Roast

When I visited Tokyo and Kyoto with my friend Devra a couple years back, I didn’t want to leave. I would say it was the beautiful aesthetic, the attention to design and style, the amazingly efficient trains, but really, of course, it was the food. I was especially excited when I learned how much the Japanese revere the sweet potato, one of my all-time favorite foods. In season (fall and winter), street vendors hawk stone-roasted ones—paler-fleshed and sweeter than ours. Famous cookbook author Harumi Kurihara showed me how she loves to mash miso into roasted sweet potatoes, so when I returned home, I knew that even the orange-fleshed varieties here would take beautifully to Japanese flavors. For a kick of bitterness that nicely offsets the earthy miso, use broccoli rabe instead of the broccolini.

Remember the peanut butter cup commercials? Man and woman, so happy in their busy day, walking around with snacks in their hands, the sky above the color of a blue slushie the houses plastered in marzipan pastels, a happy-sounding tune of endless comic surprise piped through the air, the world a perfect place. Then—whoopsie, so clumsy of me—they smack into each other, exchanging flavors, and a wonderful new treat is born. Introducing nuts to chocolate is all well and fine and, sure, millions have been made on the combination. But if only the candymakers had the temerity to take the next step, something truly delicious could have come of it: chocolate, nuts, and a faint wave of chile heat all strummed like harp strings by the dexterous fingers of a luscious salt. Use this recipe to explore new dimensions of your favorite chocolate by trying it with a variety of salts. Choose the type and quantity of chile depending on your desire for heat.

One of the great diversions of life in France is an intimate evening at the local bistro, where mainstays of French food are reduced to their basic elements for quick, casual dining. Côte de boeuf en croûte de sel is among the great bistro dishes: beef rib steak, cut tremendously thick, perfectly cooked, and served piping hot with a little herbed butter. Roasted potatoes can accompany the dish, but it is perhaps best to leave the steak to itself; the dish is so simple, so satisfying, that you will likely find yourself thinking of little more than another sip of good red wine and a nice green salad to round things off. This preparation calls for a lot of salt, but fear not, the resulting steak will be seasoned to perfection. Whatever you do, use moist sel gris, never desiccating kosher salt, for your salt crust.

Don your chain mail and broadsword. Ancient food, harbinger of tragedy and regret, roast partridges spur thoughts of delicious violence, provoking a savage appetite spurred by rich flavors and primal aromas. Daedalus, who built the labyrinth that held the Minotaur, flung his brilliant disciple Perdrix off a roof, only to have him transformed into a partridge by the goddess Athena, who has a thing for geniuses. One of the oldest partridge recipes comes from the French, who would encrust foods in salt to protect them from the scorching heat of the oven. The guards of the Aigues-Mortes salt fields, had they survived being massacred by invading Burgundians, would surely have appreciated this dish. The Burgundians were eventually massacred as well, and their bodies buried in a tower filled with salt. Athena would have approved of their ingenuity, and of salt crusting in general, though it is doubtful that she would have approved of this choice of bird for the roasting.

They say we use only 10 percent of our brains. That assessment is immensely appealing. We are all potential supergeniuses with telekinetic and mind-reading powers, and could easily enjoy Heidegger or Joyce for light reading over coffee and donuts in the morning . . . if we only tried. But there is an easier way to experience the unbridled horsepower of our full consciousness: try roasted peaches in bourbon syrup with smoked salt. Your first bite will expand the boundaries of sensation separating your mouth from the rest of your body, and you’ll be feeling spiciness in the warmth of your hands and smokiness in the tingling of your toes. And by the third bite your mind will have moved on to peel the black backing off the edge of the universe, filling the unending space beyond with your pounding heart.

The chicken is in the oven—heat forming a golden crust that seals in the juices, salt working its silent alchemy within, denaturing some of the proteins in tough muscles making those parts more tender and flavorful. Roasting is the easiest way to cook chicken and the tastiest. All that is required to reach perfection is time and the perfect salt. Sugpo Asin, a king among salts, glowing rose-cloud white, lush and firmly crunchy, with dulcet brine notes that play lavishly (but with discipline) against the sweet tamed gaminess of poultry, honors this basic meat and vegetable meal as all basic meals should be honored—asserting the preeminence of simple home cooking as the cornerstone of eating well.

For hundreds of thousands of years, we burned bones in the fire and then broke them open to slather our food (and faces and bodies) in the butter-fine marrow. Scooped from roasted veal bones and spread on a wedge of crusty bread, marrow is so rich and flavorful that it threatens to overwhelm. And that’s where the salt comes in. The strident mineral tones of a coarse sel gris penetrate through the fatty richness, letting fly its myriad dimensions—like cutting a ruby from a hunk of Burmese rock. If marrow hadn’t been created by nature, it would have been necessary to invent it just to have a food that strikes so squarely at the core of the eating experience. If it weren’t for sel gris, nature’s felicity would all be for naught.

This one is for the beet lovers out there. It’s also for the not beet lovers out there. I am not a beet lover, but this ganache is delightful.

Believe me, I had never even had celery root, let alone become infatuated with it, before we started experimenting with root vegetable ganaches. But, in case you haven’t got the point by now, you can trust me on all sweet things that are delicious. I’m not trying to throw a nasty curve ball your way.

When I was first married, back in the late sixties and early seventies, going out to eat was reserved for very special occasions. Because of our tight budgets and young children, our social lives consisted of cooking out with our friends on Saturday nights. When the steaks and Vidalia onions were piled on our plates and we took our first bites, I think for a short while we all forgot that we were as poor as church mice, because we were eating like kings. What fond memories these Vidalia onions bring back!

Another great make-ahead dish, this is an appealing way to serve zucchini at room temperature or chilled. Salting the zucchini and letting it sit for about 30 minutes gets rid of excess liquid and keeps this dish from becoming watery. If you make this ahead of time, remove it from the refrigerator about thirty minutes before serving and taste it. You may find that you need extra shakes of salt and pepper, and an extra squeeze or two of lemon juice.