Fig

Can be prepared in 45 minutes or less.

What to drink: Fess Parker 2000 Late Harvest Muscat Canelli, Santa Barbara County, or another sweet dessert wine with orange and honey flavors.

The secret to the light and flaky crust is cream cheese. For an extra-special presentation, cut out decorative shapes from the dough scraps, and arrange them on the pie after glazing it; brush cutouts with glaze and bake.

"I spent a weekend in North Carolina's Blue Ridge Mountains," writes Elizabeth Haworth of Columbia, South Carolina. "The Riverwood restaurant in Blowing Rock was a real treat—I especially enjoyed their fig and Stilton salad with Port dressing. Would the chef share the recipe for this unusual salad?" The sweet-tart dressing paired with creamy Stilton cheese strikes a great balance in this winter salad.

Egg fettuccine, rather than regular durum pasta, makes all the difference in this dish. It's usually sold curled in nests or loose in trays. Active time: 40 min Start to finish: 45 min

In England, plum pudding was required at Christmas in the nineteenth century, and it still is today. This luscious cake takes its cues from that beloved dessert. It combines the flavors of a plum pudding in a chocolate cake and iced it with fudge frosting.

Fresh herbs and pancetta (Italian cured bacon) blanket the pork before it goes into the oven. Ask the butcher to tie the two loins to hold their shape. Begin marinating the meat one day before serving. What to drink: Open a few bottles of spicy Zinfandel or hearty Bordeaux to place on the buffet table.

Here's a super-sophisticated yet easy-to-make topping for ice cream. Serve shortbread cookies alongside.

Can be prepared in 45 minutes or less.

You might be tempted to bake 2 sheets of cookies at a time in the upper and lower thirds of the oven. Don't give in to this urge—the cookies must go in the middle of the oven to cook through and brown evenly.

Prosciutto slices are usually paper-thin-but for this dish be sure they are not too thin or they will tear when you spread the cheese on them. Serve these with the Black Pepper Almonds, and pour Champagne.

Ciabatta is a wonderfully chewy classic Italian bread that is being rediscovered by specialty bakers around the country. Look for a rather wide, flat, flour-dusted bread, whether shaped into rolls or loaves. The rolls we used were 4- to 5-inch rectangles, but one or two ciabatta loaves would work equally well. Can be prepared in 45 minutes or less.

This is one of those recipes that has pretty much disappeared in the United States, but those who remember it rave about it. A fluden, which comes from fladni or fladen, "flat cake" in German, is just that, a flat, double-or often multilayered flaky pastry filled with poppy seeds, apples and raisins, or cheese. It was originally common to southern Germany and Alsace-Lorraine, later spreading east to Hungary, Romania, and other Eastern European countries. Often flavored with honey, it was eaten in the fall at Rosh Hashanah or Sukkot and is symbolic, like strudel, of an abundant yield. I have tasted apple two-layered fluden at Jewish bakeries and restaurants in Paris, Budapest, Tel Aviv, and Vienna, sometimes made with a butter crust, sometimes with an oil-based one. But only in Paris have I tasted the delicious fig rendition, a French fig bar, from Finkelsztajn's Bakery. (Figs, my father used to tell me, were often eaten in Germany as the new fruit on the second day of Rosh Hashanah.) This recipe is a perfect example of the constant flux of Jewish foods. Today, with the huge population of Tunisian Jews in Paris, it is no wonder that the Finkelsztajn family spike their fig filling with bou'ha, a Jewish Tunisian fig liqueur used for kiddush, the blessing over the wine on the Sabbath. You can, of course, use kirsch or any other fruit liqueur instead.

Remove the skin and fat from a whole cut-up chicken to make this Middle Eastern dish.

This spice-scented compote makes a great accompaniment to the New York cheesecake.

What to drink: Malvasia, a sweet Italian dessert wine, or a dessert Sherry made with Pedro Ximénez grapes. Susan Simon likes the Carlo Hauner 2000 Malvasia delle Lipari Passito, also from Salina.