Veal

(Pasta con Ragù di Vitello, Salsicce e Porcini) Ragù is a beloved part of Tuscan cooking. Every person has his or her own recipe, but the basics are constant: It is a hearty sauce made with meat (beef, pork, veal, duck, even boar) and vegetables like carrots, tomatoes and onions, all cooked in wine and broth. And ragù is most often served over pasta. This recipe includes dried porcini mushrooms, which give the sauce a real taste of the Tuscan countryside.

A true demi-glace — the luscious sauce made by reducing homemade stock and red wine to a rich concentration — needs to simmer for several hours, making it the perfect activity for a lazy winter Sunday.

Serve with: Orzo with parsley, and steamed carrots and green beans. Dessert: Pear tart.

"I recently had lunch at Café Boulud here in New York," says Shelli Rafkin of New York, New York. "My entrée, blanquette de veau, had the most incredible sauce I've ever tasted. The whole dish, in fact, was sensational." In this variation on the classic stew, the veal and the vegetables are cooked separately and combined at the end, when they're topped with a rich white sauce.

I hadn't expected to find an entry on meat loaf in Alan Davidson's magisterial Oxford Companion to Food (1999). Indeed, I only looked it up there so I could say that meat loaf was a great and ubiquitous dish that everyone snubbed. Meat loaf, I intended to say, is a kind of joke.... Alan Davidson let me down. He had plenty to say about meat loaf..."a dish whose visibility is considerably higher in real life, especially in N. America and Britain, than in cookery books."

For this recipe we used what the butcher calls the first cut or brisket cut of the veal breast — it's the thicker, upper portion.

Any leftover sauce from this recipe would be delicious served with boiled new potatoes or crudités. The sauce keeps 4 days, chilled and covered. Can be prepared in 45 minutes or less.

"At a recent lunch at the Stage House Inn in Scotch Plains, I was served a braised veal shank," writes Max J. Kalm of Westfield, New Jersey. "This version was so much better than the ones I’ve prepared. Would chef David Drake be willing to share his recipe?" The restaurant serves this entrée with a vegetable risotto. Mashed potatoes would also be a good side dish for the veal shanks.

The delicious sauce is also very nice with chicken and shellfish.

Jars of mixed peppercorns—red, green, white and black—can be found in supermarket spice racks. Uncork a bottle of Zinfandel to go with this simple, great-tasting main course.

We like the flavor that 6 pounds of breast bones and 4 pounds of knuckles bring to this stock.

An elegant and simple main course.