Alcohol

Although this unusual risotto could be served with Parmesan cheese shaved over the top as a savory side dish, it’s at its best as a dessert. Serve it warm and topped off with a scoop of vanilla ice cream or some sweetened whipped cream. Gobble it all up before the ice cream has a chance to melt.

Fondue has provided nourishment to mountain folk in Switzerland and the Italian and French Alps through many a hard, cold winter. Made from what must have been, at times, the only ingredients at hand, stale bread and hard cheese, the communal rites that developed around the eating of fondue sustained spirits as well as bodies. Although Emmentaler, Gruyère, and fontina are fondue classics, you can actually use any kind of “mountain” cheese, such as Appenzeller, Comté, or Beaufort. The slow, even heat of the slow cooker is just perfect for making a smooth, effortless fondue. I suggest using a 2- or 3-quart slow cooker for the fondue. It fits more easily on the table and is more suitable size for this amount of fondue.

My friends who live in the countryside were surprised one morning to wake up and see me climbing their walnut tree in my pajamas, swiping the rock-hard, unripe green orbs off the branches. Once I’d picked enough, I climbed down and confessed that I could barely sleep the night before in anticipation of collecting enough of them to make a batch of nocino, an Italian liqueur made from unripe walnuts. It took a while for them to figure out what I was talking about. When I returned a few months later with a tub of Vanilla Ice Cream (page 143) and drizzled inky-brown nocino over each scoop, no one questioned my early-morning motives. If you know someone with a walnut tree, give this liqueur a try. And be sure to give them a bottle as a thank you, so you’ll get invited back to gather more green walnuts the following year.

I often serve small glasses of vin d’orange as a warm-weather aperitif. Anyone who enjoys Lillet is likely to enjoy this fruity and slightly bitter fortified wine. But be careful—it’s quite potent. To stay true to its humble Provencal roots, I use very inexpensive vodka and dry white wine. I’ve even made it with wine from a box—with excellent results!

One day while cooking some blueberries, it occurred to me that the sharp taste of a sizable shot of gin would nicely complement the berries, so I reached for the bottle and poured some in. Gin’s herbaceous flavor does indeed marry nicely with blueberries—it can hardly be tasted once cooked, but somehow it just rounds out the blueberry notes. Now, whenever I cook with blueberries, a bit of gin finds its way into the mix.

For those who like their chocolate sauce rich and thick, this sauce has more body than the Bittersweet Chocolate Sauce (page 243), courtesy of a modest amount of cream. It is particularly appealing when served side by side or gently swirled with White Chocolate Sauce (below) as an accompaniment to wedges of chocolate cake.

Mangoes, like most tropical fruits, will tip you off to their ripeness with their aroma. A good, ripe mango has a heady, syrupy scent, and when you hold it in your hand, it should feel slightly soft and a bit too heavy for its size. Although the plump, sweeter varieties, such as Hayden and Tommy Atkins, are the most tempting, slender and wrinkly Champagne or Manila mangoes that you might come across will surprise you with their gentle nuances. Depending on which variety you choose to use in this sauce, start with the smaller amount of sugar and add more if necessary. A spoonful of mango sauce is a nice complement to Coconut and Tropical Fruit Trifle (page 70) or scoops of Toasted Coconut Sherbet (page 152) nestled in cookie cups made with Sesame-Orange Almond Tuiles (page 212).

This thin sauce with a fiery personality adds a direct hit of liquor, tempered by caramel, to any dessert that it’s drizzled over. I particularly like it made with Armagnac, Cognac’s rowdy cousin, and paired with Creamy Rice Pudding (page 138). If you wish, you can use bourbon, rum, or any favorite liquor in place of the Cognac.

With the addition of sprightly tangerine juice, this twist on traditional butterscotch sauce goes very well drizzled over Buckwheat Cake (page 44) paired with orange or tangerine sections instead of the cider-poached apples, or spooned over Pâte à Choux Puffs (page 232) filled with Caramel Ice Cream (page 144) and topped with toasted or candied nuts.

Sabayon is the French version of Italian zabaglione, an airy egg-and-wine custard. It requires a certain amount of energy—and strength—to whip up a batch. If you’ve ever heard a frenzy of whisking coming from the kitchen at an Italian restaurant, you’ve heard why many Italian cooks (especially the sturdy grandmas) have such well-developed arms. But one lick of the boozy, frothy dessert is enough to make you forget those few furious minutes of whipping. If you don’t think you’re up to the task, you can use an electric handheld mixer. But I always feel that if I’ve worked hard to make something, I’ve earned the right to eat it. You can serve the sabayon hot from the stove, although here, it is cooled and whipped cream is added so it can be held before serving.

I thought I knew all about chocolate truffles until I enrolled in an advanced course in chocolate making at a school for professionals next to the Valrhona factory in France’s Rhône Valley. I spent three very intense days there learning how to combine three simple ingredients—chocolate, cream, and butter—into silky smooth ganache. In the class were eight of the top chocolatiers in the world, plus a ninth person, who quickly realized that he had a lot more to learn about chocolate than he thought he did. Ganache seems simple, but chef Philippe Givre taught us how to whip these three ingredients into a velvety paste that needed several days of rest before it was ready to be tasted. (It’s worth the wait!) It would take a whole book to explain his technique and a professionally equipped kitchen attached to a chocolate factory to try it out, so for this recipe, I’ve shortened the process a bit. Of course, to make these truffles, it’s worth seeking out the best chocolate you can find, which, if you’re lucky like I was, might be right next door.

After years of carefully studying dessert habits, I’ve begun to refine my theory that there are two types of people—those who like lemon desserts and those who like chocolate. I’ve observed that there’s a subspecies that likes desserts with a crunch, a group that includes me. I’m a big fan of seeds, and I like to add them to these jam-filled cookies to put them squarely in the crunchy camp. Or should I say “roundly,” since they are, indeed, round. But feel free to use any cookie cutters you have—round, square, oval, or even heart-shaped.

My first experience making Swiss cookies was less than optimal. A friend had given me his mother’s recipe for Basler leckerle, a spiced almond cookie swathed with a kirsch glaze. They’re meant to be kept in a tin for 6 months before eating, during which time they supposedly soften up and become toothsome delights. To make a six-month story short, I was skeptical when I plucked one of the cookies out of the tin. Then I bit down and almost lost a tooth they were so hard. Since then, I’ve avoided Swiss cookies. But, some time later, at Stohrer bakery on the rue Montorgeuil in Paris, I tasted the lovely zimtsterne, star-shaped cinnamon-almond cookies of Swiss origin that are made only around the holidays, and fell in love. I was prompted to come up with a recipe that I could have year-round—as well as one that wouldn’t require a trip to the dentist. I couldn’t find a cookie cutter in the traditional zimtsterne shape of a six-point star in France where I live, so a friend brought me one from New York, which I guess makes this Swiss cookie a star of international proportions.

Sabayon is the French term for zabaglione, the frothy Italian dessert made of egg yolks and wine. It was a great day when I discovered that it could be frozen and scooped like ice cream without being churned in an ice cream maker. Because of the less-than-shy wine flavor, it holds its place in a bowl of fruit soup, especially one made with intensely flavored blood oranges.

When I was going over the recipes to include in this book, next to this one my editor wrote in big letters “BY ALL MEANS.” So I took that as a “yes.” Because of the caramel, the mousse is slightly soft even when frozen, so it’s best stored in the coldest part of your freezer. But don’t forget about it back there. Once you taste it, I doubt that you will.

Although this dessert sounds old-fashioned, the frozen sour cream is a modern-day update. And the fact remains that it’s a wonderful way to use a bounty of ripe summer berries. Such an elegant dessert couldn’t be easier to make—the frozen sour cream, which doesn’t require any cooking, is churned like ice cream while the berries marinate in orange-flavored liqueur, and the two come together in wine glasses for serving.

Up until a few years ago, white peaches and nectarines were an oddity in America and finding them was nearly impossible. Happily, they’ve now become fairly common, and you can spot them in grocery stores and farmers’ markets across the land. Their flavor is not as intense as their yellow counterparts, but their delicacy is part of their appeal. Also appealing is how when white nectarines are cooked with their skins and then puréed, the finished mixture is an ivory hue with a faint touch of rosy pink. I came up with this dessert when I was the pastry chef at Monsoon, an Asian restaurant run by Bruce Cost, one of the best cooks I’ve ever met in my life. Unlike American dinners, most Asian meals don’t end with a full-on dessert. So my challenge was to create desserts that customers would find appealing enough to order after sharing spicy, authentic, and sometimes challenging fare—like the turtle soup served with raw turtle eggs floating on the surface, or the sea slugs that tasted (slightly) better than they looked. I had to make sure the desserts would bring people back from whatever culinary precipice we took them to. This fruit sorbet, resting in a five-spice cookie cup and served with berries steeped in sweet plum wine, was the perfect landing pad.

One late summer weekend, I was visiting a friend who lives in the wilds of Northern California, and I noticed lots of wild blackberry bushes with berries that were so plump and ripe that they were practically falling off the branches. I can never resist free food, so I set out for an afternoon of heavy picking. When I came back, my basket loaded down with fresh berries, my friend casually asked, “Did you see the rattlesnakes?” “Um . . . no, I . . . I didn’t,” I replied. Actually, I was really glad to have missed them. That incident didn’t quite scare me away from picking other types of fruits and berries, but I’ll let others risk their lives for blackberries, which I’ve been happy to plunk down money for ever since that day.

I know you’re going to be tempted to use seedless watermelon here, but don’t. I’ve never tasted one that I particularly liked. And because I have a penchant for making things harder than they should be, I don’t mind plucking out the seeds. For some reason, the harder something is to make, the better it tastes. (And I wonder why I spend a majority of my life in the kitchen.) Don’t worry about using a fancy sake—inexpensive brands work really well in this recipe. And unless you read Japanese, you’re not likely to be able to ascertain the difference trying to read the labels at the store.

There’s nothing I like better than very, very cold Champagne. So cold that I usually drop a small ice cube into my glass to make sure it’s as chilled as possible. I always feared that it was offensive and crass to ice down Champagne until I went to a tasting of Krug Champagne, considered by many to be the finest of them all. I didn’t dare drop an ice cube into any of the glasses that were presented to me, but I did confide that I often did so to one of their experts, who surprised me by saying that it’s perfectly acceptable to put a bit of ice in Champagne for the very reason I do it. For this sorbet, you don’t need to use the finest French Champagne. In fact, I’ve made it successfully with Italian prosecco and Spanish cava—without offending anyone.