European

My friend Mario Piccozzi and I discovered this deluxe version of bread pudding on a winter visit to Merano, the historic resort town in the middle of the Alps, in Alto Adige. It was the perfect dessert on a cold day, served in its baking dish, still warm from the oven. Spooning the pudding onto plates, I was thrilled to find it loaded with apple chunks and walnuts, oozing rich custard and bubbling apricot jam. I make this at home now (it’s very easy) and serve it just as they do in Merano, family-style, setting the steaming, gold-topped pudding in the middle of the table, with a serving spoon and lots of plates. It disappears fast.

Baked apples are a favorite treat and comfort food in Trentino–Alto Adige as they are here. This recipe emphasizes the treat aspect, since the apples are draped with melted chocolate, chopped walnuts, and Amarena cherries. Many apple varieties are good bakers, including Cameo, Cortland, Empire, Jonagold, Northern Spy, and Rome. Granny Smith and Golden Delicious are always reliable, too.

These rolled-up scallops of beef (involtini di manzo) are fun to make, lovely to serve, and pleasing to eat, with the tangy surprise of a whole pickle (and other vegetable morsels) inside. They’re a practical choice for a special meal, too, since you can assemble and cook the involtini in advance, leave them in the pan, where they’ll stay moist, and reheat them when your guests are seated. And if you need more than six servings, the recipe can be multiplied easily. I like to serve these with Whole-Grain Spaetzle (page 16) to mop up the sauce.

Beef chuck, or shoulder, offers excellent cuts for stews and braises, because the meat is extremely tasty and, over long cooking, all the connective tissue adds flavor and body to the dish. For this braise (and the Sugo alla Genovese, page 112), I especially like the compact chunk of meat cut off the top of the shoulder blade, which is known by many names, including “top blade” or “top chuck shoulder” or “flatiron.” This piece is usually sliced and packaged as steaks, but ask your butcher to give you a whole top blade, as a roast. The more common beef chuck or shoulder roast, which comes from the underside of the shoulder, would be fine in this recipe, too. (It might be called “chuck pot roast” or “under blade chuck.”)

In Trentino, this lively condiment of cooked apples and fresh horseradish is served with boiled beef, poached chicken, and all kinds of roasts. It’s great with many of the dishes in this chapter, especially the beer-braised chicken and beef and the fried and baked potato–celery root canederli. Since it is so easy to make in large volume, I serve it with roast turkey or ham at the holidays, and I hope you will, too. Cream is customary in the salsa (it counters the sharpness of the horseradish), but the flavor is good without it. And you can use more or less horseradish to suit your taste for its pungency.

Späetzle are little noodles or dumplings made by pressing a sticky dough through a perforated tool right into boiling water—one of the simplest of all the techniques by which pasta is made. These whole-wheat späetzle are especially delicious, dressed simply with butter and grated cheese, and make a good alternative to potatoes as a contorno accompanying roasts or braised meats. The key to making späetzle is having the right tool or utensil, with holes large enough to let the sticky dough pass through easily and quickly. You might have a colander that works, but I recommend that you buy a späetzle-maker designed for the job. There are different kinds—some slide like a mandoline; others extrude the dough, like potato ricers—and both types are inexpensive and easy to use. And you’ll use your späetzle-maker often, I am sure, after you make and taste a batch of spätzle di farina integrale.

Here’s another fine winter salad, pairing one of my favorite, underappreciated vegetables—celery root—with fresh apples. The mellow, tender cubes of cooked celery root and the crisp apple slices provide a delightful, unexpected combination of flavor and texture. To turn the salad into a light lunch, add a few slices of prosciutto and serve it with some crusty bread. A firm, crisp apple is what you want for salad, and fortunately there are many varieties in the market that have that essential crunch, with flavors ranging from sweet to tangy to tart. I like to use a few different apples, rather than just one type, for greater complexity of flavor and vivid color in the salad. In addition to the reliably crisp Granny Smith apple, I look for some of the old-time firm and tart apples, such as Gravenstein, Jonathan, and Rome, and a few newer strains, like Cameo, Gala, and Fuji.

Crunchy, flavorful, refreshing, nourishing, and colorful, this salad makes a fine meal by itself. Its assortment of vegetables, apples, nuts, and cheese should be fresh and well prepared. It is especially important to use a top-quality table cheese, because it is a major contributor of taste and texture. In Trentino–Alto Adige, this salad would always have a fresh local cheese, most likely an Asiago pressato, made with milk from farms in the province of Trento (and the neighboring Veneto region). Aged only 20 days, this young cheese has a sweetness and soft, chewy consistency that’s perfect in salad. If you can’t find genuine Italian Asiago, don’t buy the inferior cheeses called Asiago produced in other countries (including the United States). Choose instead Montasio—a favorite of mine from my home region, Friuli—similarly soft and sweet, though richer and more complex than Asiago. Cubes of fresh Grana Padano (which also is made in Trento) or even good American cheddar, younger and on the mild side, would be great here as well. You can dress this salad in advance and set it out on a buffet. In that case, though, I suggest you add the walnuts just before serving, so they remain crunchy.

This is a terrific salad for your repertoire, especially in winter, when vegetable choices are limited (though I like it any time of year). It is tasty and versatile, good as a side dish for grilled chicken, lamb chops, or pork chops, and substantial enough to be a meal in itself. It doesn’t wilt and is excellent for a buffet table or picnic. Best of all, you can make and dress it ahead of time—in fact, it gets better if you do.

These tasty canederli are fried and baked rather than poached, with a potato-cake crustiness that is delicious any time of day. Serve them with eggs for a special breakfast or brunch, with a salad for lunch, or with juicy meats, like the Roasted Chicken with Beer (page 17), or Beef Braised in Beer (page 19). And they are also good (though not crusty) if you poach them—follow the procedures for the preceding canederli di speck.

Savoy cabbage is typically served as a cooked vegetable, but here the raw cabbage, shaved into thin shreds, makes a wonderful salad with great, resilient texture. Crisp rendered strips of speck (or bacon or prosciutto as alternatives) are a great complement, and the hot vinegar dressing is delicious. For shredding the cabbage, I like to use a mandoline slicer. These versatile cutting implements were once quite costly and usually found only in professional kitchens. Today, though, you can buy a decent simple mandoline for under $20, and I recommend that every home cook have one.

Genuine imported speck is the meat of choice for these canederli, but you can substitute either thick cut bacon or prosciutto—in particular, the fatty prosciutto from the end of the leg—and get excellent results. Or you may omit the meat entirely and still have quite satisfying canederli. Poached canederli are best served as soon as they are cooked, but you can cook them in advance, and reheat them in hot stock.

Every region of Italy has a fagioli (bean) soup, often quite filling, with potatoes and pork and either pasta or rice. Interestingly, it was in Trentino–Alto Adige, renowned for the heartiness of its soups, that I had this unexpectedly light bean soup, cooked with fresh apples and delicately spiced. It is vegetarian (also unusual), nourishing, and quite scrumptious. The combination of apples and beans is marvelous, and one of the pleasing features of this recipe is that simply by using less water you can make a great bean-and-apple side dish, a perfect accompaniment to roast pork, duck, or ham.

This is a different sort of frittata, not the neat golden round of well-set eggs that’s probably most familiar. Here the eggs are in the skillet for barely a minute, just long enough to gather in soft, loose folds, filled with morsels of asparagus and shreds of prosciutto. In fact, when I make this frittata or the “dragged” eggs—uova strapazzate, page 143—I leave my eggs still wet and glistening so I can mop up the plate with a crust of country bread. That’s the best part of all.

Maple syrup adds a new layer of sweetness to this delicious twist on the classic French dessert.

We've fallen hard for Scotch eggs—the gastropub staple— cooked eggs swaddled in sausage meat, then breaded and fried. Sorry, doc, now we're making them at home.

The secret to Sticky Toffee Pudding sweetness is dates, baked into a dense cake that's drizzled with caramel—special enough to be served for company and simple enough to be enjoyed after a weeknight dinner.

To save yourself some chopping, look for bags of mixed, pre-cut braising greens, available at some supermarkets. (Buy spinach separately for the gremolata.) Serve with warm bread for a filling main course.

When I worked in Gray Kunz's kitchens at Lespinasse, there was an honest-to-God Swiss princess living at the St. Regis Hotel. Her name was Princess Doria, and every night, she would phone down to the kitchen and tell us what she wanted to eat for dinner. In the beginning, Gray would cook for her himself: he was Swiss, she was Swiss, it was a whole Swiss thing going on. But after a while, he got tired of taking her calls, and the job devolved to me and the sous chefs. Every night, that phone would ring, and I would say, "Good evening, Princess," and she would tell me what she wanted to eat that night. Princess Doria wasn't into super-fancy creative cooking: her thing was refined-but-homey. Some- times, for example, it would be a roast pintade for two: I would plate the breast for her, and the thighs for her cat. So I developed some dishes that were just for her. I named them after her: Salad Doria, Chicken Doria. And sometimes on cold winter nights, she would call down and say, "Andrew, I would like some Soup Doria tonight, please." Time passed. I left Lespinasse to travel and cook in France. When I got back to New York, I helped open Le Cirque 2000 in the Palace Hotel. We'd been up and running about two weeks when the kitchen phone rang by my station one night, right in the middle of the busiest part of service. I heard a familiar voice say, in French-accented tones, "Andrew?" Princess Doria on the line. She'd moved on to the Palace right behind me, and she would be pleased, she said, if I would send up some Soup Doria for her. This soup is just Princess Doria's style. It's really a potage—a French minestrone, a chunky winter vegetable soup. I like to sprinkle Parmesan cheese on top and serve it with some crusty, crunchy French bread.