Wine

Côtelettes de Saumon Frais Dorigny Active time: 1 1/2 hr Start to finish: 1 3/4 hr

Melting the chocolate in the pear poaching liquid makes an instant sauce.

Guancette di Manzo When braised, these beef cheeks become meltingly tender, with a rich, deep flavor. You may want to check with your butcher when planning this dish, since it's often necessary to order beef cheeks ahead of time. At Uno e Bino, Cesanese wine is used in the braising liquid, but it's difficult to find in the United States. A dry Lambrusco or Chianti makes a good substitute. Active time: 1 1/4 hr Start to Finish: 4 1/4

Pappardelle con Stracotto Active time: 1 hr Start to finish: 4 hr

My recipe was adapted from Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. I've changed the meats (a lot) and the seasonings (a bit). I've also tinkered with cooking times and sequence.

A favorite test-kitchen Muscat wine is Bonny Doon's Muscat Vin de Glacière from California.

Active time: 20 min Start to finish: 25 min

"During a recent business trip to Birmingham, Alabama, I had dinner at the Hot and Hot Fish Club," writes Shelia Murray of Paradise, California. "Every bite of chef Chris Hasting's shrimp and grits was packed with flavor. I'd love to prepare this stand-out dish at home."

A traditional side dish for the Christmas ham, sausage or spareribs.

This soup is also wonderful hot.

In the kitchen of Piedmont's splendid country restaurants it is usually a woman who rules. Invariably, she has been schooled not by chefs, but by her mother, and her professional accomplishments are founded on the region's home cooking, a cuisine that, for finesse and variety, is unsurpassed in Italy, or even in Europe. One of the most gifted of these women is Ilvia Boggione of the restaurant Vicoletto in Alba. Among her specialties is this deft rendition of a classic game bird that is sometimes served with tajarin — thin homemade noodles. To call it sauce may be misleading, however, particularly if one's idea of a pasta sauce is something juicy and all-enveloping. There is nothing runny or sauce-like about this one. Quail is cooked until its meat slips succulently off the bone, and small bite-size pieces of it are nestled among the pasta strands. A more accurate description of the dish would be pasta with quail. Suggested pasta: Homemade noodles make the only satisfactory pairing for this sauce, particularly thick, square shaped tonnarelli or the broad pappardelle or fettuccine. In Piedmont (as noted above) they use tajarin, a thin noodle that in restaurants is made almost exclusively from a large number of egg yolks.