Condiment

This is an incredibly flavorful paste that is simply made and keeps almost indefinitely in the refrigerator. It is also easily doubled, so you might as well make extra to rub on meats, chicken, and fish.

This recipe is an updated version of the classic cooked Mexican tomato sauce, which is made with vegetable purees and simmered on the stove. My version roasts the vegetables in the oven, allowing them to caramelize, before they are pureed. The result is a sauce with deep rich flavor and a hint of sweetness. If you don’t like heat, make sure to remove the seeds from the jalapeño!

This recipe is commonly referred to as Pico de Gallo (rooster’s beak). I suppose it is because the ingredients are all chopped up as if they were broken up by a bird’s beak. It is one of my favorites since it is not only delicious but also low fuss. Don’t worry about chopping the vegetables into uniform sizes or shapes and certainly don’t feel compelled to measure any of the ingredients. This chunky sauce goes well with almost every Mexican dish and is the classic accompaniment to serve with tortilla chips.

This has become my favorite sauce—for now. Its fresh flavor, vibrant color, and slight heat (which you can control with the amount of jalapeños you add) are the reasons why. And once you discover how easy it is to prepare and how long it keeps in the refrigerator, I don’t doubt it will become a favorite of yours, too.

Tapenade is essentially puréed olives with other flavorings added. This is a pretty mild version, but if you like the sharp taste of Kalamata olives, feel free to add more.

What is tzatziki you ask? It’s a cucumber sauce that they serve as a spread for pita bread in every Greek restaurant. And, if that doesn’t help, it’s the white sauce that they put on gyros. If you still don’t know what I mean, make it and you’ll find out.

This tart-sweet relish is thick enough for you to plop some into the crevices of a samosa for a wonderful, classic Indian food taste treat. Tamarind is known as the “date of India,” and the delectable marriage of the two kinds of dates in this chutney is a natural. Both ingredients lend body, their flavors perfectly complementing each other. I’ve eaten this chutney off a spoon. If available, use jaggery (unrefined Indian sugar) or Southeast Asian palm sugar instead of the brown sugar. Sticky dark brown slabs of tamarind pulp are sold at Chinese, Indian, and Southeast Asian markets in a double layer of plastic packaging. Soft dates, such as Medjools, work best. Otherwise, soak chewy, hard dates in just-boiled water for about an hour to soften them, then drain and proceed.

While this relish boldly says, “I am mint!,” it also has a bite from chile, ginger, and raw onion. Lime juice and sugar tame and unite the ingredients. This, along with the Tamarind and Date Chutney (page 220), provides just the right bright accents to Indian Samosas (page 115).

A simple, everyday relish from India, this condiment adds a wallop of fresh spiciness to food. Each cook has a different take on green chutney, and many add chopped onion and grated coconut. The straightforward approach here keeps the flavors bright. Green chutney is purposely hot, but feel free to seed the chiles or use a less-alarming chile, such as jalapeño, for less dramatic results.

Sweet, salty, and rich, this delicately flavored condiment unites and enhances the flavors of Cantonese steamed rice rolls (pages 156 to 160). It comes together quickly and tastes great, especially if flavorful cold-pressed peanut oil, the kind sold at Chinese markets, is used. If you use canola oil, add a dash of sesame oil for nuttiness.

Used in Chinese, Japanese, and Southeast Asian cooking, chile oil is easy to prepare at home, and it’s infinitely better than store-bought. Its intense heat enlivens many foods, especially dumplings, which benefit when chile oil is part of the dipping sauce or used as a garnish. Some cooks add aromatics, such as ginger, star anise, and Sichuan peppercorns, to the oil, but I like to keep the chile flavor pure. While you may use other cooking oils, such as canola oil, my preference is for the kind of peanut oil often sold at Chinese markets, which is cold pressed and filled with the aroma of roasted peanuts. It is texturally light, has a high smoking point, and offers a wonderful nuttiness that pairs well with the intense chile heat. Lion & Globe peanut oil from Hong Kong is terrific. Use just the infused oil or include the chile flakes for an extra brow-wiping experience.

This ubiquitous Asian condiment does not need to be purchased. In fact, it has a wonderful, bright flavor when made at home. In the late summer, when chiles are at their peak red color and spicy-fruity flavor, I buy a bunch at the farmers’ market and make a batch or two of this sauce. Keep the sauce uncooked if you enjoy a wild, robust flavor. Or, cook the sauce for a more mellow finish. I often blend different kinds of chiles so as to not create too much of a burn.

Great on their own, Chinese jiaozi get a fantastic flavor boost when dipped in a zippy sauce like this one. The tart-salty-spicy combination adds a complex edge to the dumplings. There’s no such thing as a definitive dipping sauce, since cooks and diners mix up their own according to personal taste. At the least, your sauce should be tangy and savory. But add some nutty, hot chile oil, and your eating experience will enter a different orbit. Chinese dumplings are wonderful with an extra kick of ginger or garlic in the sauce, too. I prepare the sauce in advance, but you can set out the ingredients and invite guests to do it themselves.

My first introduction to Thai curries came while I assisted a friend in preparing a luncheon for Nancy Reagan at the Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California. What a surprise: the curry sauce was red! Although Thai curries have many ingredients in common with those of neighboring India, they tend to be tinged with a hint of sweetness from the combination of coconut milk and a traditional dash of sugar, and they are often colored red or green by the red or green chiles in them, rather than the more familiar yellow color of Indian curries. As with most Thai curries, serve this over rice.

I make this marmalade in the dead of winter whenever my collection of confitures is running low, since, happily, good pineapple is always available. One pineapple yields a lot of jam—another thing to be happy about. The best way to judge if a pineapple is truly ripe is to take a whiff. If the fruit is ripe, it will smell strong and sweet and the flesh will be sweet, too. Using the old wives’ tale method of plucking a leaf from the top just means you’re going to get strange looks from the people in the produce department. And if you do it in France, where I live, you might even be reprimanded.

In my humble opinion, red plums make the best preserves, and certainly one of the easiest. Their skins give the jam a pleasant tartness and contain so much pectin that even inexperienced jam makers will be blushing like rosy plums with the pride of success. Tossing the fruit with sugar and letting it stand for a few hours intensifies the color of the strawberries so that the jam cooks up with a vivid crimson color.

Figs have two seasons—the first figs appear in late summer and the second batch shows up around mid-autumn. If you miss the first one, not to worry—the second is usually more prolific and the figs are even tastier. Don’t be put off by fresh figs with skins that are split and syrupy; those are the ones that taste the best. For jam making, I like black Mission figs, which are the most common variety, but this recipe will work with others as well. Figs are high in natural sugar, which means that the jam cooks relatively quickly.

One day while cooking some blueberries, it occurred to me that the sharp taste of a sizable shot of gin would nicely complement the berries, so I reached for the bottle and poured some in. Gin’s herbaceous flavor does indeed marry nicely with blueberries—it can hardly be tasted once cooked, but somehow it just rounds out the blueberry notes. Now, whenever I cook with blueberries, a bit of gin finds its way into the mix.

Mangoes, like most tropical fruits, will tip you off to their ripeness with their aroma. A good, ripe mango has a heady, syrupy scent, and when you hold it in your hand, it should feel slightly soft and a bit too heavy for its size. Although the plump, sweeter varieties, such as Hayden and Tommy Atkins, are the most tempting, slender and wrinkly Champagne or Manila mangoes that you might come across will surprise you with their gentle nuances. Depending on which variety you choose to use in this sauce, start with the smaller amount of sugar and add more if necessary. A spoonful of mango sauce is a nice complement to Coconut and Tropical Fruit Trifle (page 70) or scoops of Toasted Coconut Sherbet (page 152) nestled in cookie cups made with Sesame-Orange Almond Tuiles (page 212).

Kimchee is the signature dish of Korean cuisine and a staple in my kitchen. While I certainly love, adore, and crave its stiff aroma and sharp pucker, I understand that it can be an acquired taste for some. It’s quite polarizing—you either love it or hate it. either way, just to be safe, you may want to warn your cohabitants and neighbors of your culinary goings-on so they don’t alert the police to a strange odor emanating from your home.