Cheddar

This bread is wonderful served along with our Baked Spaghetti (see page 76) and a fresh salad.

Dora Charles—my head cook, my soul sister, and my friend—really puts her big toe in this dish. In fact, Fodor’s Travel Guide called it “The Best Baked Spaghetti in the South.” Go, Dora! (P.S. Dora doesn’t really put her toe in this, that’s just a Southern expression we use when someone has done a dish just right!)

Tart apple, smoky bacon, and rich Cheddar cheese all come together for a flavorful autumnal treat with this unique sandwich. Certain elements of this sandwich should be thick—the bacon and the bread—and others should be thin—the apple and the Cheddar. Use a crisp, tart apple such as Granny Smith, Mutsu, or Honeycrisp. Use the best bacon you can find as well. I like to make this sandwich in a cast-iron skillet because it makes for a uniformly deep golden crust, which I cherish above all else in a grilled sandwich.

A meal in itself, this is a great dish for a crowd. It can be made ahead, baked, and reheated, or it can be held unbaked until a couple of hours before you plan to serve it.

This egg dish is bursting with generous chunks of ham and scallion and bound with an abundance of sharp Cheddar. Be sure your ham is sizzling nicely before adding the eggs, and don’t overcook this scramble: The eggs are just right when they’re still a little wet. Serve with Blackberry Corn Muffins (page 39).

The key to making a great broccoli omelet is to slightly overcook the broccoli. One of the best cheeses to pair with broccoli in many a dish is Cheddar because of its sharp, tangy taste.

This is a springtime treat, when asparagus is at its peak and you can get the young, thin stalks. Making this with thick stalks is fine, though you may want to peel the tougher bottom half of the stalks before cooking. Blanching rather than steaming helps the asparagus retain its bright green color and firm texture. Serve with Niçoise Salad (page 160).

These colorful scones are crumbly and rich from the combination of Cheddar cheese and spinach. A more substantial scone than some of the sweet ones, these go well with just about any salad and are also good with a frittata.

There is a point in the year, usually after the Christmas decorations have been put away, when the house gets too cold to sit still in without a wrap around you. I have always kept a cold house; hot rooms make me feel unhealthy. But sometimes the only way of getting warm here is to eat. Carbohydrate-rich meals, such as the tart of leek and cheese and pastry I made on the coldest day of the year, warm you in a way few others are capable of.

Cheese is the savior of chard, as a crisp crust, a seasoning for soup, a luscious sauce, bringing out its qualities while introducing a note of luxury. Often, the bolder the cheese the more interesting the result, so a well-matured British cheese is a wise choice for something like a shallow chard tart. As a sort of double whammy, I add cheese to the pastry as well as the filling.

You could measure my life in bowls of soup. Each New Year’s Day brings a pot of lentil soup (a good-luck symbol throughout much of Europe); pea and mint soup is to celebrate early summer; cabbage soup for colds and crash diets; parsnip soup for frosty weekends; chicken broth to cleanse my soul. You probably don’t want to know about the parsimonious soup-stew I put together from the weekly fridge cleanup. I do believe in the power of soup to restore our spirits and to strengthen and protect us. Steaming, frugal, yet curiously luxurious, soup replaces many a meal in this house. With a good loaf on the bread board and fresh salad in the bowl, I have no shame in serving soup to visitors (only amusement in watching them looking round in vain for a main course). I first came up with the idea of this soup years ago, and have watched it do the rounds, yet it has never made it into any of my own books until now. It has something of the Welsh rarebit about it.

I enjoy making a bit of a fuss about cheese sauce. The difference between a carelessly put together sauce and one made with care and love is astounding. Taking the trouble to flavor the milk with bay, clove, and onion, allowing the sauce to come together slowly to give its ingredients time to get know one another, and enriching it with a little cream will result in a sauce of twice the standing of one seasoned only with speed and sloppiness. There is much humble satisfaction in a simple dish, carefully made.

Since this soup is the liquid version of a baked potato, calories and all, you can use low-fat milk with no detrimental effect on flavor, if it gives you any comfort. But don’t do anything silly, like use low-fat cheese, which melts poorly and tastes worse. It’s important to add the cheese a little at a time, so it incorporates and doesn’t become an oily mess.

One of my favorite possessions is my grandmother’s cast-iron skillet. It’s more precious to me than the antique bone china that I also inherited. To think of all the fried chicken and cornbread it has held is amazing. Several years ago, I returned home to Georgia after living in New York City, and I carried my treasured skillet in a blanket on my lap practically the whole trip. It is almost like my sacred talisman. No one will dare touch it when we are cleaning up from dinner. If I leave the room, I return to a spotless kitchen with a dirty cast-iron skillet on the stovetop. No one wants the responsibility. It sounds severe, but a little fear is fine with me. When properly seasoned over time, cast iron develops a virtually nonstick surface that only improves with use. To clean cast-iron cookware, wash with a nonabrasive sponge and warm soapy water. Rinse it well. To prevent rust, make sure the piece is completely dry before you store it. As insurance, I usually place mine in a warm oven for a little while to fully dry out. Cast iron is great for baking cornbread, pan-frying, and sauteing. It is a little slow to heat up, but once it does, it heats evenly and stays hotter longer. Cast iron is inexpensive and can be found at hardware and cookware stores.

Southerners love a casserole. They are church supper staples, great to take to the new neighbor, and equally welcome to a new mom. Cheddar, sometimes called “rat cheese” in the South, ranges in flavor from mild, nutty, and creamy to extra-sharp, rich, and robust. Gruyère is a low-moisture cow’s milk cheese from eastern France and western Switzerland. It has a sweet, rich, almost nutty flavor and is excellent for a cheese sauce. Cheddar cheese is more Southern, though, if you wanted to stay truer to those roots. Turkey sausage is much lower in fat than sausage made from pork and other kinds of meat. Use country-style or coarse-ground sausage, and if purchased in links, remove it from the casing before cooking.

Summer squash is a tender vegetable that differs from winter squash in that it is harvested before the rind hardens. It grows on bush-type plants, not vines that spread. There are many varieties, including yellow crookneck and straightneck, scallop, pattypan, and zucchini, that all cook in the same amount of time. When preparing summer squash dishes, I like to mix the varieties for an interesting contrast of color. When there is a family gathering or buffet, my mother-in-law, Sara, is always asked to bring her squash casserole.