Ham

These tasty fried rice balls have been enjoyed in Italy for centuries. They are great when just out of the skillet, but are delicious at room temperature as well. They can be fried in advance, then reheated. At our restaurant Del Posto in New York, the chef sends them out as a palate teaser.

With its developed flavor and moist, saucy consistency, risotto is still special the day after—it’s not just cold rice. Riso Sartù is a dish I always enjoy when visiting my cousin Clara Pacelli in Naples. It is one of the most wonderful ways I know to transform cooked risotto into something new. The risotto is blended with meat sauce, green peas, and lots of grated cheese and packed into small molds with morsels of egg, prosciutto, and mozzarella hidden inside. Baked and then unmolded, the cakes are crisp and crunchy outside—as you can see in the photo below—and creamy and chock-full of treats inside. This recipe makes six cakes with 2 1/2 cups of risotto and a cup of Ragù alla Bolognese (page 143) as the meat sauce. It is easy to multiply the formula if you have more risotto and sauce, and ovenproof cups to serve as molds. This dish might be made today with leftovers, but traditionally it was the specialty of the Neapolitan aristocracy, and risotto was made expressly for it.

Salsa arrabbiata—literally, “angry” sauce—is a tomato-based pasta sauce made in countless versions in Italy, sometimes with meat, sometimes without, but always with some kind of hot pepper. I like bits of meat in my sauce, either thick bacon or, even better, prosciutto “end” (see below). The heat here comes from small whole pickled peppers, packed in jars of vinegar, labeled peperoncini or peperoncino (the same term I use for red pepper flakes). Though these are milder than pickled “cherry” peppers, they provide plenty of spice—especially peperoncini Toscano, which I hope you can find. The sauce should have a pleasing play of textures as well as tastes, providing nice and distinctive bites of all the ingredients. Cut the onions, peperoncini, and prosciutto (or bacon) thick enough so that they don’t get lost, or lose their shape in the tomato sauce.

This gratin of fennel wedges and strips of prosciutto drizzled with butter and topped with Grana Padano or Parmigiano-Reggiano, then baked until golden, is rich, aromatic, and irresistible. It’s also quite convenient, since you can set up the baking dish hours ahead, keep it refrigerated, then pop it into the oven just before dinner. You can make this without prosciutto or substitute bacon, and it will be delicious, but it’s even better with prosciutto. Keep in mind that the cooking of prosciutto and cheese concentrates the saltiness, but the sweetness of the fennel brings it all into balance. Serve hot for best results.

GINA Ever since I was a little girl, my mom has been telling me that if you don’t eat black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day you’ll have a bad year ahead of you. Now, when I was younger I didn’t care a bit. I was going through that awkward stage anyway—how much worse could it be? But as I got older, I learned to love that black-eyed pea tradition, convinced that my year was going to be fantastic! And you know what’s funny? I tell my girls the same thing. Who says traditions and superstitions aren’t effective? Not to mention that black-eyed peas are rich in calcium and vitamin A. What could be bad about that? Of course, this being a Gina recipe, I added in my favorite collard greens. . . . Mmm, even better.

Although these savory, salty little bundles are a little too fat to truly resemble cigars, rolling the crabs in the prosciutto does employ a technique used by skilled workers in Cuba. It might also seem familiar to you if you’ve ever hand-rolled anything in papers. For directions on cleaning the soft-shell crabs, see page 32. Make sure you go easy on the salt in this dish because the prosciutto already contains plenty.

Cauliflower is another one of those vegetables that gets a bad rap. Yes, it’s in the cabbage family, and when the cauliflower is raw, the connection is easy to identify. Take a page from the Italians, then, who aren’t afraid of oil and know that giving some vegetables a dip in the fryer brings out their best characteristics. In this case, the cauliflower turns sweet and silken; add in some smoky shreds of ham hock and, well, you’ll be begging to eat cauliflower more often. Ask your butcher to split the ham hock for you; they have big saws for that very purpose. And don’t you dare throw away the liquid left over from boiling the ham hock. One bonus of this recipe is a soup waiting to happen.

Salted watermelon, cornbread, and molasses. You don’t have to look far to see how much Southerners like to mix their sweet with their salty. This summery salad, featuring Balsamic-glazed grilled peaches and shaved country ham tossed with fresh herbs and creamy goat cheese, is an elegant tribute to this unendingly popular flavor combination. For real Southern flavor, use sticky-sweet Georgia peaches.

My mom used to cook greens in such big batches that she would wash them on the rinse cycle in the washing machine. For her, a “mess” was a discrete unit of measurement equal to approximately one large grocery bag full. I think most Southerners operate under this assumption, at least as far as greens are concerned. It may seem like you’re starting out with far more greens than you’ll ever need, but keep in mind that they’ll cook down quite a bit. If they don’t all fit in the pan at first, start with as many as will fit and add to the pot as the greens cook down.

Yet another in the seemingly endless parade of hearty one-pot dishes from the Creole and Cajun traditions, jambalaya is a close cousin of Spanish paella (which comes as no surprise, given Louisiana’s earlier ownership by Spain). I love jambalaya, whether it’s made in the “red” Creole style, with tomatoes, or in the “brown” Cajun style, without, because even though it requires a little slicing and dicing, it’s actually a fairly fast and weeknight-friendly one-dish dinner—and it really sticks to your ribs. I often make mine with shrimp (as in this recipe), but jambalaya is sort of like gumbo in that it is made with everything from chicken, sausage, pork, and oysters to alligator, boar, venison, and turtle—basically, anything that swims, crawls, grazes, or flies in the vicinity of Southerners.