Bean and Legume

Fish sauce and dried shrimp flavor the sweet, spicy, and bright chile jam used to glaze this side dish with deeply savory notes.

Give your pan-seared salmon fillets a lemony pop with mustard-herb butter.

Thin green beans add ribbons of color as well as bite to a celeriac rémoulade.

A leek, carrot, and celery mirepoix, cooked until tender with rich white beans, gets a crisp, crunchy texture and delightfully rustic flavor from a garlicky bread-crumb topping flecked with parsley.

Set out all of the components of this fun and delicious dish and allow guests to add their own toppings. Because the chili is meatless, the vegetarians in the crowd can also enjoy this meal by simply omitting the crispy cubed-pork topping.

Savoy cabbage would work well here, too.

You can make the veggie filling a day ahead and refrigerate. Simply reheat 1 1/2 hours before filling the tacos.

The tangy sweetness of cherry tomatoes contrasts nicely with the plump, smoky chops, while green-olive paste gives a briny edge to the white beans.

The chicken calls for oil-packed sun-dried tomatoes from a jar, and this dip cleverly makes use of some of that oil.

The ciabatta slices make for man-sized crostini, perfect for a Super Bowl party. If you can, always cut the bread into bite-sized chunks for more manageable portions.

Beans have sustained people—black, white, and Native American—in the South for centuries. Miss Lewis first developed this recipe as a way of jazzing up canned green beans, which she appreciated for their economy. These days, fresh green beans are available and affordable all year long, so we happily adapted the recipe. Don't rush the cooking time and the goodness of these beans will be a revelation: smoky, luxuriant, and vegetal.

Residents of Brunswick, Georgia, and Brunswick County, Virginia, are both fiercely protective of the provenance of this dish, but let's face it—hunters have lived off this sort of thing forever. Like all stews, this tastes even better the next day.

"There is a dish that originated in Charleston called Hoppin' John," Edna Lewis writes in In Pursuit of Flavor, "which we had never heard of in Virginia." This (along with the fact that she found black-eyed peas a little dull) goes a long way toward explaining why she decided to gussy up its scrupulous simplicity—virtually unchanged through the centuries—with tomatoes. Well, nobody's perfect. Here you'll find the real thing, traditionally eaten on New Year's Day for good luck. Serve it with extra black-eyes and their pot liquor on the side to add more moisture, as well as a platter of Simmered Greens .

"Green peas were considered a great delicacy," says Edna Lewis in The Taste of Country Cooking. "If our peas ripened first, they were shared with the neighbors and vice versa." Since garden-fresh peas have become practically impossible to find, we rely on frozen peas for this classic combination. Serve it, as Miss Lewis would, with skillet-cooked chicken and biscuits on an evening in late spring.