No-Cook

One of the cool things about cooking cheater barbecue is the thought that something is going on inside that slow cooker or behind the oven door while you’re off doing something else. The same is true with making lox in the fridge. Our method is just a simple take on classic cold smoking with a little bottled smoke. The fish “cooks” in sugar and salt and cold-smokes in the fridge. Three days later, like magic, you’re in lox. Serve with toasted bagels and cream cheese or dark rye bread with chopped hard-cooked egg, capers, and red onion.

Stephen Cellar, R. B.’s hungry nephew, asked R. B. where he got that awesome red sauce we had served with burgers at a family picnic. Having grown up in the sophisticated chipotle-buffalo-ranch-bruschetta drive-through era, Stephen didn’t recognize that good old twentieth-century American favorite, “special sauce.” When we grew up, McDonald’s special sauce on a Big Mac was the first condiment other than mustard, ketchup, and mayonnaise that anyone considered for a burger. Way before pesto, sun-dried tomatoes, and made-up foreign-sounding food names, even the pedestrian “special sauce” was fancy enough to attract attention. How long did it take us to figure out that it was just like Thousand Island dressing? The mystery ingredient was chili sauce, that misnamed cousin to ketchup shelved beside the cocktail sauces. It looks and tastes like ketchup, but not quite as sweet or silky smooth and without any apparent chili flavor. For a fancy presentation, serve bunless chopped-steak burgers alongside crisp iceberg wedges and ripe tomato slices adorned with thinly sliced red onion, crumbled bacon, and Fridge Door Special Sauce. Or, slather over burgers topped with lettuce, cheese, pickles, and onions on a sesame seed bun. It’s so old, it’s new again.

The most sophisticated desserts combine a little salty component with the sweet. Try this crystallized yin/yang blend sprinkled on chocolate sauce, caramel, smoky s’mores, or a simple piece of chocolate for a subtle bang of unexpected flavor. A blend of coarse sugar crystals, like Demerara, with kosher salt delivers a chic look and immediate impact.

Eastern North Carolina’s pungent vinegar sauce is accented with black pepper notes and a light sweetness, but no tomato. Because it works so well with pulled pork, its popularity has traveled way beyond the region.

Heading west toward Tennessee on I-40, Pink Vinegar is more voluptuous, kinder, and gentler thanks to a little ketchup and more sugar.

These days quality hardwood-smoked salmon and trout in convenient Cryovac packages are easy to find. What we never expected was that even canned tuna, a product that has required little contemplation beyond water- versus oil-packed, would go through a major transformation with the new retort vacuum-packed foil pouch. No can opener, no draining, and new flavors to play with. A pouch or two of hickory-smoked tuna works for this spread. When we say any fish, we mean any fish or any shellfish, like smoked oysters or clams. We usually use a frozen pack of R. B.’s patio-smoked, fresh-caught Rhode Island bluefish courtesy of his friend and neighbor Chappy Pierce. Vary the ratio of seafood to cream cheese to your liking. If things taste fishy, add lemon juice. Serve the spread mounded in a bowl garnished with capers and lemon slices. We prefer plain water crackers for serving.

Recipes, like everything else fashionable, rise and fall with popular perception. They’re in, they’re out, they’re hot, they’re hopelessly last season. Liver has never caught the wave of coolness, unless it’s taken from a force-fed goose. Even liver as haute couture as foie gras is on the OUT list, branded as inhumane and even outlawed in some places. Slumming with ready-to-wear liverwurst, on the other hand, is looking pretty fresh. Why shouldn’t it? Liverwurst has plenty in common with foie gras, especially its color and buttery smoothness when it’s blended with cream cheese. Instead of slapping it on rye bread with mustard, serve it with the sweet flavors that commonly adorn foie gras, and your perception will instantly change. This is absolutely one of R. B.’s favorite cheater recipes.

Any appetizer spread, even this one of conventional cheese ball ingredients smashed into a spread, becomes much more glamorous when paired with all things pale green—celery sticks, thin green apple wedges, or Belgian endive. Don’t underestimate the allure of a generous pile of green grapes, either.

Deviled eggs can create a fair amount of anxiety. It’s the peeling that’s the problem. Experts say older eggs with more of an air pocket peel more easily, some say leave the cooked eggs in the fridge a couple of days before peeling, some say add a little vinegar to the boiling water. All we know is that when it counts, they don’t peel. Deviled Egg Spread with Smoked Paprika is the happy outcome after a fit of frustration with a bowl of broken hard-cooked eggs. Hey, you’re thinking, that’s just egg salad. So what! The smoked paprika adds the devil and makes a perfectly lovely spread for party rye or crackers.

The Phoenician port of Karalis is Cagliari and, sitting on the island’s southern verges on the Gulf of the Angels, it seems not of Sardegna. The Sards who live away from the port say it is a place doubled-faced and call the Cagliaritani hollow-hearted. They say Cagliari is of the world and not of Sardegna. Sardi falsi—sham Sards—they are called. Surely discordant, as a city, with the Stone Age commonweal of the island’s interior, Cagliari’s most pleasant quarter seems the one raised up in the serene, medieval tracks of the Pisani. There, embraced by walls, new—as measured in Sard antiquity—one senses, still, some sweet press of sympathy. And it is there on its piazzette, where one can sit under broad, blue-striped umbrellas, to sip at cool Nuragus di Cagliari between melting bites of salty bottarga, the Sards’ caviar. Fashioned from eggs harvested from the cefalo—the gray mullet—the roe sacs are taken whole, compressed under thick hefts of marble, rubbed with unpounded crystals of sea salt, then left to dry on grass mats under the Cagliaritano sun. What emerges after several months of patience is a supple, glossy mass that, when shaved or grated gives up an authoritative yet balmy brininess. In the humblest of osterie as it is in the ristoranti, this bottarga, the Sards’ caviar, is presented with simple adornments. Rather easily hunted up in American specialty stores, look, though, for the bottarga di cefalo rather than the more common, far less delectable, bottarga di tonno, made from eggs of the tuna. Here follows a recipe for a most uncommon, sensual sort of overture to lunch.

On the curve of Palermo’s Via Papireto, just before the entrance to il mercato delle pulci—the flea market—there sits a watermelon stand and a hand-wrought sign: ICED, SWEET WATERMELON, DAY AND NIGHT. We passed the little place several times each day on our excursions through the great honkings and snarlings of the city traffic. Drawn by its promise, we meant always to stop but never found quite the right convergence of appetite, time, and space in which to park the car. But one Saturday evening, after a long, winy dinner and a dry search for a still-open gelateria, we thought to soothe ourselves with a visit to the watermelon man. Though it was well after midnight, he was there, waiting midst the walls of precisely laid, smooth-skinned fruit, his old Arab eyes illuminated by festoons of pink and green lights. He bid us sit at his one and only tiny, oilcloth-covered table, tucked in the corner farthest from the street. Speaking only in smiles—it was hardly necessary to tell him what we desired—we watched as he chose a melon from those he kept in a basin of iced water and then cleaved it open with a single heft of some ancient tool. Each half he stuck with fork and spoon and, resting the juice-dripping melons on wooden boards, he presented them. He brought a little tin plate in which we might deposit the seeds and two beautifully ironed kitchen-towel napkins. The red flesh was crisp under our spoons and each new excavation brought up a yet sweeter, colder mouthful of it. We ate slowly under the pink and green lights, finally resting our spoons against the great, hollowed shells, triumphant, certain we’d spent well that hour of our lives, certain, too, how perfect, how divine was that food. Lacking a faithful watermelon man, here follows a way to work with a well-ripened, even if not exquisitely fleshed, melon. Perfumed with cinnamon and studded with bitter chocolate and pistachios, it is the traditional ice of ferragosto—the official high summer Italian festival. The gelo is best eaten long after midnight.

Perhaps the essence of Campania is this, of the countryside, of the pastoral innocence of the good, pure foods one eats there. Search, beg, grow, procure these few ingredients, first eating them with your eyes, dashing all record of plastic mozzarella and dusty-fleshed fruit masquerading as a tomato. This is not a recipe as much as it is quiet illustration of one fine way to eat in Italian.

Should there be, one day in your life, both a handful of still-warm-from-the-tree ripe figs and the juice-dripping flesh of a melon, go quickly to find leaves of mint, some good green olive oil, and the juice of a lemon to make this little salad. Use only flawless components and arrange them for someone wonderful with whom to rhapsodize over it. You might, then, need heady, appropriate conversation. You could choose to speak of Platina—one Bartolomeo Sacchi—the Vatican librarian and author, in 1475, of Platine de Honestate Voluptate. The work’s argument concerns the history of Roman cuisine and was the first officially published cookbook since those written during the Republic. Or you might want to chatter a bit about Cantalupo in Sabina—the Singing Wolf of the Sabines—once a papal garden property outside the Roman walls where a strain of tiny, orange-fleshed melons were cultivated, they, no doubt, being the precursors to those we call cantaloupe. Perhaps you might choose not to speak at all, thus distracting nothing from the sweet little figs.

This time of year, with pomegranates in season, I find myself spooning this salsa over all sorts of things, from duck to turkey and even grilled fish.