Ham

I love sugar snaps because they’re crispy, they’re crunchy, and they’re snappy! Just blanch, shock, and cut them into little slivers to enjoy the full sugar snappy experience. To keep things interesting, toss in some minty fresh deliciousness and some salty, crispy prosciutto! Now that’s what I call a summertime salad.

This is not your ordinary bean dip. A lovely combo of beans, veggies, rosemary, and prosciutto makes this a simple but sophisticated twist on an old standby—and, while I recommend cooking your own beans, popping open a can instead is totally acceptable in a pinch.

Who doesn’t love a breadstick? And a breadstick wrapped up with yummy stuff is even better. My recipe for homemade grissini (skinny little breadsticks) is really good, but as I always say, pick your battles. If you don’t feel like making them, go ahead and buy some packaged ones—I promise this will still be a crowd pleaser!

A mirliton is a chayote squash or a vegetable pear. It is also the name for instruments in which a voice resonates over a membrane, as in a kazoo. The Carolina Chocolate Drops are bringing the kazoo back in style with their unique take on traditional jug-band music. I am mounting a campaign to bring the squash back too.

Spring is a short-lived but well-loved season in the Mississippi Delta. All is verdant and lush with the scent of fresh-tilled earth in the air. When spears of asparagus are combined with farm-fresh eggs, to me, it all signals spring. I particularly enjoy this dish for breakfast with sourdough bread for sopping up the luxuriant, velvety cream sauce.

Speck is a cured Austrian ham, similar to prosciutto except that it is lightly spiced and smoked. Prosciutto or thinly sliced uncooked bacon may be substituted. (If using bacon, cook until nearly rendered, 3 minutes.)

For the bones, select a combination of the following: chicken (necks, whole carcasses, wings, or feet), pork (any bone, shanks, necks, split feet, smoked hock, or ham bone), or beef (oxtail or any bones).

Silvia and I have made this often over the years, the first time in my (illegal) home kitchen for an Easter catering gig when we made the entire meal twice, timing it so that the second roast was perfectly blistered and crispy when we arrived back home with a car full of dirty pots and pans to have dinner with our own families. It goes well with wilted spring scallions, roast potatoes (basted in the drippings), lightly dressed spicy arugula, and beans in all forms. One favorite bean dish for this ham is from Amanda Hesser’s The Cook and the Gardener: flavorful white beans simmered with hearty herbs and crème fraîche until slightly thickened.

Superstition across the southeastern United States holds that eating hog jowls, collard greens, and black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day will make a person healthy, wealthy, and wise. Hog jowl, which is the cheek of a pig, is a flavorful and fatty meat that is usually cured or smoked. Hard to believe a food as rich and fat-laden as hog jowl is linked to health and prosperity. These meager foods have always been a symbol of plenty for people who are often very poor. The “good-luck” traditions of black-eyed peas in the Southern United States date back to the Civil War, when Union troops ravaged Southern lands, destroying crops and taking all livestock. All that was left were black-eyed peas, which were considered to be fodder for horses and other animals; as a result, many Southerners subsisted on this protein-rich and hearty legume.

This recipe is based on a Cuban sandwich traditionally made with roast pork, ham, pickles, Swiss cheese, and mustard. We start with the same main ingredient—the pork. It can be a loin, a ham, even a shoulder, but it should be roasted so that it retains some texture. Then we ratchet things up. In place of the ham, we have coppa, which comes from the neck of the pig and is cured and dried like prosciutto. Standing in for the pickle, we have a pickled pepper relish. The sugar in the recipe cuts through the spiciness and acidity, rounding out the flavors in the relish. Instead of the Swiss cheese in a Cuban, we use fontina. We press the sandwich just as you would a Cuban, and presto! We have what we have nicknamed the Cubano-Italiano.

While we use a delicious aged Cheddar, this sandwich will be a success with other cheeses, too, as long as they have a big presence, such as a sharp Gouda (no subtle fontinas or mozzarellas); because the cheese is the star of the sandwich, it needs to stand up to the other flavors. Use just enough smoked ham to balance the cheese and poached pear. Use a very thin layer of mustard on the bread, right next to the cheese. The bread in this instance should be something nutty and fruity. The tartness of the dried cranberries in our bread is a great addition to the sandwich, so if you don’t have them in your bread, you could add them to the poaching liquid when you prepare the pears.

Growing up in Chile, Sisha often ate a breakfast of avocado on toast, adding olive oil, salt, pepper, and sometimes ham. So this simple sandwich evolved, like many breakfast foods, into an excellent snack. Please note that with a simple recipe such as this, it is all the more critical that each ingredient be top-notch. Of course, the obvious place to start is with quality smoked ham. But don’t forget, too, that a perfectly ripe avocado will add the best texture and flavor and that a fresh bakery baguette will have that incomparable French bread taste. As for the butter? Unsalted gives you control over how much and what kind of salt to add. And your sandwich will reach a higher level altogether if made with fresh butter from a local farm.

This open-faced sandwich is similar in many ways to a Spanish tortilla. It’s best made in really well-seasoned cast-iron skillets that were passed down from your grandmother. And there’s a great side benefit: the dish is perfect for brunch guests, since it looks so good (and thus makes you look so good) when you’re serving it!

Perhaps you’ll consider it “cheating” to add luxurious prosciutto to a vegetable dish, but I consider it a genius way to liven up the plate. And this is the easiest side dish you will ever make. I like to add this to my scrambled eggs for breakfast.

Saltimbocca means “leap in the mouth”—as in, this traditional Roman dish is so good that surprisingly it will just leap into your mouth. In Italy they make this dish with veal, but I find that the delicate flavors of veal get lost amid the strong tastes of the spinach and prosciutto, and I end up feeling like the very expensive veal cutlets were a waste of money. So I use chicken.

Traditionally, this rich dish is served as a main course, and as a kid that’s the way I ate it. But it also works in our health-conscious world as a starter or a side with something fresher and lighter—say, grilled fish drizzled with lemon juice or grilled meat. A creamy, cheesy dish like this is just the thing to make you feel coddled, as if your dining room is the coziest spot on earth.