Side

Bacon is a natural fit with Brussels sprouts because the salt in the cured meat complements the earthiness of the vegetable. This dish is particularly hearty due to the meaty bâtons of bacon. You may have to have a good butcher slice 1/4-inch-thick strips from the slab of bacon. As for the Brussels sprouts, choose tightly closed sprouts with no yellowed leaves; the ones that seem heavy for their size are the freshest and best.

With its nutty flavor and beautiful dark green color, this is a good make-ahead brunch dish that tastes best chilled, but it’s also good at room temperature. If you prepare it in advance, taste for seasonings before serving; you may need to add a little extra salt or lemon juice.

Sweet potatoes make delicious home fries, and with the addition of ginger, these become something really special. Choose small to medium sweet potatoes and use them within a week: They don’t keep as long as white potatoes. Store sweet potatoes in a dark, cool place, but don’t refrigerate them.

To make this dish, you’ll need a mandoline, which is a hand-operated slicing appliance with assorted blades for thick to thin slicing. A metal kitchen utensil known as a spider, which vaguely resembles a spider web with a long handle, is handy when frying because it lets you quickly remove hot food from the oil without removing much of the oil. It’s inexpensive and sold in most kitchenware shops. Soaking the julienned potatoes before cooking them removes some of the starch and yields a crisp shoestring effect.

Also known as latkes, these crispy, golden treats are a childhood favorite and are best served with caramelized onions, sour cream, and fresh, tangy farmers’ market applesauce. Allow yourself about twenty minutes to soak the grated potatoes in the cold water to remove the starch. Otherwise, they become gluey as the starch cooks in the potatoes and they won’t get crispy.

While the classic fried potato dish served with bacon and eggs in diners everywhere is excellent on its own, the “smothered and covered” variation is more decadent, blanketing the crusty brown potatoes with caramelized onions and cheese. Thanks must be given here to the Waffle House chain for their inspired innovation!

A robust and filling variation on classic home fries, this pretty vegetable dish gets color and crunch from the asparagus. It pairs especially well with Crispy Crab Cakes (page 198) and Scrambled Eggs (page 75), though potato lovers may decide to eat this as a main course. This is a great way to fit vegetables into a brunch without its being too healthy.

What would bacon and eggs be without a side of home fries? These “homers” are too good to be called simply a “side.” Many Bubby’s customers prefer to eat them in great quantities with an accompaniment of bacon or sausage.

For the best grits, choose good stone-ground hominy grits, found mostly at high-end gourmet shops. Good-quality grits can be yellow, white, even blue, and they have a lively, crunchy texture. Just for the record, most regular folks down South use quick grits. And also for the record, that’s what we use at Bubby’s. But at home I cook from a bag of stone-ground hominy grits from Hoppin’ John’s, a small mill in Georgia (www.hoppinjohns.com). The Tabasco in the recipe really adds a zing to the grits, which go especially well with Smithfield Ham with Red-Eye Gravy (page 189).

This homemade cereal is hearty, wholesome, and filled with nutritious ingredients such as walnuts, rolled oats, raisins, and sunflower seeds. Granola is very flexible, so you can add whatever fruits and nuts are your personal favorites. This granola is great with milk or yogurt, or even as a topping on pancakes. Because raisins can make the granola soggy, we add them right before serving. The granola keeps well for a long time, so this is a big batch—it makes three pounds. Just keep it in an airtight container and eat it for breakfast all week, as we do at Bubby’s, or cut it in half to feed a smaller crowd.

Béchamel, a basic French white sauce made with butter and cream or milk, is combined with a generous amount of homemade sausage, then poured over warm, flaky biscuits. It’s as addictive as it is undeniably rich. For extra decadence, put poached eggs (see page 75) on top of the biscuits. Make the biscuits ahead of time and freeze them for up to two months. Rewarm in a preheated 350°F oven for 10 to 15 minutes.

These robust, aromatic sausages pair well with many egg dishes. For best results, most of these ingredients should be chilled before you start. The fat needs to stay separate during the mixing process or the sausages will be mealy. Properly handled ingredients, especially the fat and meat, are the key to good sausages. Both the meat and the fatback should be brought down to 32°F, so place them into the freezer for about an hour. Fatback, which is the fresh unsmoked layer of fat that runs along the pig’s back, is sold at butcher shops. Don’t confuse it with salt pork: They’re not the same thing. The easiest way to get ground juniper berries is to grind them in a spice grinder. If you don’t cook all the sausages in one meal, the patties freeze well for several weeks as long as they are well wrapped. The best thing is to wrap the patties individually in plastic wrap, wrap six to eight of the plastic-wrapped sausages in aluminum foil, then put the foil packages in a resealable plastic freezer bag and mark the bag with the date they were frozen.

A chef at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco in the 1920s is said to have created this to honor George Arliss, an actor appearing there in a play entitled The Green Goddess. The dressing is made with an abundance of herbs and can be served with fish or shellfish as well as salads. Be sure to use fresh herbs: Dried just don’t deliver the same flavor. For this salad to look its best, place it in a bowl that’s twice the size of the greens so you’ll have plenty of room to toss.

This salad is practically a meal in itself, especially if you fan out a beautifully grilled sliced chicken breast or some shrimp on top. Because it contains raw egg, this dressing, which can be made ahead, should be refrigerated and used within three days.

A simple green salad, this one is made special by the unusually good vinaigrette. The dressing can be made up to three days ahead and stored, tightly covered, in the refrigerator.

Our friend Gerry has a farm in upstate New York, in Delaware County, and it is a trove of little wildly growing goodies. Each spring, around the end of April through the end of May, little leafy wild leeks, called ramps, spring up (ahead of the rhubarb, ahead of the asparagus) in patches on the side of streamlets. These wild leeks taste amazingly good with eggs, though we often pickle the bulbs and use just the leaves for scrambled eggs. At our local farmers’ market in Manhattan’s Union Square, ramps are one of the first green things to fill the winter-barren tables. If you can’t find ramps, leeks make a good substitute. Use one-quarter of a well-washed, chopped leek per serving. Also try substituting goat cheese for the Parmesan for a slightly different flavor. Serve with Skillet Hash Browns (page 211).

Homemade raisin challah bread is a real treat. Slice this light, egg-rich loaf thick for toast or use it to make a memorable French toast. This bread can be frozen for up to two weeks.

My adopted grandmother, called Mema by dozens of grandkids, step-grandkids, and us adopted grandkids alike, as well as scores of great-grandkids, always made these popovers for Christmas dinner. They are just as tasty for brunch. Popovers rise in the oven due to steam, not a leavener such as yeast, and then they deflate somewhat after baking. Good with butter, jam, or honey, they are best eaten warm. I like using a cast-iron popover pan, but you can also use a good, solid muffin pan. For the puffiest, airiest popovers, make the batter at least 2 hours ahead of time. Refrigerate the batter for 1 hour, and then let it sit out at room temperature for 1 hour.

Soft, slightly sweet rolls are an American dinnertime tradition, but they certainly have their rightful place at the brunch table, too. From this basic recipe, you can shape many rolls, including round rolls, cloverleaf rolls, and twists.

James Beard’s excellent biscuit recipe can hardly be improved upon. But by using sour cream in the recipe, we feel the biscuits are a little creamier. If you prefer the original Beard biscuits, just omit the sour cream and double the heavy cream.