Chile

Those who like a little extra kick in their eggs will enjoy this dish. Customize it by adding a little extra jalapeño, which will increase the heat. The clean, bright flavor of cilantro is excellent here, and it adds color as well.

The sweetness of the honey and the spiciness of the jalapeños make for an intriguing flavor combination in this rich corn bread. Wear rubber or plastic gloves when handling and chopping hot chile peppers—the chiles can make your fingers sting—and wash your hands thoroughly afterward. Serve with butter, honey butter, Maple Butter (page 274), or jam.

A contemporary take on the ground meat–stuffed marrow. This economical supper stands or falls by the way the meat is cooked. The real flavor here comes from the caramelization of the sugars in the meat. To make the most of this, I have the oil at quite a high temperature as I add the meat, then resist the temptation to stir or turn the meat too soon. Continual movement will result in “wet” rather than crisp-edged, golden ground pork.

Small squashes deep-fry particularly well, offering a refreshing, almost juicy contrast to the ethereally crisp batter. This is one of those recipes—pancakes are another—that I tend to make when there are just two of us, and we can eat our sizzling fritters at the stove while the next one cooks. I find I get a much crisper result if I don’t overcrowd the pan.

There is a small but distinguished group of seafood and tomato dishes, from the Provençal soups with their croûtes and brick-red rouille to Portuguese soup-stews reeking of garlic. With those dishes as a starting point, I spent some time working on a soup of tomato and crab. After making several versions that were too thick and rich, I took the step of bringing chile and lemongrass into the proceedings to add a breath of freshness and vitality. This is a bright-tasting soup that sings with the sweet heat of chile and crustacean. To add enough substance to treat it as a main dish (when this recipe will serve 3 or 4), I introduce a last-minute addition of bean shoots or maybe some shredded, very lightly cooked snow peas.

How a dish smells is important. It whets the appetite, brings us to the table, and opens up a host of pleasures. With coconut, cardamom, and coriander, this simple dish of baked tomatoes is heady and aromatic. It curdles a bit, but no matter. You will need some rice or bread to go with it. Creamed coconut, a block of pure dried coconut, is available at Asian markets and online.

The first time I included pumpkin in a coconut-scented laksa was for a Bonfire Night supper in 2004 (see The Kitchen Diaries). The soup had to be sensational to make up for our distinct lack of fireworks (I think we wrote our names in the air with sparklers). Rich, sweet-sour, mouth-tinglingly hot, and yet curiously soothing, it had everything you need in a soup for a frosty night. There is much pleasure to be had in the constant tweaking of a recipe to change not its essential character but its details. And so it has been with this soup. I have since gone on to remove the tomatoes or add some shredded greens as the mood and the state of the larder take me. Such improvisations, many made at the last minute, need to be done with care: you don’t want too many flavors going on. Vietnamese soups such as this are traditionally ingredient rich but should never taste confused. By the same token, to simplify it too much would be to lose the soup’s generosity and complexity and therefore its point. The laksa appears complicated at first but in practice it is far from it. Once you understand the basics, the recipe falls into place and becomes something you can fiddle with to suit your own taste. The basic spice paste needs heat (ginger, garlic, tiny bird’s eye chiles); the liquid needs body and sweetness (coconut milk, rich stock); the finish needs sourness and freshness (lime juice, mint, cilantro). The necessary saltiness comes from nam pla and tamari rather than salt itself. These notes in place, you can feel free to include noodles, tomatoes, greens, sweet vegetables, or meat as you wish. What matters is balance.

Sweet squashes marry well with the earthy flavor of beans and lentils. This is apparent in the dhal and pumpkin soup in The Kitchen Diaries and here in a more complex main dish that offers waves of chile heat with mild citrus and the dusty “old as time itself” taste of ground turmeric. Dried (which is the only way most of us know them) chickpeas are the stars of the world’s bean dishes, used to fill bellies everywhere from India to Egypt. Their character—knobbly, chewy, and virtually indestructible in the pot—makes them invaluable in slow-cooked dishes where you need to retain some texture. Fresh chickpeas are bright emerald green and have an invigorating citrus note to them that is completely missing in the dried version. I saw some for the first time this year. I have long wanted to put lemongrass with chickpeas, partly to lift their spirits but also to return some of their lemony freshness to them (I use more lemon juice in my hummus than most as well). This recipe, which just happens to be suitable for vegans, does just that. Like many of those slow, bean-based dishes, it often tastes better the next day, when all the ingredients have had a chance to get acquainted.

Marrying textures and tastes to one another is one of the most satisfying pleasures of cooking: the soft with the crisp, the steamily hot with the icily cold, the spicy with the mint cool. I somehow had a feeling that crisp crumbs might work well with the soft, collapsing flesh of a squash. They do, but are more interesting when the crumbs are not packed on top like a crumble but lightly scattered over and between the pieces of squash.

Peppers, the red, collapsed horns in particular, are heavily linked with Hungary and its rust-colored stews. The Hungarians make ground paprika from them too, which has become their most famous culinary export. Despite their South American origins, Hungary is where I have found the most dazzling displays of peppers in the markets. Two minutes, even less, from the river and the Szabadsag Bridge, Budapest’s market stalls glow deep rust and gold with tins of paprika and strings of dried mahogany chiles. I love the crumbling wooden stalls of scarlet-capped mushrooms with their stray pieces of iridescent moss, wicker baskets of black sloes, and small sacks of red berries, and the apparently precarious piles of peppers, Christmas red, clean white, and burnt orange turning scarlet. The long peppers that curl back on themselves have the intrigue of Aladdin’s lamp but are awkward in the kitchen, tending to tip their stuffing out into the baking pan. You can roast them, though, with olive oil and lots of salt, and eat them with sesame bread torn into chunks. The most useful, called Gypsy and the size of a fat rodent, are perfect for stuffing: with spinach and cream; translucent onions, capers, parsley, and garlic; cracked wheat, green olives, and toasted pine nuts; ground lamb and cumin. But mostly they are baked with a shake of the olive oil bottle and a grinding of salt until they collapse, wrinkle, and melt into silken strips. You’ll need bread then, in fat, rough chunks, and maybe a glass of bright beer. From August to the close of the year is when the market has the most from which to choose. After that the peppers come dried, in long strings of tobacco, madder, and soot. They shouldn’t be despised. By then the stalls are mostly piled with roots and cabbages, endless sausages, and wholesomely fatty pork. The paprika stalls, stacked with red and gold tins, are kitsch in a Hansel and Gretel way, their shelves covered in fastidiously ironed lace, like the old women who run them. Gulyas, or goulash, means “cowboy” and was traditionally cooked over an open fire. My paprika-scented pork stew—you could use beef-departs not too radically from the classical dish. I include dried mushrooms and cook it in a low oven, giving it a particularly deep, smoky flavor.

The kormas of India, serene, rich, silken, have much in them that works with the sweetness of the parsnip—cream, yogurt, nuts, sweet spices. The Mughal emperors who originally feasted on such mildy spiced and lavishly finished recipes may not have approved of my introduction of common roots but the idea works well enough. Despite instructions the length of a short story, I can have this recipe on the table within an hour. For those who like their Indian food on the temperate side.