Side

Here is a simple way to enjoy big Paris mushrooms. I like chanterelles, morels, and even matsutakes, but these common white mushrooms—the kind you see in supermarkets—remind me of culinary school; they smell like la bonne cuisine française. We use banker watch–size mushrooms—as big as you can find. If you’re looking for an upscale alternative, porcini will also work. This dish is best prepared in a cast-iron frying pan, served family style at the table. Bring it out hot and bubbling.

You can use any type of carrot for this dish: perfect bunching carrots in midsummer, Touchons in the fall, or large carrots to feed livestock in the winter. Use anything but the dreary, bagged mini carrots carved from larger, less valuable specimens (they have more in common with sea monkeys than food). It’s simple: if the carrots look shitty that day, buy spinach. If not, cook them up like this.

Boil turnips for too long and you’ll have socks juice soup. Cook them just right and you’re being Richard Olney for an instant. Do not confuse turnips with rutabagas; here in Quebec, they hold the same name in French. And if you have some rendered duck fat on hand, please use it in place of the oil and butter.

Back in the day, when there was Sally Wong, when there was yellow pepper, and when there was tuna, David was doing endive salad and roast chicken. Although nonrevolutionary, this salad is always delicious. It’s on the menu often, especially in the winter when the garden is under a snowbank and the Parc Vinet Salad (opposite page) is a distant memory. Use Stilton in this salad; it works much better than other blues.

This is only a Parc Vinet salad when the garden is lit with the floodlights of the Parc Vinet ballpark directly behind all three restaurants and we’re harvesting enough greens to fill a bowl. Although this light salad seems a bit un–Joe Beef, it is in fact the best partner to a browned-out meal of wine reductions, marrow, and other consorts. We use whatever herbs and greens we have to make it, and this is what you should do, too. Let’s say 40 percent bitter greens, 40 percent sweet greens, and the rest in fines herbes. Just don’t go and put in rosemary. If it’s got woodsy stems, keep it out of the bowl. And do not use commercial salad mix. That’s not the point of this salad.

A note on ricers: For a young boy, a potato ricer is akin to magic. It’s more impressive than planes or satellites; it’s up there with fire trucks, guns, and large breasts. We use ricers a lot at Joe Beef—for potatoes, Madeira jelly for foie gras, fruit preserves, and polenta. One day, a hungover vegetable cook produced a plate of clumpy, amateur polenta. It was on the menu, so we couldn’t send out carrots and apologies. Instead, we just pressed it through the ricer. It came out freaking perfect, the clumps gone and the polenta shaped like rice, slowly falling in the butter. There we were, four grown-ups, as fascinated as ever with the potato ricer. The general rule for polenta is four parts water to one part cornmeal.

David has an Irish friend called Jerry O’Regan who always triple checks whether or not his main course is served with mashed potatoes. In fact, Jerry doesn’t understand why all food isn’t served with potatoes. Sometimes we send him a side of lentils instead of potatoes and he looks at it as if it were alien food. We don’t want to make an “Irish guy potato” stereotype here, but after cooking for Jerry for ten years, we get it. At the end of the meal, Jerry doesn’t say thank you, he says “Feels good to have some potatoes, hey Davey?”.

It’s true, at least for Fred, that an egg cooked in meat is the best. So much so that when we make braciole, he’s known to dig like a gopher to reach the eggs inside, leaving a hollow meat box to crumble on itself. The following is a short recipe where the egg gets that viande taste that Fred loves.

The best fries are done with potatoes that have never seen the cold. It has something to do with starch converting to sugar at certain temperatures. If you’re interested in the specifics, check out Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen. At the restaurant, we use a russet potato from the Île d’Orléans in the Saint Lawrence River (which Cartier originally named the Isle of Bacchus because of the native vines that covered the landscape), but you can use anything similar. This recipe really is made to work with a deep fryer. If you don’t have a small one at home, a 5-quart (5-liter) thick-bottomed, highsided pot and a deep-frying thermometer will work. We use half canola oil and half beef fat, which always makes better fries the second day. If you can get your hands on rendered beef leaf fat (the fat from around the kidneys), definitely use that. If this is all too much, you can use peanut oil. We don’t, as we can’t piss off both the vegetarians and the allergics. A few years back we started tossing our fries in escargot butter (its name comes from its use, not its contents; it’s basically garlic butter) and now we can’t stop. We also like to add a little grated pecorino as we toss.

This great side dish has a bit of a Quebecois-lumberjack-in-Bollywood taste. It is red lentils cooked like dahl, seasoned like baked beans. It is a pork chop’s best friend, or will mate with a hefty breakfast.

Orzo is the Italian word for barley, and the slender, grain-shape of orzo pasta makes for a no-fuss, neatly consumed salad, particularly if you are balancing a plate while perched on the edge of a sofa or standing around the TV watching the Super Bowl. Although the salad makes for a great accompaniment to the Stuffed Sliders Your Way, your vegetarian friends will thank you for providing them with an option they will really enjoy as their main dish.

Consider this recipe a double whammy. Not only do you end up with a dreamy, cheesy bread pudding, but you also get the recipe for an excellent loaf of Irish soda bread. The bread is so easy to make—there's no yeast involved—don't be surprised if you find yourself baking a loaf often. It makes excellent toast. Many Irish cheeses are now sold in our supermarkets, but you'll have good results with any sharp Cheddar. Buried in the recipe is a nifty trick: Adding a bit of Parmesan to the mixture helps amplify the flavor of the Cheddar.

Every Super Bowl spread needs a refreshing salad to counterbalance the array of must-have dips, cheesy snacks, and meaty mains. Because the elements of this are all chopped, it's a salad that's easy to toss, easy to serve, and best of all, easy to eat.

Colcannon, a classic Irish combination of mashed potatoes with cabbage or kale, is standard winter fare. If that sounds, well, boring, trust us, this version is anything but that. We freshen it up by cooking the potatoes and cabbage separately, then we make it easy to serve for a party by adding an egg and baking it in a pie pan, so that you can cut it into wedges.

Consider making a double batch of Ed Lee's orange-honey butter to serve the next morning with toast or warm biscuits.

Chef Vivian Howard uses toasted farro and chicken livers to boost the flavor and texture of this traditional Cajun side. Howard suggests serving the dish with braised pork shoulder or shanks.

Transform sweet potatoes into caramelized beauties by cooking them with rice wine and honey. Serve them alongside roast duck or pork chops.

Try sorghum syrup in place of honey to make these simple glazed carrots. Lee's preferred brand is Kentucky Pure Cane Sweet Sorghum, available at bourbonbarrelfoods.com.

This dish flips conventional Southern cookery on its head. Rather than cooking greens nito submission, they’re quickly brined to soften their texture and mellow their bitterness, then married with the sweet, salty, and creamy elements of a composed salad.