Wine

In Egypt we called it poisson à la grecque. All kinds of fish can be cooked in this way—small ones whole, and large ones cut into steaks. Serve hot or cold with good bread and a salad.

The red wine caramel adds a sexy complexity to this classic French staple and the fresh thyme gives it a sweet, earthy depth.

In culinary school, beef bourguignon is one of the first dishes you’re taught that truly represents French cuisine. It’s basically beef stew with a deep red-wine flavor. The kicker is that it’s one of the easiest recipes in this book. Serve this with creamy mashed potatoes and I swear you will feel like Paul Bocuse, and you don’t have to go to cooking school.

Simple ingredients with complexity and depth add up to an Italian classic. Oh, and did I mention this is mind-blowing? When purchasing the veal shanks, check that they are pink and smell sweet. The most important step in making Osso Buco is browning the meat. This develops a really rich brown color on the meat and adds a ton of flavor to the base of the sauce. Serve with Soft Polenta (page 244) or Garlic-Chive Mashed Potatoes (page 237). The gremolata is also good on a grilled fish.

I love this dish for the simple ingredients and hearty, rustic flavors. Braising the chicken in red wine actually tenderizes the meat, as well as imparting a beautiful purple hue. “Leggy” red wine means to me a heavy wine with depth and body. Depending on whether or not each of you can eat half a chicken, you will probably have leftovers. Soft, creamy polenta (page 244) is a great accompaniment.

Pork tenderloin is like the filet mignon of the pig, so I serve this with Red Onions Roasted with Balsamic and Honey (page 260) and round everything out with Garlic-Chive Mashed Potatoes (page 237). Charred red onions match perfectly with the sweetness of the dried plums (dried plum is code for prune).

This is a simple country-style roast chicken with a garlicky wine marinade. Roast small red or fingerling potatoes while the chicken cooks. Add them to the oven after the chicken has cooked for 15 minutes. You can even add a pan of popovers (page 191) to the oven. They will be done in about 1 hour.

Italians love prugne, the name for both fresh and dried plums (which we call prunes). Italy is one of Europe’s largest plum-producers, and the fresh fruit is a favorite in season. But dried plums, prugne secche, are in such demand year-round—for snacking, cooking, and baking—that today Italy ranks as one of the world’s biggest importers of prunes (many tons of them grown in California!). I, too, love prugne secche, particularly in crostatas (tarts) and torte such as this cake, which I found in Basilicata. Morsels of prune, poached in a wine syrup, dot the golden, buttery cake, and each bite bursts with their concentrated essence of fruit flavor. It’s a great treat for the holidays, or on any winter’s day—a delicious reminder of the sweet taste of summer.

This is one of those bountiful braises that you make when you want to delight a big table of family or friends, offering them an assortment of tender meats and pasta dressed with the braising sauce. Like other slowly cooked braises, this gives you two courses from one saucepan. Serve pasta dressed with the meaty-tasting tomato sauce as a first course—there’s enough to dress 2 pounds of rigatoni. And then serve the pork, veal, and sausage as a second course. Of course, you don’t have to serve it all for the same meal. Use half the sauce to dress a pound of pasta, freeze the rest, and you have a future meal all ready to go. And after serving the ragù, take any leftover bits and pieces of meat, shred and chop them up, clean the meat from the veal-chop bone, and blend all of it in with any leftover sauce. I bet you’ll have enough sauce with meaty morsels for a lasagna or other baked pasta—yet another meal from that one big braising pan.

This dish showcases the skillful skillet cookery and flavorful pan sauces that delighted me in Umbria. After lightly frying the veal scallops, you start the sauce with a pestata of prosciutto, anchovy, and garlic, build it up with fresh sage, wine, broth, and capers—and then reduce and intensify it to a savory and superb glaze on the scaloppine. Though veal is most prized in this preparation, I have tried substituting scallops of chicken breast and pork; both versions were quick and delicious. Serve the scaloppine over braised spinach, or with braised carrots on the side.

Dress your fresh strangozzi with this meaty, multitextured sauce—ground veal and chopped chicken livers cooked in a tomato base—for a hearty dish that will delight carnivores and pasta-lovers simultaneously. This is also a great sauce to incorporate into risotto. If you are not enthusiastic about the flavor of chicken liver, use only 1/2 pound, for a subtle flavor boost. But if you love the organic richness of livers, as I do, use a whole pound. This recipe makes a big batch of sauce, so you can use half and freeze half (it will keep well for 4 to 6 weeks).

This traditional casserole of veal scaloppine is simple and simply delicious, with a multitude of harmonious flavors and textures. The scaloppine are quickly fried, then layered in the pan to bake, moistened with an intense prosciutto-Marsala sauce, and topped by a delicate gratinato of Grana Padano or Parmigiano-Reggiano. And though veal is customary, scaloppine of chicken breast, turkey breast, or even pork would be excellent prepared this way. The first step, of frying the meat, can be done in advance, but I recommend that you assemble and bake the casserole just before serving: reheating will toughen the gratinato and accentuate the saltiness of the prosciutto.

Thick tuna steaks are not just for grilling. The stovetop technique here is quick and convenient. You use one big skillet for browning the fish steaks, make a simple (yet complex-tasting) sauce, and put the two together for a final brief braise that marries the flavors perfectly. This is the true alla Genovese method. If you prefer grilling to pan-cooking, however, you can certainly omit the first step of flouring and frying the steaks, and make the sauce separately. Use a smaller saucepan in this case, preparing the sauce as in the recipe, starting with the sauté of garlic, anchovies, and porcini in 2 tablespoons olive oil. (Use the other 3 tablespoons olive oil, and 1/2 teaspoon salt, to season the fish before grilling.) One advantage of a separate sauce is that it can be finished ahead of time, so when your guests arrive you only have to fire up the stove and cook the fish. And you’ll find it delicious with bass, codfish, or salmon as well as tuna. In fact, this sauce is so good, I suggest you have a good slab of focaccia to mop up the pan.

In this version of carbonade, the beef-and-wine dish that is a hallmark of Valdostana cuisine, the principal elements are cooked independently. First, you prepare the sauce, cooking red wine with aromatic vegetables and herbs until complex in flavor and highly concentrated. Later, the beef tenderloin, the filetto, is skillet-roasted (on the stovetop) until crusted and caramelized outside and juicy inside—a simple cooking method that takes barely 15 minutes. Before serving, you deglaze the empty skillet with the wine sauce and blend in the butter. It is only on the serving platter that the beef and wine come together, yet the pairing is perfect. I particularly like this separately cooked wine sauce because it is as good with other meats as it is with the filetto. Try it with roasts, such as loin of pork or rabbit, or with game, such as tenderloin of venison or elk, seared like the beef tenderloin here.

Veal chops are always something of an extravagance, though worth it when well prepared. In this exciting recipe from Valle d’Aosta, thick rib chops are stuffed with the region’s prized fontina, browned, and braised on the stovetop, then baked. The result is quite grand, because the succulent meat and pan sauce are enriched with driblets and hidden pockets of sweet melted fontina. And if you want to go superluxe for a special occasion, shave fresh truffle on top of each chop just before serving. To return to earth, however, let me point out that you can make costolette alla fontina in more modest versions that are absolutely delicious and much easier on the pocketbook. For instance, you can form veal scallopine into envelopes to enclose the fontina, or stuff a veal loin chop, a thick pork chop, or a plump chicken breast in place of the veal rib chop. You may have to adjust the amount of cheese you put inside, and adjust the cooking time at each step to avoid overcooking. But if your meat, wine, olive oil, tomato paste, and broth are of fine quality, and—most important—if you use real fontina (and Grana Padano or Parmigiano-Reggiano), you will produce a splendid dish.

Gorgonzola and Taleggio are my favorites of Lombardy’s many fine cheeses. Both are made from rich cow’s milk, exclusively from animals that have grazed in the pastures of particular locales. The finest Taleggio, in my opinion, comes from small producers in the highlands north of Bergamo, where the cheese originated centuries ago. Creamy and soft when ripe, Taleggio is a superb table cheese, all by itself or with a piece of good bread or fruit (and at room temperature, of course). On my recent trips to Lombardy, though, I’ve appreciated it as a component of cooked dishes. As I’ve suggested in the recipes, fold it into any of the riso dishes in this chapter—after the heat is off—and you will love how it melts and lends its luxurious texture and complex flavors to the rice. Because it browns beautifully in a hot oven, Taleggio is a great cheese for a gratinato, as you will find when you try this very special recipe. Thick veal chops are browned, then braised in a sageinfused tomato sauce and finished in the oven under thin slivers of Taleggio and a sprinkle of grana. The golden crown of cheese over the tender meat is a perfect final touch. To be sure, this is an extravagant dish and demands the best ingredients. Meaty veal chops are always expensive, and these should be cut extra thick (either rib or, my preference, loin chops are suitable). And your Taleggio must come from a reliable cheesemonger who has allowed the cheese to ripen properly before it’s cut and sold—too young and you won’t get the full flavor. The cheese should be soft under the rind but not runny all the way through. In fact, you’ll need to chill ripe Taleggio in order to slice it thinly for the recipe. But the effort and expense are well worth it, as you’ll find when you taste your costolette al formaggio.

This venerable Lombard specialty belies its literal name. Pitocchi (taken from the Greek word for “poor”) were beggars who roamed the Padana lowlands during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries seeking sustenance; presumably a plain rice dish was what they got. Though simple to prepare, today’s riso alla pitocca is far from meager. Quite the contrary, it is rich in flavor from the pestata base and loaded with succulent chicken chunks.

Editor's note: Chris Hanna suggests serving her French Lentil, Prosciutto, and Pepper Salad alongside the pan-seared duck. The first time I made duck, I prepared traditional Peking duck using two enormous birds special-ordered from the butcher. After three days of painstaking preparation, every surface of my kitchen was covered in duck fat, and the ducks had shrunk down so much I only had a few ounces of meat to serve the six people walking through my door for dinner. Duck breasts are the answer! You can find them in the freezer section of your market if you can't find fresh, or you can special-order them from your butcher. They're much less fatty than duck legs or thighs, and they don't shrink much at all. In this recipe, the sear on high heat gets the skin nice and crispy. Aromatic five-spice powder gives the duck an exotic flair. An easy pan sauce results from deglazing the pan with wine and balsamic vinegar. Duck and Pinot Noir are meant for each other. An elegant Russian River Valley Pinot Noir is a perfect match, and stands up to the aromatic spice rub.