Walnut

Banana leaves gracefully cover cocoa beans in their fermenting bins where the beans develop their extraordinary flavor. Roadside farm stands in chocolate’s growing regions offer a jumble of bananas, cinnamon sticks, plantains, cacao pods, walnuts, vanilla beans, and coconuts, all from trees of the tropics. For that extra earth-friendly touch, use muffin or cupcake liners made with unbleached, eco-friendly paper.

Authentic, fiery mole sauces from the southern region of Mexico take days to prepare. This is a relatively quick version of the chunky, spicy, and chocolatey, mole negro or “black sauce.” To experience the full flavors of peppers, native spices, and fresh chocolate, book a culinary vacation to Oaxaca, Mexico, the Land of Seven Moles, where you can explore a district known as the Trail of Chocolate. In the meantime, get fresh ingredients from your local farmers’ market. You can substitute jalepeños for the poblano chiles, but the dark dried ancho and mulato chiles are important to bring the sauce to its characteristic deep chocolate brown. This will make a large batch of sauce designed to thin and use for a meal, then freeze and thaw as needed.

This is a classic fudge with the full flavors of fine chocolate and cooked cream. You’ll need a small, heart-shaped cookie cutter. Otherwise, you can cut it into simple squares or triangle shapes.

No apologies here. These are dense and decadent. You’ll want to use a strong dark chocolate—something that stands up to the richness of great butter, fresh eggs, and a lot of sugar.

With its sweet and sour crunch, this salad is sure to be a winner at your table.

Gina: Nothing is as warm or as inviting as an old-fashioned baked apple. Our baked apples are even more inviting because we pack them with golden raisins, dried cranberries, and nuts, splashed with rum for extra goodness (or try Calvados, an apple-flavored liqueur from France, for a special twist). Serve these warm, fragrant little gems with a scoop of caramel or rum-raisin ice cream. In the unlikely event that you have a few left over, there’s nothing like a cold baked apple for breakfast, served in a pool of cold half-and-half. (Chances are your sweet-tooth husband is also on to this secret, so don’t be surprised if he beats you to the kitchen.)

Gina: Multilayered coconut cakes are the prom queens of Southern desserts—and we love them—but, like prom queens, those cakes take time to prepare. This buttery Bundt cake, made with coconut milk, coconut flakes, and fresh chopped pineapple swirled right into the batter, is easier to make and just as satisfying. A pineapple glaze adds a tart punch to the mix.

A pesto-like dressing made from walnuts, garlic, and plenty of fragrant basil gives fresh, tender green beans a vibrant flavor. This simple, satisfying salad is delicious alongside grilled burgers, roasted chicken, or pan-seared fish.

This is such a great salad—especially in the fall, when beets are in season. The sweet, earthy flavor of the beets provides a nice foil for the tangy blue cheese and peppery arugula. By lightly crushing the walnuts, you need less of this healthy but high-fat nut in your salad. Sometimes it’s the little things that make a big difference.

As a child, I love the holiday of Purim, the time when my mother would make hamantashen, filled with apricot jam or dried prune fillings. As a young adult, when I was living in Jerusalem, I discovered a whole new world of hamantashen fillings, and the magic of the shalach manot, the gift baskets stuffed with fruits and cookies. Traditionally, these were made to use up the year’s flour before the beginning of Passover as well as to make gift offerings. Strangely enough, hamantashen are little known in France, except among Jews coming from eastern European backgrounds. The North African Jews don’t make them, nor do the Alsatian Jews, who fry doughnuts for Purim (see following recipe). French children who do eat hamantashen like a filling of Nutella, the hazelnut-chocolate spread. You can go that route, or opt for the more traditional apricot preserves, prune jam, or the filling of poppy seeds, fruit, and nuts that I’ve included here.

During World War II , Claudine Moos’s family hid in Lyon, which was the center of the Free Zone and considered to be a slightly safer city for the Jews. One day, her father, a socialist and Resistance fighter, was distributing leaflets against the Germans at the railroad station. The French police, helped by the German SS officer Klaus Barbie, caught him and others, and they were dispatched on the last train to Auschwitz. As they were escorted away, they sang the “Marseillaise,” the French national anthem, at the top of their lungs. Claudine, who was five years old at the time, has memories of their singing voices fading off into the distance. She was raised by her mother, who had also lost her father at a young age. Despite a difficult life, having lost her father and her husband, Claudine’s mother’s last words were “Life is good.” Even in a good life, food could be a challenge. “During and after the war, food was rationed,” Claudine told me in her kitchen in Annecy. “We got ration cards for the milk and eggs. Of course there was no chocolate. I remember my mother coming home with the first tablet of chocolate she could get after the war. How excited we all were!” Regardless of the shortages during the war, chestnuts still fell from trees throughout France in autumn. This rich uncooked cake would have been made from the chestnuts that were collected on the street. The recipe comes from a handwritten cookbook that Claudine’s grandmother gave her when she got married in 1960. The original recipes were measured in interesting ways, calling for a “glass of mustard” and a “nut of butter.” Peeling chestnuts used to be a laborious task. Her grandmother would collect or buy them whole, score them a quarter of the way down, boil them to loosen the skin, and then peel them. For Claudine, it is so much easier these days to make this cake, because she can buy frozen or jarred chestnuts, already peeled. Best made a day in advance, this rich cake should be served in small portions, topped with dollops of whipped cream.

Danielle Fleischmann bakes this apple cake in the same beat-up rectangular pan that her mother used. Known as a “Jewish apple cake” because oil is substituted for butter, it is called gâteau de Hannouka in France. When Danielle makes the cake, she uses very little batter, and half sweet and half tart apples, a combination that makes a really tasty version of this simple Polish cake. Although her mother grated the apples, Danielle cuts them into small chunks. I often make it in a Bundt pan and serve it sprinkled with sugar.

This classic charlotte or schaleth aux cerises is adapted from Françoise Tenenbaum, a deputy mayor in Dijon who is responsible, among other things, for bringing meals on wheels to the elderly poor. At a luncheon in the garden of a fifteenth-century building where the film Cyrano de Bergerac, with Gérard Depardieu, was filmed, Françoise described this Alsatian version of an apple, pear, or cherry bread pudding that she makes for her family. Starting with stale bread soaked in brandy, rum, kirsch, or the Alsatian mirabelle liqueur, it is baked in an earthen schaleth mold or, as Escoffier calls it, a “greased iron saucepan, or a large mold for pommes Anna.” Earlier recipes were baked in the oven, for 4 to 5 hours. Françoise bakes hers in a heavy cast-iron skillet or pot for less than an hour, at Passover substitutes matzo for the bread, and, except during cherry season, makes hers with apples.

The French love their bread, but they usually buy it in boulangeries. In many homes I visited, though, people would make a quick bread like the goat-cheese-and-apricot bread on page 145. When they had a bit more time, on a weekend morning perhaps, they would make a heartier bread and eat it throughout the week. This recipe, which I tasted at a friend’s house in Paris, is very forgiving and can withstand additions and variations. I often add bits of leftover nuts and dried fruit. Great for breakfast with goat cheese or preserves, it is also a wonderful sandwich bread.

Hélène Sancy’s Haroset recipe goes back to her family’s residence in Portugal before the Inquisition. It is probably one of the oldest existing haroset recipes in France today, if not the oldest. Her husband’s job is to grind the fruits and nuts with the brass mortar and pestle, which they inherited, handed down through the generations. Although the Sancys do not roll their haroset into balls as is called for in other old recipes from Spain and Portugal (recipe follows), they have another fascinating Passover custom. First they say a blessing over the bitter herbs (maror)—in their case, romaine lettuce—as a reminder of slavery in Egypt. Then they wrap the romaine around parsley that has been dipped in salt water, a little chopped celery, and about a teaspoon of haroset. The Ashkenazi way, in contrast, is to sandwich bitter herbs and haroset between two pieces of matzo. Curiously, the Sancys’ recipe for haroset, in this land of vineyards in the southwest of France, includes no raisins.

This hot, savory chutney is from what used to be India’s northwest frontier but now is on Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan. There it is made with fresh red chilies, which have beautiful color and medium heat. They are not always easy to find, so I use a mixture of red bell peppers and cayenne pepper. They are always combined with nuts, generally almonds but sometimes walnuts. This chutney may be frozen. It is like gold in the bank. Serve it with kebabs, fritters, and with a general meal.