Are you bilingual? Multilingual? Then you have my admiration. Although I can read pretty well and sort of write in a few other languages, I never became fluent in speaking any of them. Never. I was always intimidated. I remember a Russian professor screaming at me because I could not pronounce something correctly. Well, look who won the Cold War, buddy.

I’ve tried French many times. It’s a beautiful language, and now I have a niece who moved to Paris, married, and is about to have a baby. She majored in French in the US and after a decade in France simply sounds like a native. I speak French to her, and she originally began to help me, but now she is at the last of the 3 D’s: disbelief, despair, and disgust. I have offered to help teach her child French. She will not give me her new address in Paris.

I just thank God that I grew up with English. It is the world language. And it’s not just American money and military might that have created this dominance. The most important feature of English is the vocabulary. English has more words that any other language, more synonyms, more ways to convey nuance, more ways to entice.

If you have never looked at the Oxford English Dictionary, the famous OED, you should try. It is amazing how many words there are. And, equally, it is amazing how varied are the uses for a single word. For a single simple word. Like puff.

There’s puff of air, puff of smoke, you huff and puff. There’s Puff the Magic Dragon. And then, there is the dreaded puff pastry.

They say a married couple should never attempt to wallpaper a bathroom together. Now add making puff pastry. I have suggested it to Suzen, and seen a look of wariness that I really don’t think I deserve. Simply put, making puff pastry is an art. Thanks to the new book Puff by Martha Holmberg, using puff pastry is artful, easy, and delicious.

Puff tells the story of both what puff pastry is and how to use it. Yes, there are recipes here to make your own puff pastry, and Suzen and I will ultimately do that. But the easy way out is to buy puff pastry in your supermarket in the freezer section. Holmberg is amenable to using all the frozen brands but she gives you fair warning. The most common brand, whose name begins with P, is oil-based, not butter based. It’s not real puff pastry and you’ll be disappointed. I was. Find a frozen puff pastry made with butter. Or take the challenge and make your own. If you don’t have a puff pastry pre-nuptial agreement, then go post-nup.

Suzen made this dish: salmon surrounded by puff pastry with a mushroom filling and rich butter lemon sauce. It’s a Paris-class meal, whether you speak French or not. This dish is simply tear-evoking. And, while it is hearty enough to put on any winter table, it is also smoothly subtle enough to be the perfect meal for a summer weekend. Just serve smaller portions, add a side salad, and you have a classic meal that cannot be topped.

Puff is filled with recipes you will want to try. They sound and look elegant. They are surprisingly easy to make and rewarding in very bite.

Wild Salmon in Puff Pastry with Savory Mushroom Stuffing and Lemon-Caper Beurre Blanc

Yield: serves 4

Ingredients:

2 tablespoons olive oil
¼ cup minced shallot or onion
Kosher salt
2 cups cremini mushrooms, stems removed, chopped very fine
Freshly ground pepper
2 tablespoons crème fraiche or heavy cram
1 teaspoon lemon zest
2 tablespoons chopped fresh dill
2 tablespoons capers, drained and roughly chopped
1 sheet (about 9 ounces) frozen puff pastry
1 pound skinless center-cut salmon filler, about 1 inch thick, cut into 4 portions
1 large egg beaten
3 cups loosely packed mixed bitter salad greens
Lemon-Caper Beurre Blanc [recipe follows below]

Preparation:

Heat the oil over medium-high heat in a large skillet, add the shallots and a pinch of salt, and sauté until they are tender and fragrant, 2 to 3 minutes. Raise the heat to high, add the mushrooms, and season with salt and pepper.  Cook, stirring frequently with a wooden spoon or other tool that scrapes the pan nicely until the mushrooms have given off all their liquid, the liquid has cooked off, and the mushrooms are nicely brown, deeply flavored and quite dry, 7 to 9 minutes.

Take the pan from the heat, let the mushrooms cool for a few minutes, then stir in the crème fraiche , lemon zest, dill and capers. Taste and add salt and lots of pepper to taste — the stuffing should be highly seasoned. Chill in the fridge while you prepare the pastry and salmon.

On a lightly floured counter, roll out the pastry sheet to a 14-inch square. Cut the sheet into 4 7-inch squares. Season the salmon generously on both sides with salt and pepper.

Pile one quarter of the chilled mushroom stuffing on the center of one square of pastry. Set a piece of salmon on top of the stuffing. Moisten the edges of the pastry with a little water, then bring each corner to the center on top of the salmon, overlapping the edges a bit. Press firmly along the seams to make a tight, neat package. Try to press out any bulkiness where the pastry overlaps. Repeat with the other ingredients.

Line a baking sheet with parchment paper or foil and arrange the salmon bundles on it, seam side down. Brush the tops with the eggs wash, and cut a couple of slits on the top of the pastry so steam can escape. Chill for at least one hour or up to 24 hours, loosely covered with plastic wrap.

Heat the oven to 424°F. Bake the chilled salmon bundles until the pastry is deep golden brown and lightly puffed and salmon is cooked through (about 145°F on an instant –read thermometer, 23 to 28 minutes. Arrange each bundle on a dinner plate, whole or cut on an angle, with a pile of the greens next to it, if using. Drizzle the Lemon–Caper Beurre Blanc around the plate and serve immediately.

Lemon-Caper Beurre Blanc

Ingredients:

¼ cup fresh lemon juice
1 tablespoon minced shallots
2 teaspoons finely grated lemon zest
½ cup (1 stick) very cold unsalted butter, cut into ½-inch pieces
1 tablespoon capers, drained and chopped
1 tablespoon chopped fresh parsley
Freshly ground pepper
Kosher salt

Preparation:

Put the lemon juice and shallots in a small saucepan, bring to a simmer over medium-high heat, and cook until the liquid has reduced to about 2 tablespoons. Reduce the heat to low, add the lemon zest, and whisk in the butter chunks, one at a time. Keep the heat low so the butter emulsifies into a creamy sauce rather than melts and becomes oily. Add the capers and parsley and season to taste with pepper and possibly salt, though the capers make the sauce quite salty. Keep warm.

Source: Puff by Martha Holmberg

It’s those different additions, in different proportions, that give you the opportunity for truly an unlimited number of risotto combinations.

Now, unlimited is the good news. Having a deadline to actually pick one recipe for an upcoming dinner party, well, that could have been a challenge. We have a shelf of Italian cookbooks, each one excellent and almost every one offering a chapter of risottos.

Given that deadline to pick one recipe, I cut the Gordian knot. Biba Caggiano is a fabulous chef, author, and TV personality based in Sacramento. Her cookbooks are staples, books that you can always depend on. So, I was scanning the recipes in Italy al Dente and found this header note: “If I have a dinner party at my house, this is the risotto I would choose.” That was just the advice I needed to end my search. Suzen read the recipe, agreed, and we were off to the store.

Was Biba right? Is this “The” risotto recipe? When I was served the dish, I took one bite, got up, and went for seconds. No one was going to beat me to having more.

This risotto, with its hint of smoky salmon and the bare sweetness of the mascarpone, is culinary paradise. It is a perfect dish. Not the just the ingredients, but the balance that is created in the flavors by the proportions Biba suggests.

This risotto is very easy to make, and I’m sure you will enjoy it. Oh, the recipe calls for vegetable broth or canned chicken broth. Suzen made one modification here: we always make stock from left over feasts, so we used turkey stock we had made ourselves at Christmas.

You can buy stock in nice metal cans, or you can make your own, using that free range turkey carcass, and fresh vegetables and just the seasonings you want. I’ll post some stock recipes in the fall when you’re more likely to be roasting whole birds. This stock is a secret to making a perfect risotto dish even more perfect. Yes, that may not be good logic or grammar, but culinarily “more perfect” is possible.

Risotto with Smoked Salmon and Mascarpone

Serves: 4 to 6

Ingredients:

6 cups vegetable broth or 3 cups canned chicken stock mixed with 3 cups of water
3 tablespoons unsalted butter
⅓ cup thoroughly washed leek, white part only
2 cups imported Arborio rice other rice for risotto
½ cup dry white wine [we used leftover white sparkling]
3 to 4 ounces smoked salmon, cut into thin strips
2 to 3 tablespoons mascarpone cheese
1 tablespoon chopped fresh parsley

Preparation:

Heat the broth in a medium saucepan and keep warm over low heat.

Heat the butter in a large skillet over medium heat. When the butter foams, add the leek and cook, stirring, until the leek is pale yellow and quite soft, 8 to 10 minutes. Add the rice and stir quickly for a minute or two until it is well coated with the butter. Add the wine and stir until the wine is almost reduced. Add ½ cup simmering broth or just enough to barely cover the rice. Cook, stirring, until the broth is absorbed almost completely. Continue cooking, adding broth and stirring the rice in this manner for another 16 to 17 minutes.

When the last addition of broth is almost all reduced, add the salmon and stir for a minute or two. Add the mascarpone and the parsley. Stir quickly until the cheese is melted and the rice is a moist, creamy consistency. Taste, adjust the seasoning, and serve.

Source: Italy al Dente by Biba Caggiano

I was lucky to receive Jayne Cohen’s new book Jewish Holiday Cooking recently and, like her first book The Gefilte Variations, this wonderful volume is a superbly crafted jewel. Jayne tells some wonderful stories about her family [don’t miss the story about her grandmother’s flanken on page 89]. Jayne is a careful recipe tester and has filled this book with inspirational recipes offering tempting contemporary twists. This book is nominated for a James Beard Award this year, and I will keep my fingers crossed.

Reading this beautiful book quickly inspired my Passover plans. We’ll start with her Chopped Chicken Liver with Caramelized Onions and Matzo. For our entre, I’m ready for her Slow-Roasted Salmon with Green Herb oil and Beet-Horseradish Relish with Wild Mushroom Potato Kugel and Fresh Asparagus. As far as dessert goes, that is generally Brian’s domain, and knowing him I bet he will choose the Hungarian Chocolate-Walnut Torte with fresh whipped cream [the page is already dog-eared in the book so I think he already found it]. I know this review for Jewish Holiday Cooking is cutting it close, but Jayne’s book has all the necessary information for this year and many more to come. She has recipes for every holiday, and I will use throughout the year.