Fruit

We always made this to take to Family Night suppers at church. Its official name was Congealed Fruit Salad, but it was known at our house as pink salad, because, well, it’s pink! Besides, anything with the word congealed in the title just sounds gross to me, and this is anything but.

It is hard to imagine how the flavor of fresh-picked Jewel strawberries could possibly be improved. But with traditional balsamic vinegar, the gorgeous, sweet-tart, syrupy vinegar made from local grapes in Modena, Italy, it is ridiculously easy to make the strawberry taste burst out in an incredible way. If you can, use Jewel strawberries.

Consider the Spitzenberg. The heirloom variety ripens in mid-October, when Chick Evans buys every one of these local beauties he can get his hands on. Black Diamond Farm supplies the Spitzenbergs, and Chick turns them into a delicious apple cake, spiked with apple brandy. If you can’t find Spitzenbergs, substitute Ida Red, Cortland, or Granny Smith apples.

This unpretentious little bakery and café is a favorite with the locals, and Deb Moglia’s smart-looking sandwiches on fresh-baked breads attract a steady crowd at lunchtime. My favorite is the Apple Reuben, a warmingly satisfying construction inspired by the pastrami-stuffed version, only here it is made with sautéed local apples.

Flavor pairing comes naturally when using products that come from the same region, and Lakewood’s assistant winemaker, John Damian, developed this recipe to prove it. The secret to a chicken dish that he guarantees will awaken sleeping taste buds is the combination of fragrant, flavorful local peaches and just enough residual sugar in the wine to give the marinade a lift.

Local rhubarb season overlaps with strawberry season in the Finger Lakes, and that’s enough to fire both the imagination and the grill at Stonecat Café. Culinary wizard Scott Signori slathers this unique sauce over Peter McDonald’s pasture-raised chicken and suggests washing it down with Ithaca Nut Brown Ale.

The local tradition of purple pies began sometime in the 1960s with Al Hodges, who commissioned Irene Bouchard to make a unique grape dessert for the Redwood Restaurant in Naples. Forty years later, thousands come to the village of Naples to celebrate the grape harvest and sample the native grape pies. The robust flavor of Concord grapes makes this unusual pie a treat. You will have to peel each grape, but the delicious results are well worth the effort.

Here is another great dish from the repertoire of Nicolas Jongleux. We used to scoff at people who said they knew how to make a great dessert that wasn’t too sweet. But as you get older and the espresso and the social cigarillos have started to erode your taste buds, you find yourself liking bourbon, lemon, and dandelion. This is a perfect little dessert in that fashion. It’s zingy and alive. We burn it with a blowtorch. If you don’t have one, just use your broiler. Heat it to the max and put whatever is holding the grapefruit right under it. Don’t forget dry rags or oven mitts and an ovenproof vessel.

Here is the dessert we served on opening day at Joe Beef. You can use small foil molds or teacups for serving.

The financier gives you a failproof moist cake that will stand through the rigors of pâtisserie de cuisine. It is simple to make, which is a good thing for us at Joe Beef, with our limited space and no real pastry chef, and for the home cook. Keep in mind that baking is a science, and although we include volume measures here, weighing the ingredients is recommended. We use ornate wax paper tartlet molds. If you don’t have them or can’t find them, you can just fill muffin cups half full and you’ll get the same result. Serve the cakes with ice cream and sweet wine.

Our good friends Dyan Solomon and Éric Girard own Olive + Gourmando, a perfect luncheonette on Saint Paul West in Montreal’s Old Port. Their little shop is what we expect the coffee shop in the afterlife to be like: they’re detail fanatics and it’s no contest the best place for lunch in the city. When they first opened, they were bakers, and the place was a bakery with a few seats. They still make bread, but mostly to use in delicious sandwiches. The front counter is displayed with brioches, croissants, brownies, and fruit pastries, and they’re all killer. We thought they were insane when they decided to open in Old Port a decade ago. It was a barren ghost town of bombed-out buildings, seedy bars, and grow-ops. There were no people, much less hotels and tourist shops selling maple-sugar products and “raccoon” Daniel Boone hats actually made from Chinese skunks. Like us, Éric and Dyan don’t take anything too seriously (Dyan can tell you many stories of Fred’s practical jokes when they used to work together: her showing up at 6:00 A.M. to a fake “dead man” at the bottom of the stairs; Fred putting a scraped lamb shank in his shirt, saying he may have hurt his hand. . . .) They’re Montreal classics and were kind enough to hand over one of their most beloved recipes.

We champion this generalization: gentlemen eat their beef with steak sauce—the brown type, thick and sharp. Although we support Heinz ketchup and we think it calls for respect and pride, we don’t use bottled steak sauce. Here is an easy and tasty alternative. It is delicious with Filet de Boeuf (page 248).

This recipe, aka Kälte Glühwein trinken für Freunde im Sommer, was inspired by a box of German mulled wine: it depicted a blond, deliriously happy family sitting down to a few cups of this mulled tea. Serve in highball glasses.

This drink started as a vinaigrette for razor clams, and it still is. But with scotch, really cold, it’s awesome. If you have a juicer, it’s the best. If you don’t, a blender and a sieve will do. Chervil is one of those herbs that you can’t cook, and if you buzz it in syrup, for example, you will end up with something more akin to soup Florentine than a cocktail component. Serve in a lowball glass.

If you want long sticks of rhubarb, peel the rhubarb first. If you want 1/2-inch (12-mm) chunks, don’t bother peeling it. This is pickle in a small amount, so don’t bother canning it, either. But do keep it in a proper (sparkling clean, tight cap) container in the fridge, where it will keep for up to a month. We serve this pickle with charcuterie and cheeses.

Back in the day, when there was Sally Wong, when there was yellow pepper, and when there was tuna, David was doing endive salad and roast chicken. Although nonrevolutionary, this salad is always delicious. It’s on the menu often, especially in the winter when the garden is under a snowbank and the Parc Vinet Salad (opposite page) is a distant memory. Use Stilton in this salad; it works much better than other blues.

The spice and heat in this jam make it more at ease with meats and cheese than toast. As for the Babylon term, it’s simply in relation to the avid devotion that the world’s kitchen has for reggae music!

This is Fred’s mom, Suzanne’s, recipe. It is an old Belgian Walloon standard—a quick and tasty pickle that is good with pork roast and sausages. You can also mix the “brine” with nut oil as a dressing for beets. And use it to give a welcome buzz to a bland wine sauce: just a drop or two. This pickling solution works well with almost any stone fruit. The amount of liquid you need will vary according to the stone fruit(s) you use. Here, the amount has been geared to 1 pound (455 g) cherries and/or Italian plums. You may need to adjust it if you use other stone fruits. Because we are deathly afraid of preserves gone wrong (from watching an old episode of Quincy, M.E., where the culprit was botulism), we suggest using superclean plastic containers and always refrigerating the preserves.

We came up with this alternative to braised rabbit as a way to eat rabbit in the summer. If possible, ask the butcher to bone a rabbit for you. Be sure to distinguish between the legs and the loins (or saddle). In Canada, asking for the kidneys is no problem. In the United States, it is hit or miss. Sometimes we like to serve the skewers with Gentleman Steak Sauce (page 251) for dipping, but they are good on their own, too. Another nice option is an easy pan jus, made by deglazing the pan with a shot of sherry, then adding 1/2 cup (125 ml) chicken stock and 2 tablespoons unsalted butter.

Mint is a classic accompaniment for lamb. And it wasn’t until Jennifer May shot this classic braised lamb recipe with its mint condiment that we really appreciated its beauty. It’s something we imagine on the Sunday table of Mayor Drapeau, who brought Expo 67 and the ’76 Olympics to Montreal (and chased away the hookers and the gangsters—albeit temporarily).