Cookbooks

The meatballs are tender and juicy, and once covered in a nice cozy blanket of tomato sauce and melted mozzarella, they’re pretty hard to resist.

Take crispy chickpeas to the extreme with this recipe of battered, fried garbanzos spiked with Thai basil, Sichuan peppercorns, and a host of fragrant spices including cumin and five-spice powder.

This cube of crustless milk bread is encased in a shiny, shatteringly thin caramel shell, then filled with an enormous dollop of chamomile-infused vanilla bean custard.

It’s a vodka martini—properly called the Kangaroo—gone savory with peaty Scotch and olives four ways.

Pairing the tangy fruit with Scotch—plus oolong tea that’s been steeped forever—gives a whisper of smoke and a bitter, malty edge to the drink.

It couldn’t be simpler to combine honey, grapefruit, lemon, and seltzer, but the mixture is surprisingly complex in flavor, both tangy and rich.

The Stilton adds another dimension to the bubble and squeak, giving it a wonderfully rich and redolent tang. Served with slices of Christmas ham, this is a dish that would certainly get those Herald angels singing.

This is a fine Christmas Day vegetarian dish, a serious centerpiece packed with rich flavor. The recipe may look a bit epic upon first glance, but the sauce and caramelized onions can be made in advance.

This recipe calls for a whole leg of ham, with the bone in, that has been pre-cured and pre-cooked. If you can’t buy a pre-cooked ham, ask your local butcher for a cured leg and follow their cooking instructions before glazing.

While brandy is the traditional partner for fruit cake, you could also try using a dessert sherry such as Pedro Ximénez. It’s an intensely sweet, dark sherry made from the Spanish grape variety of the same name. Perfect in festive cakes, puddings and custards, you can find it in liquor stores.

This velvety Vietnamese rice porridge gets a deep flavor from soaking overnight in chicken or vegetable broth before simmering with fragrant ginger and scallions.

You’ll find these a fudgy, sweet and lightly fermented addition to your brownie repertoire.

This lavash recipe makes a forgiving dough that can bend to your schedule: You can make the first step and the final product in about 6 hours, or you can spread the work out over the course of a couple days.

Like many long-simmered sauces, this one, perhaps the most delicious of all the Italian meat sauces, is more flavorful and balanced the following day.

Use this rich, creamy Italian white sauce for lasagna, gratins, and mac and cheese.

Goat’s milk butter is mildly tangy, complementing the whole wheat flour and wheat germ in these cookies.

An outer coating of sumac-sugar gives these slice-and-bake cookies a bright pop of flavor that balances the rich, buttery shortbread.

To give almond shortbread cookies the pastel treatment, dust them with tinted confectioners' sugar blended with finely ground freeze-dried blueberries, raspberries, and mango.

The textured end of a meat mallet is gently pressed into the dough of these cardamom- and rose water–scented cookies to form a grid pattern.

Lebkuchen recipes are many and diverse—some are flourless, made with almond and hazelnut meal; some are made in bar form and others in cookie form; some are glazed with chocolate and others with a thin lemon glaze.