and are delicious. This simple version has seasonal herbs and greens and is baked as a casserole in a shallow dish. It doesn’t have to be served before it deflates, because the amount of pouf is less important in this presentation. This casserole is wonderful for brunch or a light lunch served with some lightly dressed tender salad greens. If you want a traditional presentation, this same recipe can be made in an 8-cup soufflé dish.

Paula Wolfert and I revised this fabulous dish of hers for cooking in my wood-fired oven. The key is to cook it until the lamb is falling-apart tender. The recipe is adapted from Paula’s book, The Slow Mediterranean Kitchen. It comes from the southern Italian region of Apulia, where it is baked in a shallow terra-cotta dish called a tiella. You can make it entirely in the wood-fired oven, or cook the onions and brown the lamb on the stove top, then move it all to the oven to finish cooking.

The swineherd, like the shepherd, conducts his life significantly all’ aria aperta—out-of-doors. It is there that he naps and forages, tends to his fires, capriciously bathing himself and one part or another of his clothing in an often swift and single maneuver. He might also cook up some wonderfully scented stew of wild mushrooms or one of dried beans and just-gathered grasses and herbs, as supplement to his staples of cheese, honey, bread, and wine. More than once, though, we took note of purposeful midday couriers visiting a swineherd in the pasture, carrying a basket full of components for him to cook a fine feast of a lunch midst his charges and under the sun. We learned, too, that, once in a while, the swineherd cooks for his family, his friends. Here follows a version of a dish as it is prepared by a young Sard herdsman when he slaughters a pig for market. Staging a torchlit supper in his meadow, he braises a haunch of the animal for his neighbors. Its formula was told to us by his wife, she having cooked it for us on the farm where we stayed near Sassari.

A tiny place where once lived the paladins of Sardegna is Orgosolo. Only a decade or so ago did they think it prudent, finally, to wander about the steep, tortured alleyways of their mountain village unadorned with a rifle. Orgosolo is the historic lair of Sard banditismo—banditry. Perhaps the businesses of thieving and buccaneering seem more gainful in Calabria, for now, the only rapscallions left in Orgosolo are the political artists whose bullying, bitter-sermoned murals irritate walls, housefronts, mountain faces. Too, icons are chafed, gastronomically, in Orgosolo, as they are here in this dish, which asks for bottarga as well as pecorino, upsetting the proscription, for a moment, against the mingling of fish and cheese.

The poorest, perhaps, of all Sard dishes, some version of mazzamurru is often a shepherd’s supper or humble sustenance for a bountyless hunter’s family. Made of whatever stuffs might be at hand, the commonalities of mazzamurru are rich ewe’s milk, some rough bread, and shards of sharp, salty cheese. The ornaments are often a handful of wild grasses or a few sun-dried tomatoes, some olives, a crush of dried herbs. Present the mazzamurru with a bowlful of some simple tomato sauce or, better, no sauce at all, its nakedness tasting of such goodness.

Raised up seven hundred years before Christ on the Mar Ionio, the resplendence of Sybaris eclipsed Athens. Tenanted by unredeemed voluptuaries who roasted songbirds, wove cloth from gold, slept upon rose petals, and indulged every hunger, even their appetite for peace, these Sybarites vanished, as if by some peevish smite from the gods. All that remains is a farming village of sweet, sleepy folk who roast lamb with lemons. Still, I think theirs is a dish upon which an old Sybarite could smile.

To tear at a beautiful, newborn bread and eat it with fat, salty olives, a potent red wine sipped between them, is a meal everlasting in its innocence and sensuality. Here follows the simplest of recipes that pairs the soft creaminess of roasted garlic with the olives for a lush result. The dish asks only a little dalliance in the oven. Roasting the olives plumps them, renders them voluptuously fleshy, tender. And when whole, fat garlic—caramelized in a long, slow roasting—confronts the salt-tinged meat of the warm olives, the whole becomes quietly paradisiacal. As beautiful as it is, stray for a moment from the red wine idea and consider a fusion, instead, with an iced Marsala Superiore Riserva or Marsala Vergine or Marsala Soleras Stravecchio—altogether different wine from the often industrially produced sweet varieties that find their way to the States and are used to make zabaglione or to splash sautéed veal. The crackling, almost dry golden chill of them leaves just a point of sweetness on the tongue.