Fruit

Sparkly candy canes and winking snowmen aren't for everyone. Salted Honey and Chocolate Bark is a sweet-and-salty confection that even the manliest of men would be pleased to nibble on—or make. No cookie cutters, sprinkles, or icing necessary.

Tender and richly flavored, this roast is a hearty crowd-pleaser to serve for Hanukkah (or any cold night).

Use this syrup in vinaigrettes, to glaze meats, and in place of grenadine in cocktails.

The BA Test Kitchen likes Grade B maple syrup for its deep and rounded flavor.

Tarragon syrup gives this simple but stunning orange and tangerine salad extra personality.

Cook the figs until just softened: Overcooking or intense boiling will render them tough instead of lush.

We use sparkling rosé wine here mostly for its color. Any decent bubbly will work as a substitute.

Created by Epicurious member Kathe Miller from Chelan, Washington, this beautiful salad has a wonderful presentation as well as a rich taste. Try it as a starter, or as a satisfying lunch. Miller recommends pears that are tender but crisp, giving the salad a divine texture and bite that is at once crunchy and juicy.

To cut baking time, fork the tuber a few times, then nuke for 5 minutes.

I have written a recipe for panettone dressing before: the sweet seasonal fruit bread was cubed, toasted, and mixed with Italian sausage; this is very different, not least because I see it not as an accompaniment to turkey (which has its own interior stuffing) but to be served, at parties or over cocktails, in small squares, like savory brownies. As ever, feel free to substitute the plainer pandoro if you wish, though I do think the rich fruitiness is part of this unconventional appetizer's charm.

As with biscotti there is an undeniable American-Italian influence at play here but, once again, I embrace this. Actually, though, American-Italian food has had its own influence on the cooking of the Old Country: these days, I am reliably informed by my Italian publisher and celebrated food writer, Csaba dalla Zorza, you can find dried cranberries with relative ease in Italy. The true Italian Christmas dinner is very much about the capon. Yes, you can find capons outside of Italy, although not everyone can quite cope with the idea of eating a castrated cockerel. Many understandably view old-school caponization with distaste, although it is considered ethically acceptable if the rooster has been chemically rather than surgically castrated. I don't know about you, but the idea of eating meat that has been flooded with the types of hormones necessarily involved here gives me the willies. Besides, my Christmas Dinner is my Christmas Dinner: unchanging, ritualistic, an intrinsic part of me. When in Rome, and all that, but if I'm cooking at home, I don't fiddle with my time-honored menu. I'm not going to give an evangelical tub-thump about my turkey brining techniques, as I've done enough of that in the past, but I am still open to other ways of celebrating the Big Bird and this recipe is a case in point. For me, it is perfect for any sort of seasonal supper party, but really comes into its own on a buffet table, as it carves fantastically and is as good (maybe even better) cold than hot, so you can make it in advance and then be the world's most unharried host on the night. You need to go to a butcher to get a while breast joint and you need to ask for it to be butterflied and boned and make sure the skin is left on. I know it might sound a bit of a faff, but take it from me that stuffing a while double breast joint is very much easier than stuffing and rolling a single breast joint, as is more commonly found in supermarkets. Basically, all you're doing here is opening out your boneless turkey joint, smothering it with stuffing, and folding it over. What you end up with, for all the ease of its creation, is nothing short of a showstopper.

If you've never encountered struffoli before, they are best described—visually at any rate—as the croquembouche of southern Italy: small dough balls, and I mean really small, the size of marbles, that are deep-fried and then rolled in honey before being assembled into a cone—as in the French piled-up profiteroles model—or a bulging wreath. Since I was taught the recipe by a pair of Calabrian sisters, I make mine as their Mamma makes hers; and this takes the wreath form. I'll be honest: you don't make these because you're seeking some exquisite taste sensation; struffoli are about custom, celebration, and sweetness. This, in effect, is the festive centerpiece of Christmas in the south of Italy. You get a very real sense of this if you make the struffoli not alone, but in company, with other hands to roll out the dough with you. Children love doing this, by the way, and their little hands are much better suited for rolling the small marble-sized dough balls you need. Obviously, children are best kept away from the deep-frying part of the operation. As for the decoration, I've seen not only the regular cake-decorating sprinkles used but also candied fruit, glacé cherries, almond dragées, and cinnamon-preserved pumpkin pieces. It's the former, solely, for me. And although I've seen only the multicolored ones in Italy, I go for the festive and flag-resonant Christmas sprinkles in red, white, and green. The struffoli would look more beautiful, perhaps, left burnished but otherwise unadorned, although gaudiness not elegant restraint—I'm firmly told—is in order here; I have tried to maintain some balance between the two.

The Christmas season in Puerto Rico is blessed with balmy weather and clear skies. There is nothing like dining under the shade of a gourd tree on Christmas Eve, savoring every morsel of the earthy tamales called pasteles and adobo-flavored pork while looking at the sea. Puerto Rican women get together with their families to prepare pasteles by the hundred, freezing them until needed for Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, family reunions, the Fiesta de Reyes, and the religious season called octavas that follows the Feast of the Epiphany. It is the blend of the tiny pepper ají dulce and broad-leaf culantro in the fragrant sofrito (cooking sauce) that gives an unmistakable Puerto Rican identity to these earthy tamales. A dash of vinegar lends the sofrito just the right amount of tang against the mild dough of malanga and plantain tinted orange-yellow with achiote-infused lard. I learned to make these in the traditional kitchen of the Puerto Rican side of my family. While one person took care of trimming the plantain leaves, others were busy grating the vegetables and making the sofrito. There the vegetables are grated by hand, though you can find machines designed specially for this purpose in any market or use a food processor. Puerto Ricans are extremely fussy about the wrapping—it has to be perfect and watertight because pasteles are normally boiled. But I prefer to steam them.

Watercress is the green of choice in Cuba, its peppery taste a perfect foil for the avocado and the sweet pineapple in this classic Cuban salad. I serve it with shrimp in a spicy tomato sauce called enchilado de camarones. In Cuba, the pineapple is never roasted, but this technique adds another dimension of flavor I find very appealing.

This heirloom family recipe has the distinctive allspice aroma of the cooking of my hometown, Santiago de Cuba, the only part of Cuba where this complex spice is used in a pork marinade. The combination of cumin and allspice is especially characteristic of my family's cooking. Originally a Christmas dish, cerdo brujo is now one of the most popular dishes at my restaurant Zafra, where we celebrate Christmas every day.

This garlicky sauce is the traditional accompaniment to the starchy root vegetables of the Hispanic Caribbean, especially Cuba. The acidic medium is usually Seville, or bitter, orange juice, though lime juice or white vinegar can be substituted. The mojo is at its best spooned or brushed over piping-hot boiled yuca, plantains, or other starchy tropical vegetables.

Here's another dessert that was inspired by a wine-tasting dinner. It's often hard to come up with a dessert that pairs well with wine, but this savory-sweet dessert does. At its center is a Seckel pear, a small, reddish pear with a slightly spicy flavor. It has a firm flesh that makes it perfect for poaching. In this dessert I poach the pears in pomegranate juice with some ground black pepper. A chunk of Cabrales cheese, a strong blue cheese from northern Spain, is sandwiched between the top and bottom halves of the pear, and a Szechuan Ice Cream is served with it, sitting on a diamond of baked almond cream.

Daniel Boulud always had a preference for classic French desserts, so I developed this recipe for the lunch menu when I was pastry chef at Daniel. The dessert itself is very simple: We bake an undocked, thick round of puff pastry, letting it puff up high, and serve it hot, filled with Orange-Scented Pastry Cream and topped with a buttery caramel sauce and a few Candied Pecans. The puff pastry rounds should be baked à la minute, never ahead of time, though the dough can be rolled out and cut in advance, and stored, covered, in the refrigerator for up to a day. Sometimes the best desserts are the simplest.