An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace

by Tamar Adler

I often push the limits of a single pot of water’s utility, boiling broccoli or cauliflower, then pasta, and then potatoes, all in succession, and then use the water to make beans. As long as you move from less starchy ingredients to more starchy ingredients, one pot of water can get you pretty far.

If you’re going to eat it immediately, let the broth settle, then use a ladle to skim any fat off the top of the liquid by making a little whirlpool with your ladle and lightly skimming what rises to the top of the ladle. This takes practice. If you can wait, put the broth in the refrigerator. Tomorrow there will be a thin layer of fat over the top of the broth, which you can skim off with a spoon and save for sautéing vegetables or spreading on toast. If I’m making a to-do of it, I serve some of the broth as a first course. In that case, I cook a few vegetables or pasta that are as small and beautiful as I can manage and serve a spoonful of them in each bowl of broth. If it’s summer, dice a little zucchini and onion and cook them in butter in a pan. If it’s spring, pull a little of the broth aside and cook English peas in a combination of broth and butter. If it’s autumn, little cubes of butternut squash and rice are good. If it’s winter, cook tiny pasta shells or heartier pasta, like tortellini. Warm enough broth for everyone, then warm the vegetables, grains, or pasta in the broth, and ladle it out in bowls with spoonfuls of each in each. If it’s a second or third or fourth day soup I’m making, I pick off whatever meat is left on the carcass, heat up my broth, and cook noodles in it, omitting vegetables entirely and using enough noodles that the resulting soup is a golden broth, flush with swollen noodles and little bits of chicken. I like twisted pasta like fusilli and...

A gently but sincerely cooked egg tells us all we need to know about divinity. It hinges not on the question of how the egg began, but how the egg will end. A good egg, cooked deliberately, gives us a glimpse of the greater forces at play.

Poach eggs directly in stews. In the Middle East there is a wonderful egg-in-stew dish called shakshouka, traditionally eaten in late morning. It is made by stewing onion, garlic, sliced peppers, and whole tomatoes in a lot of olive oil, then poaching eggs directly in the rich, oily sauce. It is a glorious food. Make a version using any tomato sauce you have. If it’s store-bought, cook fresh onions, garlic, and peppers in a lot of olive oil before adding the sauce. Serve it very hot, drizzled with more oil, with a lot of bread.

The French dish called oeufs en restes, literally “eggs in leftovers,” has as its only two requisite ingredients eggs and leftovers. Recipes instruct to heat any leftover, like boiled or roasted meat, or vegetables, or beans, in a pan with a little broth, crack and slide the eggs onto the warm restes, salt the eggs, cover the pan, and cook on medium-low heat until the eggs are cooked through. This is a delicious and very adaptable meal. As long as the restes are hot, the eggs should be able to resist the temptation to meander toward the bottom of the pan. If they yield to temptation, use a soft spatula to scramble them into the restes instead.

Try poaching eggs directly in chicken broth. This is delicious if philosophically perplexing. Sauté a little garlic in olive oil in a pot, add chicken broth to it, then when it’s hot, crack an egg or two into a cup each, and slide them into the broth. While the eggs are cooking, put a piece of t...

Spoon your filling over the half-moon of the omelet closest to you. Tilting the whole pan up toward you, fold the farther side, with a combination of gravity, your spatula, and optimism, over the filled half. Slide it out of the pan onto a plate. Or make an omelet but leave it unfilled and unfolded. Flat, round omelets are quiet, and a little serious. I like to eat them with bread or cut into wide ribbons and placed on hot rice, sprinkled with vinegar and a few pickled chiles. I recently learned a trick for making plain, flat omelets taste dressier: whisk in a teaspoon of white wine per three eggs before adding them to the pan.

In Spain, the most common one, called tortilla española, is made of potatoes, onion, and eggs. Like everything in Spain, it’s made unabashedly oily. I recommend following suit. Tortilla española 2 small potatoes 1 onion a lot of olive oil salt 3 eggs, beaten Heat the oven to 375 degrees. Peel and thinly slice the potatoes and onion. Cook them together in a deep sauté pan with a committed 1/2 inch olive oil. Layer a combination of potatoes and onion in the pan, salting each layer. Cook them over low heat, letting them poach in the oil and the liquid they emit. When they’re soft, drain them in a colander over a bowl; save the starchy oil to cook vegetables in later in the week. Let the potatoes cool. Heat new olive oil in an eight- or nine-inch pan. Mix the potatoes, onion, a quarter of their oil, and beaten eggs to cover them, in a bowl, and pour the mixture into the pan. As soon as the eggs are set, put the pan in the oven to finish cooking for 10 to 15 minutes, until the top is set and just firm to the touch. Put a plate on the pan and flip the pan over. Serve at room temperature.

Mix two or three cups of pasta with three beaten eggs. Salt it lightly. If you have Parmesan cheese, grate a little directly into the pasta-egg mixture. Add as many herbs as you have, up to a half cup. Any are good. Celery leaves or the celery-like herb, lovage, give pasta frittatas a particularly pleasant bite. Cook the frittata as you do tortilla española. When you can lift the sides of the pie up and peek under it, put it in the oven to finish cooking.

Aioli is also the name of the festive Provençal meal that is organized around big bowls of it, for dipping, spreading, smothering, spooning. There are different-sized “aioli” meals ranging from petite, which can contain just little boiled potatoes, boiled eggs, bread, and garlic mayonnaise; to grande, which includes salt cod, green beans, carrots, and chickpeas, or any other arrangement of spring or summer vegetables; to an aioli monstre, which goes all-out, with bowls of aioli accompanied by at least all of those and baby artichokes, little snails, and squid stew.

I start with room-temperature eggs. There are scientific disagreements about whether this is good sense or superstition. I do not care what anyone says, my mayonnaise stays together better that way. Serve this in a bowl, with its accompaniments and a lot of warm bread. In Provence, an aioli without rosé is a nameless thing, and I’m not sure anyone would begin eating if there were none to pour. Mayonnaise and aioli 2 egg yolks 3/4 teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon Dijon mustard 2 cups best olive oil around, plus more if the mayonnaise is not too wobbly when you’re done 1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon room-temperature water 3/4 teaspoon (a squeeze) fresh lemon juice 1 drop red wine vinegar For aioli: 2 cloves garlic, pounded to a paste with salt in a mortar with a pestle or on a cutting board Dampen a dish towel, form it into a ring on the kitchen table, then set a bowl in the ring. This will steady it while you whisk. Whisk the egg yolks, salt, and mustard. When the yolks are a uniform yellow, about 5 seconds into whisking, begin to add the oil in a very slow stream, only drop by drop to start. This matters, and there’s no voodoo or trick or way of getting around it. Once the mayonnaise thickens, start adding the oil more quickly. When it becomes hard to whisk, add the water and lemon juice. Then whisk in the remaining oil. Taste for salt. Salt will take time to disperse throughout the mayonnaise because it’s not dissolved by heat or vinegar. If you’re not serving it for hours, keep the seaso...

Our desire to eat fresh vegetables has left us with an idea that vegetables are only good if they’re cooked just before being eaten. But many of the best vegetable dishes are created over time. This is true of a lot of dishes, but particularly of ones made from vegetables, those unwieldy things that take more doing than anything else in the kitchen does before they’re even close to done. Here is what I do, and I think it works well: Each week I buy whole bunches of the leafiest, stemmiest vegetables I can find. Then I scrub off their dirt, trim off their leaves, cut off their stems, peel what needs peeling, and cook them all at once. By the time I’ve finished, I’ve drawn a map of the week’s meals and created the beginnings of a succession of them. Then each day I pick up where I left off. On Monday night, I decide to neatly make a vinaigrette, plump a few raisins in warm vinegar, and have a roasted vegetable salad. Or I warm some vegetables up with a sprig of thyme, a little broth, and a splash of cream and have soup. On Tuesday, I choose to eat the salad as is, or turn what is left into a frittata, or I decide to eat soup and spend my time making little garlic-rubbed toasts to accompany it. On Wednesday, I add freshly chopped mint and vinegared onions to roasted beets, or perhaps press garlicky cooked kale into sandwiches, or toss the kale with a béchamel sauce and spread it in a buttered dish to make a warm, bubbling gratin. This ensures my vegetables don’t go bad—crispe...

Stem cooking greens by pulling leaves away from their stems in the opposite direction, and drop them into the water in your sink, where the beet greens await them. Beet leaves’ stems are tender enough to leave connected to their leaves. If other stems are slim and seem to want to stay where they are, let them. Swish the leaves around in the cold water, then move them to a cutting board in batches and cut them roughly, once or twice. Cut the stems of beet leaves into smaller pieces when you get down toward their bottoms. It’s easier to do any finer cutting than this after they are cooked and cooled and won’t shake water everywhere. Don’t worry about drying them. The water that clings to the cooking greens’ leaves is your best friend in sautéing them. They will cook better if they’re damp when you begin. Cook your greens in batches. Put the two biggest deep pans or widest pots you have on the stove. Heat a tablespoon of oil in each. Add greens directly to the pans, letting the leaves pile up a little. Salt each batch lightly when you start cooking it, knowing that the greens will cook down significantly. Add a smashed or chopped garlic clove just after the greens and let it sizzle in the warm oil for a few seconds before mixing it through. Stir the greens with a big spoon, and lower the heat if they seem to be getting burned without getting cooked. If the pan seems dry, add a spoonful of water. A nice occasional addition is an infinitesimally small scrape of cinnamon, nutmeg...

Garlicky leaf, stem, and core pesto 4 to 5 cups stems, leaves, and cores of cauliflower, broccoli, kale, collard greens, Swiss chard, cabbage, sliced or diced into 1/2-inch pieces 3 cloves garlic 1/2 cup olive oil 1/2 teaspoon salt water Put everything in a pot just big enough to hold it and add water to cover by half. Cook it at below a simmer until anything you prod with a wooden spoon is smashable. Keep just enough water in the pot to make sure the bottom’s not burning, adding a little water as you need it. When everything is soft, purée it quickly in a blender or food processor, or simply smash it with a wooden spoon until you get tired, leaving moments of appealing, irregular texture. This is delicious dolloped on toast and grated with Parmesan, or treated as a side dish and served with fish or meat, or, with a cup of Parmesan cheese added, mixed with hot pasta.

A vibrant vegetable salad 2 cups cooked vegetables 1/4 cup chopped almonds or walnuts 1/4 onion of any color or a shallot, thinly sliced into half-moons red wine vinegar a pinch of salt 1/2 teaspoon mustard olive oil 1/4 cup roughly chopped parsley or mint 1/4 cup roughly chopped turnip greens or radish tops or another peppery-tasting leaf a squeeze of lemon Let the vegetables come to room temperature. Remove them from the refrigerator when you get home from work so they can warm up slowly, or speed them up by putting a bowl of them near a lit burner or on a warm oven. If you didn’t toast nuts during the week’s cooking, toast them now in a 400-degree oven, checking them after 5 minutes, then periodically until they are lightly colored. Shake them off their tray. In a bowl big enough to hold all the vegetables, soak the onion in vinegar with a pinch of salt for 10 minutes. Add the mustard to the bowl and mix it in. Let it sit for another 2. Add the vegetables, toasted nuts, and a long drizzle of olive oil, then the herbs, greens, and squeeze of lemon. It should all taste refreshed.

The best soups are a day old. Soup mustn’t be fresh, but mature. They needn’t taste of their ingredients, but only give their ingredients somewhere to be left off and picked up again. I learned to make soup from my mother, whose potages contained whatever was around, much of it already cooked: roasted root vegetables, boiled potatoes or turnips, an odd handful of herbs. She served them throughout my childhood, doused with good olive oil and topped with crisp croutons. They were a day old or older. Their ingredients were older yet, and they were delicious. To make a good, honest, authentic potage, like my mother’s, slice half an onion and a clove of garlic. Cook them, salting as soon as you add them to the pan, with a half teaspoon of fresh thyme in a little butter and olive oil, until tender. If they start to brown, add a few drops of water. Add any combination of roasted squash, root vegetables, and sweet potato and an equal quantity of stock or water. Let it all simmer for half an hour. Purée in a blender in batches, blending more solids than liquid. If it begins to seem too liquidy at any point, leave some of the broth behind. If it needs more liquid, judiciously add some of what you have left; you can always add more. You can make this days in advance. Warm the soup up slowly in a pot before eating. If you want a soup of cauliflower or broccoli, begin it the same way, omit the thyme and add a quarter cup of olive oil before blending it and a dab of cold butter once you...

Or make risotto according to the instructions. While the rice is cooking, chop three or four roasted beets into small cubes—small, not perfect. Drizzle them with a little red wine vinegar and olive oil and taste them for salt. Put the bowl close to the cooking rice to warm. When the risotto is nearly done, add a big handful of chopped thyme and parsley, if you have it, and a lot of grated Parmesan. Put a big ladleful of risotto into wide shallow bowls, making a little hollow in the center of each bowl of risotto. Fill each hollow with a heaping spoonful of beets. Drizzle with olive oil, add a few cracks of black pepper, and top it all with more Parmesan. I make this sort of risotto with other vegetables, too, the same way, after they’ve taken turns as purées. Or chop cooked vegetables up, add a little good fat, and bake it all. If you were worried, this keeps the future from seeming too fibrous.

End-of-the-week vegetable curry 1/2 onion, cut into large dice peanut oil or olive oil salt 1/2 teaspoon, combined, ground turmeric, ground cardamom, and ground cumin 1/2 teaspoon flaked chile; if you have a whole, fresh chile, mince it and use instead 1/2 cup cooked chickpeas or black-eyed peas, canned or cooked from dried 1/2 to 1 can coconut milk 1 cup other liquid (chicken stock, strange liquid requisitioned from cooking vegetables, or water) 2 or 3 pieces lemon rind optional: 1 teaspoon Thai or Vietnamese fish sauce 2 cups cooked vegetables 1/2 cup toasted peanuts Fresh lemon juice Fresh mint or basil leaves Cook the onion in peanut or olive oil, adding salt as soon as you add the onion. Add the spices and the chile. Once the spices are fragrant, add the beans, then add all the liquid and lemon rind. Cook, stirring occasionally, at below a simmer until the beans are very tender, about 1/2 hour. Add the fish sauce if you are using it. Add the vegetables and peanuts and cook for 15 minutes on low heat. When everything seems integrated, taste the curry. Add salt if it needs it and a big squeeze of lemon juice. Serve on rice, topped with fresh herbs.

Citrus peels are some of the most often forsaken tails. Before juicing them, remove the zest from one or two oranges or lemons and combine a spoonful of their zest, a half clove of finely chopped garlic, a big handful of roughly chopped parsley or mint, and a little crunchy salt, and you have a gorgeous and quite sophisticated sauce for sprinkling over boiled chicken or poached eggs.

You can gather all of that, in whatever versions. You can also cook well, not in different pots and pans, but in the ones you have. As long as you taste curiously, and watch and feel and listen, and prick your way toward food you like, you will find that you become someone about whom people will say that cooking seems to come naturally, like walking. They will say it and it will be true. That is my advice then, on experience and equipment. Consider not minding whether you know the answer, and not filling your kitchen with tools, but becoming, rather, the kind of cook who doesn’t need them.

Make basil pesto by toasting a handful of pine nuts, walnuts, or pecans, pounding a half clove of garlic to a paste with salt, combining them and a cup of freshly grated Parmesan cheese in a food processor, and filling the rest with at least three cups fresh basil. Blend it quickly in pulses, adding olive oil until it looks like pesto. Or substitute a combination of arugula and parsley for basil. In the winter, quickly dunk cooking greens in well-salted boiling water, drain them well, and use them instead.

A little shallot, chopped finely and added to the butter along with parsley, makes the traditional French accompaniment to steak, maître d’hôtel butter. I find a bit of grated ginger works magic on mint butter.

So go by geography. Cuisines that cook in olive oil use herbs that grow well in the same climate as olive groves, like parsley, marjoram, thyme, rosemary, and sage. They are best for herby oils. Cuisines where food is cooked in butter have their own herbs, like chervil and tarragon. Where yogurt is treated as a sauce, mint, cilantro, and dill are prolific. I can’t think of anything that doesn’t taste good in mayonnaise.

Minestra di herbe passate 5 tablespoons butter 1/2 carrot, chopped 1/2 onion, chopped 8 cups herbs: cilantro, parsley, whole chives, spinach, sorrel, lettuce leaves 2 small potatoes, peeled and cut into chunks 1 tablespoon salt, plus to taste 4 cups water or more to cover lemon juice optional: croutons, chives, herby oil, sour cream, yogurt to garnish Melt the butter in a big soup pot. Add the carrot and onion and cook until tender. Add the potatoes, water, and salt. Bring to a boil, reduce the heat, and cook at a simmer until the potatoes are completely tender and beginning to fall apart. Add the herbs. Taste the soup and salt until the broth tastes good. Blend in batches until as smooth as possible. If the soup seems fibrous, pour it through a fine-mesh sieve. This can be served hot or cold. Squeeze with lemon juice just before serving and top with little croutons and any other herbs or garnishes.

Jim Lahey’s no-knead bread 3 cups all-purpose or bread flour and more for dusting 1/4 teaspoon instant yeast 11/4 teaspoons salt 15/8 cups water cornmeal In a large bowl, combine the flour, yeast, and salt. Add the water and stir until blended; the dough will be shaggy and sticky. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap. Let the dough rest for 18 hours at warm room temperature, around 70 degrees. (How pleasant!) When the dough’s surface has begun to bubble, lightly flour a big cutting board and place the dough on it; sprinkle it with a little more flour and fold it in on itself once or twice. Cover loosely with plastic wrap and leave it there for 15 minutes. Using just enough flour to keep the dough from sticking to the work surface or to your fingers, gently and quickly shape the dough into a ball. Generously coat a smooth towel with flour and cornmeal. Put the dough, seam side down, on the towel and dust with more flour. Cover with another smooth towel and let rise for about 2 hours. It should more than double in size and not spring back when poked with a finger. Heat the oven to 450 degrees. Put a 6- to 8-quart heavy cast-iron, enamel, Pyrex, or ceramic pot with a lid (I use my heavy Le Creuset Dutch oven) in the oven as it heats. After 30 minutes, carefully remove the pot from the oven. Slide your hand under the loaf on the towel and turn the dough over into the pot, seam side up. Don’t worry about its appearance. Shake the pan once or twice to distribute the dough; the rest ...

Olive oil tart dough 21/2 cups all-purpose flour 1/3 cup best possible olive oil 1/2 cup ice water 1 teaspoon fine sea salt Mix all the ingredients together in a bowl. If the dough doesn’t stay together, add a touch more ice water and mix to integrate. Divide the dough in half. Roll each half into a ball, then flatten it into a disk. Save the half you’re not using. Let the half you are using sit in the refrigerator for an hour. While it is chilling, heat the oven to 400 degrees. Remove the dough and roll it into a 1/4-inch-thick round on a floured surface. Lightly grease the bottom of a 9-inch pie plate and dust it with flour. Lay the crust in the pan. Trim the excess with a sharp knife. Prick the bottom a few times with the knife’s tip. Fill the crust with aluminum foil and fill the foil with dried beans or pie weights. Cover the exposed rim of the crust with a crust guard, or make your own with a long piece of tin foil. Bake for 20 minutes. Remove the foil and pie weights but leave the crust guard, then bake for another 15 minutes. Remove from the oven.

For a very good, basic tart filling that makes a perfect bed for any vegetable, whisk one and a half cups of ricotta, a quarter cup of good olive oil, two tablespoons cream, a half teaspoon kosher salt, two egg yolks, and a pinch of chopped fresh thyme or rosemary. This makes a very rich, salty custard that if there are no vegetables is a gratifying filling on its own.

Bread soup recipes are comically nitpicky about how stale and rugged their main ingredient must be. Authentic recipes for the French croûte au pot, which means “crust in a pot,” rigidly call not for stale bread but for only stale bread crusts to be cooked with the fat from a pot of boiling meat until they stick to their pot’s bottom, then served with the broth from the boiling pot ladled over the top. A recipe for onion bread soup from Simple French Cooking by Richard Olney demands stale bread that is “coarse, vulgar, compact.” We have all tossed loaves for meeting that description at some point. Stale bread cannot be bought. It must be waited for, which gives all dishes containing it the weight of philosophical ballast, as well as dietary and budgetary ones. Probably the most delicious bread soup is ribollita, the famous bread soup of Tuscany. As a Tuscan friend witheringly explained to me once, ribollita does not contain any procurable ingredients: “You don’t buy ingredients for ribollita. You have them.” Here is a recipe for a less than authentic ribollita. The truest ones require that you “have” the exact contents of the average Tuscan larder. Ribollita olive oil 1 medium onion, diced 2 cloves garlic, sliced 2 stalks celery, diced salt 1/2 cup fresh parsley and rosemary, roughly chopped 1/2 teaspoon chile flakes 3 peeled whole tomatoes 1 bunch leafy cooking greens like kale, Swiss chard, or collard greens, stemmed and chopped 1/4 cup water 2 cups cooked cranberry beans...

would repeat this in every chapter if I could. To make basic bread soup, heat a half cup olive oil in a soup pot. Cook a cup of any combination garlic, onion, leek, and celery, finely sliced, until tender, salting the vegetables immediately to keep them from browning. Add a half cup roughly chopped fresh parsley and rosemary or the leaves from a bunch of celery, four cups cubed stale bread, crusts removed, and, after stirring well, four cups any combination vegetable cooking liquids, meat broths, and bean broths you have, and the rind of a piece of Parmesan. Let it cook covered for twenty to thirty minutes, adding water if it starts to stick, until the bread has broken down completely. All bread soups are somewhere between soup and solid. The best way to tell if yours is done is by knowing it will thwart attempts to classify it as one or the other and, instead of trying, take it off the heat when it tastes good. Remove the cheese rind. Drizzle heavily with olive oil, grate with Parmesan cheese, and top with freshly cracked black pepper.

Leftover bread soup should be formed into little cakes and panfried in olive oil. These might be better than the soup that precedes them, and probably better than the bread before it. At the restaurant where my brother is chef, the kitchen makes ribollita throughout the winter but never serves it as soup at all. The soup is cooked, then left to get cold and absorb its flavors for a few days. It is then made into gorgeously nubby little golden pancakes.

Marinated goat cheese four 4-ounce logs plain goat cheese—organic is better olive oil 1 bunch thyme 2 cloves garlic, peeled 1 tablespoon fennel seeds, toasted 1 teaspoon salt Cut the cheese into rounds. Getting them cold before you do so makes this easier; keep whatever cheese gets stuck in the plastic wrappers and, in the end, shape it into rounds the size of the ones you’ve cut. Pour a little olive oil into a bowl and dip each round in it to keep it from sticking to all the others. Put the herb sprigs, garlic, and fennel seeds into a glass jar, then add the cheese carefully. Sprinkle salt in as you go to distribute it. Cover it well with oil. Store the jar in the refrigerator for at least 4 days before eating. It will keep for up to 3 months.

Savory baked ricotta 32 ounces soft ricotta 1/4 cup very good olive oil 2 egg yolks 1/4 cup roughly chopped fresh thyme, rosemary, marjoram, parsley, mint, oregano leaves salt and freshly cracked black pepper to taste Heat the oven to 425 degrees. Mix all the ingredients well in a mixing bowl. Add salt judiciously until it tastes a tiny bit less seasoned than you think it should be. A lot of water will evaporate while this bakes. Spread the mixture into a 9-inch pie dish. Bake it in the middle of the oven for 30 to 35 minutes. The top will develop a toasted, brown skin. It will inflate slightly and then deflate when you take it out. This is good at any temperature. Store it in the refrigerator. All other cheese simply likes condiments. The condiments can be the Strasbourg Muenster plate’s finely chopped onion or pickles of some kind, or a chutney, or a relish, or marmalade, or mustard. Put bread and cheese, and whatever condiments you’ve chosen, on the table. Serve them, a salad, and not much else.

Italian salads are often just a single raw or cooked vegetable, sliced thinly and dressed with a drizzle of vinegar and olive oil. In France, they are happy little mops of celery root, doused in vinegar and mixed with crème fraîche and capers. In Greece or Israel, salads might be cucumbers and mint, or roasted eggplant, or spiced boiled carrots. There is a delicious Palestinian salad made only of preserved lemons, roughly puréed, and eaten cold with warm pita bread. Elizabeth David suggests, after her lament about her native England’s bad salads, “a dish of long red radishes, cleaned, but with a little of the green leaves left on.” Cold roasted beets, sliced or cubed, drizzled with vinegar, and mixed with toasted nuts and olive oil are a wonderful salad. So is roasted broccoli, tossed with vinegared onions and a light smattering of dried chile. So are green beans, boiled until just cooked, cold and sliced thinly, tossed with peanuts and crisp scallions and rice wine vinegar and sesame oil. So is boiled cauliflower or potatoes, already nicely salted, drizzled with vinegar and oil, with a big handful of chopped olives and capers mixed in. Anything, cooked or raw, cut up a little, mixed firmly with acid, salt, and a little fat, laid carefully on a plate, or spooned nicely into a bowl, is a “salad.”

Parsley salad 1 bunch flat-leaf or curly-leaf parsley, stems removed and leaves roughly chopped 1 shallot, thinly sliced 1 teaspoon drained capers 4 cornichons, thinly sliced juice of 1 lemon 3 tablespoons olive oil salt and freshly ground black pepper Mix the parsley, shallots, capers, and cornichons. Mix the lemon juice and olive oil together and add to the salad. Sprinkle lightly with salt to taste. Top with freshly ground black pepper.

Root vegetable rémoulade 3 celery roots or parsnips, or 1 rutabaga white wine vinegar salt 1 cup crème fraîche or homemade mayonnaise freshly ground black pepper 2 tablespoons drained capers, roughly chopped lemon juice olive oil Peel the vegetables. If it is celery root, cut the skin off with a knife. Cut them into thin slices, then into matchstick-sized pieces. Put the pieces in a bowl, douse them well with white wine vinegar, and season with a little salt. Let them sit for half an hour, mixing occasionally, then put the vegetables into a colander to drain. Press down on them well, several times, then transfer to a mixing bowl. Mix in the crème fraîche or mayonnaise, adding more to taste as needed, a lot of black pepper, and the chopped capers. Just before serving, add a squeeze of lemon juice and a drizzle of olive oil.

Rice or lentil salad 2 cups cooked rice or lentils 2 tablespoons chopped fresh oregano 1/2 cup pine nuts, walnuts, or almonds, toasted and roughly chopped 2 tablespoons drained capers a big pinch of chopped fresh chives basic vinaigrette, to taste Make basic vinaigrette. In a bowl, mix the rice or lentils with the oregano, nuts, capers, and chives, then drizzle in the dressing, tasting as you go. You can make this just as well with leftover rice, lentils, or beans as with freshly cooked ones. For lunch or dinner, make what is called salade composée, or composed salad. The ingredients of composed salads aren’t mixed, but laid side by side. The French salade niçoise is a famous one, made of tuna, little new potatoes, green beans, and wedges of ripe tomato. More adaptable is salade canaille, which translates as “salad of the scoundrel.” It must be made of a rabble: the rice salad you made yesterday in one pile, lightly dressed beets in another, vinegary potatoes, a handful of fresh herbs, maybe some marinated peppers. It should be a hoi polloi until it is on your fork.

Prepare whole heads of lettuce by paring the leaves off their cores with a small knife. Lettuce leaves will stay good longer if they’re cleanly cut. Do this by holding the lettuce and cutting around each core carefully, which saves you a cutting board. Drop the leaves directly into a sink filled with water. Save outer, browned or yellowing lettuce leaves for soup. Move the lettuce around in the water with your hands.

I like this recipe from Elizabeth David’s book Summer Cooking, because it continues to flip and flip. It is for laitue au jus, or lettuce with gravy. “Cold crisp lettuce with the rich gravy from a roast poured over it, hot. Exquisite with the hot meat or bird, especially if it has been cooked in butter and flavoured with garlic and wine. Dandelions or Batavian endive can also be used for this salad.”

Simple and delicious beans and rice also only requires that you boil a pot of water and add rice. Warm your beans in their broth until they’re very hot, make rice, and ladle the beans on top. Or, if it’s spring, cook halved little white turnips with their long greens still attached, or English or snap peas in butter and bean broth or water, and cut little wedges of artichokes and cook them in olive oil and butter. When everything is tender, combine it in one big pan, add beans, a lot of broth, and a big handful of whatever soft herbs you have—chervil, chives, mint, fennel fronds, celery leaves—and ladle the bright, springy stew over rice. If you don’t want to make rice, add a little extra butter and herbs to the vegetables and beans and serve it over toast.

Or make a simpler, utterly satisfying version by cooking a mixture of finely chopped onion, carrot, and celery, called mirepoix, in olive oil, browning a small, garlicky fresh sausage per person, spooning beans and mirepoix into a baking dish big enough to fit them happily, and nestling the sausages among the beans. Add bean broth to come up just halfway and put it in a 300-degree oven. It takes about an hour for the sausages to cook through at low heat, which gives them time to get tender and for the beans to sip up some of their juices. Take the dish out when it’s bubbly and the sausages are cooked, scatter the top heavily with toasted breadcrumbs, then put it under the broiler for a few minutes, until the top is crisp and brown.

If there’s already meat on the table, or you can go without, skip the sausages and ladle beans an inch or two deep in a small ceramic roasting pan and turn them into a rustic, herby French bean gratin. Cook mirepoix as above and mix it into the beans. Bake the gratin in the oven until it begins to bubble. Mix a big handful of any combination of chopped parsley, rosemary, and sage into toasted breadcrumbs, top the gratin thickly, and let it cook until the top is quite brown.

Minestrone 1 cup diced onion, carrot, celery, leek, fennel 3 cloves garlic, sliced 1/2 cup olive oil a small pinch of chile flakes the end of a piece of cured meat or hard salami, diced 1 cup any combination parsley, thyme, marjoram, basil leaves 2 to 3 cups roughly chopped any combination kale, collard greens, Swiss chard, spinach, mustard greens, dandelion greens, broccoli raab, escarole, cabbage (cooked or raw), any stems and leaves, ribs, and cores, cooked or raw 1/2 cup whole tomatoes, well chopped, or drained canned tomatoes optional: 1/2 to 1 cup chopped root vegetables (if they are there and need to be cooked, or cooked and need to be eaten) 6 cups cooked beans a Parmesan rind 8 cups any combination bean broth, stock, and liquid from cans of tomatoes 1 cup small pasta such as orecchiette, little tubes, or small penne pesto, olive tapenade, fresh ricotta, or parsley for garnish Cook the onion, carrot, celery, leek, fennel, and garlic in the olive oil until tender in a big pot. Add the chile flakes and any cured meat. Stir to combine. Add the herbs, greens, tomatoes, root vegetables, beans, and cheese rind, crushing the tomatoes against the side of the pot. Add liquid to cover. Simmer for 45 to 60 minutes, until everything has agreed to become minestrone. Just before you eat the soup, cook the pasta in a pot of salted, boiling water, only enough for the soup you’re planning to eat that week, and add it to the week’s soup. If you freeze minestrone, cook new pasta when...

like another Italian recipe, from the cookbook The Silver Spoon, that says to cook a pound of spinach in salted water, sauté it in a lot of butter, boil rice in the spinach cooking water, and serve bowls of the rice topped with the buttered spinach and a lot of grated Parmesan.

The only requisite ingredient for your own version is a bowl of any shape or color of hot rice. Serve one thing that’s warm: each bowl can get a newly fried egg on it, or hot stir-fried spinach or scallions, or vegetable leftovers, like sautéed kale or roasted squash. If it’s a leftover vegetable, chop it, warm it in a pan with a bit of broth or water, then mix it with a drizzle of vinegar and a handful of toasted sesame seeds, or peanuts, and top the rice with it or serve it in a bowl alongside. Serve a little bowl of something cool and raw: thinly sliced radishes, chopped cucumbers drizzled with vinegar, thick slices of avocado, chunks of tomato, fresh herbs. Serve one vibrant, intense-flavored thing: spicy pickled chiles, a homemade salsa of scallions, herbs, and vinegar, Korean kimchee, Indian pickled mango. I like a little can of sardines, too. If you don’t, try leftover beef, chicken, or pork, cut into cubes and panfried. Or softly scramble eggs and add a handful of roughly chopped ripe tomato, salt, and a handful of fresh cilantro at the very end, and serve it on hot rice. I existed on solely this and sautéed eggplant for a month in China. The first I ate because it is humble but exquisite. The second is because eggplant is one of the few words I can pronounce perfectly in tonal Mandarin.

a truly pacifying rice dish, make rice and lettuce soup. I first made this soup after looking at a head of lettuce and wondering why I’d never seen lettuce risotto on a menu. I didn’t get the answer, because I then began wondering why no one ever boiled risotto rice. I’m sure lettuce risotto is on a menu, and it’s just a menu I haven’t seen. And people surely do boil risotto rice, and ought to, because it turns out wonderfully. I passed this recipe along to a friend who reported that it was “butter’s highest and best use, because the lettuce becomes an expression of butter . . . sweet, crunchy, innocent butter.” Rice and lettuce soup 11/2 onions, medium diced 2 tablespoons butter salt 1/3 cup parsley leaves, roughly chopped 1/2 cup Arborio rice 81/2 cups chicken stock or combination chicken stock and water 1 very big head lettuce, such as romaine or other crisp leaf; about 16 cups very, very loosely packed Cook the onions in butter in a medium-sized pot, salting them once you have added them to the pot. When they’re softened, add the parsley. Add the rice and liquid. Let it cook about half an hour until the rice is completely cooked through, and then for another 20 minutes until it’s jagged around the edges. Turn off the heat. Taste for salt. Cut the lettuce in thin ribbons. When you’re ready to eat, warm the soup up, add the lettuce to the soup, and mix it through. Serve each bowl with rice mounded in the middle and more liquid poured over. Drizzle with good olive oil and...

The most illuminating addition I’ve read is by Elizabeth David, who seems always to have had the right terminology for everything. Her risotto instructions say that the rice should be “impregnated” by butter before the wine is added. The rice goes from being transparent to being opaque, and seems filled up. Maybe the truest evidence of the almost sacramental simplicity of Italian risotto cooking is a dish called risotto in cantina for which risotto is made with onion, wine, butter, and broth, and then served in a bowl of sharp white wine, which is, we are firmly instructed, not to be mixed with the risotto, but dipped into before each bite. That is from Elizabeth David, too, who remarks that she doesn’t know why it sounds so enticing. Neither do I, but it does, doesn’t it?

The Neapolitan street food arancini are a spectacular use of leftover risotto, which after sitting for a night becomes claylike and can be shaped around little pieces of cheese, rolled into balls, dipped in breadcrumbs, then deep fried. You can also simply shape cold risotto into little cakes and panfry them in olive oil until golden brown. Always make more rice than you need for a meal. Asian cultures make fried rice, for which rice must be a day old. What makes fried rice good is every grain getting a chance to fry individually in hot oil. I’ve tried to make fancier fried rice by cooking a pot of rice especially for frying. It was mushy and inferior. (Thank heavens for the occasional, calculable superiority of old things.) My favorite is Thai fried rice. Thai fried rice 1 tablespoon peanut oil 2 shallots, sliced into thin rounds 1 Thai bird’s-eye chile, sliced into thin rounds 2 cloves garlic, smashed once or twice 1 cup yesterday’s cooked rice salt 1/2 cup chopped cucumber, radish, or green tomato 2 cups chopped cilantro or a combination of basil, cilantro, and mint a big squeeze of lime, plus lime wedges for serving 1/2 teaspoon sugar 2 teaspoons Thai fish sauce optional: 1 fried egg per person Heat the oil in as wide a pan or wok as possible. You need enough hot surface area for every grain to fry. Once the oil has begun to smoke, add the shallots, chile, and garlic, then immediately add the rice. Spread it out over the whole surface of the pan. Salt it lightly. When ...

Rice pudding 2 cups yesterday’s cooked rice 2 cups coconut milk 1 cup heavy cream (you could use all coconut milk also, but I like the combination) 1/4 cup plus very scant 1/8 cup raw sugar, or 1/4 cup white sugar 1/2 cup raisins (I like the littlest ones but any are fine) 1 teaspoon vanilla 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon a few grates of nutmeg Combine all the ingredients in a small pot. Let it heat to just under a boil. As soon as you see the first bubbles, lower it to a quiet simmer. Cook it with the intention of the rice absorbing everything. After about 50 minutes, it should be very pudding-y, with a tiny bit of swim left to it. Hot, medium, or cold, this is good. In my constant economy and curiosity, I have made this from rice cooked with peppercorns in it, and rice cooked with cardamom in it, and rice cooked with turmeric in it. All good, good, good.

The paper was also right because grits and polenta, their identical twin from across the ocean, are vehicles for butter, cream, and cheese, and most tempers can be at least a little cooled by large quantities of those. I cook grits and polenta interchangeably. This might affect my credibility, but they are both ground corn, and they both taste good with the other’s traditional accoutrements: a bowl of grits is delicious with Bolognese sauce, as is polenta with shrimp or pulled pork.

Warm some garlicky sautéed cooking greens in a pan. Find leftover roasted squash and season it with a little red wine vinegar, dig out some olives and a wedge of Parmesan cheese. Put grits or polenta in a bowl, assemble your leftovers on top, drizzle with balsamic vinegar or olive oil, or both, and grate it all heavily with Parmesan cheese. Or serve grits or polenta with beans ladled over. Or cut salami into slices on a long bias and brown each slice in a pan. Add red wine vinegar to cover and a spoonful of tomato paste. Let the slices of salami simmer until they’ve begun to soften, then spoon three or four pieces per person over each bowl of grits or polenta. Top each with chopped fresh parsley and grated Parmesan cheese.