Salads
Broccoli salad
Raw broccoli, crisp bacon, a sweet-tart creamy dressing and a handful of crunch. It teaches you how to make a raw vegetable a pleasure to eat: cut it small and give the dressing time to soften it.
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12 recipes
Breads
Buttermilk biscuits
Tall, flaky biscuits come down to three habits: cold butter, a light hand and a hot oven. Once those are yours, you can have a pan of biscuits on the table any morning from flour, butter and buttermilk.
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Salads
Coleslaw
A creamy, tangy slaw that stays crunchy instead of sitting in a puddle. The lesson here is salting: pulling the water out of a vegetable before it ever meets the dressing.
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Breads
Cornbread
Cornbread baked in a hot cast-iron skillet gets a crackling brown crust that no other pan gives you. This version sits in the middle of the long sweet-or-not argument, with a little sugar you can raise or leave out, and it teaches the hot-pan pour you'll use again and again.
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Salads
Cucumber salad
Thin, cold cucumber slices in a sweet-sour dressing with red onion and dill. It teaches two moves you'll use again and again: salting a watery vegetable so it stays crisp, and taming raw onion in vinegar.
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Salads
Greek salad
Greek salad is ripe tomatoes, cucumber, onion, pepper and olives under a whole slab of feta, dressed with olive oil, a little vinegar and oregano. It has no lettuce and no whisked dressing, because the tomatoes make their own. It teaches you how salting and cutting shape a raw salad.
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Salads
Macaroni salad
This is the creamy, tangy, crunchy scoop that sits next to the burgers. It also teaches the trick every cold salad needs: seasoning food that will be eaten cold, when salt and acid go quiet.
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Soups
Miso soup
This small soup teaches two things you will use again and again: dashi, the quick broth of kelp and smoked bonito that sits under much of Japanese cooking, and the one rule of miso, which goes in last and never boils. Once you have both, it is an easy weeknight side for any rice meal.
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Potatoes
Potato pancakes
Crisp, lacy edges and a tender middle, from little more than potatoes, onion and a hot pan. They're the classic Hanukkah latke and an everyday side across Central and Eastern Europe. They teach you how to get water out of grated vegetables, keep the starch that comes with it, and shallow-fry at a steady heat.
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Salads
Potato salad
The creamy, mustardy potato salad of cookouts and potlucks. It teaches two habits that make any potato salad better: season the potatoes while they're warm, and taste again once the salad is cold, because chilling mutes salt.
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Salads
Three bean salad
Crisp green beans, creamy kidney beans and nutty chickpeas in a sweet-sour dressing that gets better as it sits. It teaches blanching and shocking, and why canned beans need real time in a dressing.
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Salads
Waldorf salad
Crisp apple, celery, grapes and toasted walnuts in a light, lemony mayonnaise dressing. There's almost no cooking, which makes it a clean lesson in the small moves that decide any cold salad: toast the nuts until they smell right, keep cut fruit bright, and dress lightly enough that the crunch survives.
View recipe · 4 servings