Casserole

A meal in itself, this is a great dish for a crowd. It can be made ahead, baked, and reheated, or it can be held unbaked until a couple of hours before you plan to serve it.

Traditionally made by my stepmother, Sue, for New Year’s Day brunch, this is a wonderful make-ahead dish. It can be prepared with canned cream of mushroom soup or leftover homemade cream of mushroom soup, and you can substitute various kinds of sausage, according to your taste. Serve with Mimosas (pages 246–247) or Bloody Marys (page 245).

This layered, all-in-one brunch casserole is great for when you’re serving four or more people because it can be prepped before your guests arrive. It’s an old-time casserole with the added flavor of leeks and some delicious homemade fried onion straws on top.

Early February, icy-cold day. I find great spinach in the shops but little to go with it. I grab a bag of those factory-made vacuum-packed gnocchi that always make me feel as if I have just eaten a duvet. With cream, blue cheese, and spinach, they have a rib-sticking quality that would keep out arctic cold, let alone a bit of urban chill. Sometimes I just need food like this.

A huge pie, lighter and (slightly) less trouble than a lasagne, this is as satisfying as winter food gets. Even with top-notch chicken and heavy cream, it is hardly an expensive supper, and it feeds four generously (some of us went back for seconds).

Rutabaga’s ability to sponge up liquid is shown to good effect when it is baked with butter and vegetable stock. When it is teamed up with potato and seasoned with garlic and a spot of mustard, it is as near to a main course as I feel you can safely get with this particular root.

Potatoes cut thinly are not only good deep-fried but can be blissful when cooked with stock or butter until they are sodden and meltingly soft. I wanted a sliced potato dish that had the simplicity of pommes à la boulangère but something of the richness of its creamier cousin, pommes à la dauphinoise. This is what I have come up with: thinly sliced potatoes layered with garlic, butter, and grated Parmesan. Savory, melting, and, yes, rich, they are a near-perfect accompaniment for cold roast lamb or beef.

I am constantly on the lookout for potato dishes that will flatter a piece of meat or fish such as grilled mackerel, flash-fried lamb’s liver, or some thick bacon slices. This is such a dish.

There is much comfort, warmth, solace, and satiety in a bowl of starch, especially in cold weather. This one has the benefit of stock too, providing either a simple supper or an accompaniment to a roast.

Eventually, possibly toward the end of your meal, you reach the point where the salty, herbal juices from the meat mingle with the sweet creaminess of those from the parsnips, a moment of intense pleasure. While winter was in its death throes, and the first white narcissi were starting to peak through the damp earth, I produced this for Sunday lunch with a leg of lamb spiked with tough old rosemary twigs. We passed round a bowl of winter chicory and watercress for everyone to take handfuls with which to clean the mixture of juices from their plates.

Once the snowdrops are out and the buds on the trees start breaking, I have usually had enough of mashed, roasted, and baked roots and am gasping for the fresh greens of spring. As the root season draws to a close, I find a dish of parsnips and celery root, thinly sliced and slowly baked, makes a pleasant enough change. Sweet and yielding, this is both an accompaniment and a vegetable dish in its own right. I have used the quantities below as a main dish for two before now.

When making a sauce to blanket a dish of boiled celery ribs, I like to harness the mineral quality by using the celery’s cooking water in with the milk. It deepens the flavor and, together with parsley, establishes the vegetable’s earthy flavor. Celery blanched in deep water, smothered with a duvet of slightly bland and salty sauce, and given a crust of breadcrumbs and cheese is certainly worth eating. I have suggested making a crust for the celery and its sauce with Parmesan and breadcrumbs, but there is much success to be had with Berkswell, the sheep’s milk cheese from the Midlands. Despite being a rather different cheese from Parmesan, it has a similar fruitiness.

This rustic dish makes a wonderful cold-weather meal when paired with a green salad. Instead of the usual white top made of potatoes, this shepherd’s pie gets a toasted orange hue from winter squash, a common ingredient in Greek and Italian cuisine. You can substitute pumpkin, red kuri squash, or kabocha squash for the butternut. Gremolata, a fresh Italian condiment of parsley, lemon zest, and garlic, adds a bright citrus note.

Southerners love a casserole. They are church supper staples, great to take to the new neighbor, and equally welcome to a new mom. Cheddar, sometimes called “rat cheese” in the South, ranges in flavor from mild, nutty, and creamy to extra-sharp, rich, and robust. Gruyère is a low-moisture cow’s milk cheese from eastern France and western Switzerland. It has a sweet, rich, almost nutty flavor and is excellent for a cheese sauce. Cheddar cheese is more Southern, though, if you wanted to stay truer to those roots. Turkey sausage is much lower in fat than sausage made from pork and other kinds of meat. Use country-style or coarse-ground sausage, and if purchased in links, remove it from the casing before cooking.

Summer squash is a tender vegetable that differs from winter squash in that it is harvested before the rind hardens. It grows on bush-type plants, not vines that spread. There are many varieties, including yellow crookneck and straightneck, scallop, pattypan, and zucchini, that all cook in the same amount of time. When preparing summer squash dishes, I like to mix the varieties for an interesting contrast of color. When there is a family gathering or buffet, my mother-in-law, Sara, is always asked to bring her squash casserole.

Many Northern macaroni-and-cheese recipes use a béchamel sauce to coat tender elbow noodles, but the only time most Southerners put flour in a skillet is to make gravy—certainly not for a white sauce for macaroni. Our recipes are often simple combinations of pasta, eggs, butter, milk, and cheese. My Aunt Lee often prepares this dish. When I asked her about her recipe, she replied, “I just mix it all up in the dish until it looks right.” I had to coax a little more instruction out of her to share it with you here.

This recipe, a marriage of a recipe I learned while an apprentice to Nathalie Dupree and Meme’s version of traditional oyster dressing, is an excellent side dish for a Thanksgiving feast. The myth about buying oysters only in the months with an R is not quite true, but not completely false either. However, it is best to buy oysters during the fall and winter when they are at their prime. Oysters spawn during the summer months and become soft, milky, and bland rather than firm and sweet. It is true that in the South when the water becomes too warm, the oysters are inferior. I only buy oysters to shuck if I am serving them on the half shell. You can generally find pints of shucked oysters in better grocery stores and seafood markets.