Sauce

This sauce, called caldillo de jitomate ("tomato broth"), has a consistency closer to a light tomato soup than an Italian marinara.

Serve this sauce over baked, broiled, or sautéed white-fleshed fish.

This sauce adds a bright piquancy to almost any seafood. Try it with poached salmon, seared tuna, or sautéed shrimp.

The malty flavor of stout lends welcome contrast to this sweet, creamy dessert sauce. Try it over a bowl of vanilla ice cream or fresh fruit. It's also wonderful with the chocolate stout cake.

Our food editors were truly impressed with the flavorful pork they found in London restaurants — chefs there are making the most of heirloom breeds and natural feed, with delicious results.

If you're making this for the sherry syrup , don't be tempted to use a dark dry Sherry for the syrup or topping — it will muddy the beautiful green-gold color of the cake and tint the cream topping brown.

This quick and easy tomato sauce is the base for two meals: spaghetti marinara and steamed mussels with tomato broth. We call for canned tomatoes because most of the fresh ones available in the wintertime have a bland flavor and mealy texture. Sugar will help round out the flavor if your tomatoes are too acidic. You can also add a pinch of red pepper flakes if you like your sauce to have a bit of heat. The leftover sauce also freezes well for future meals.

Editor's note: The recipe and introductory text below are excerpted from Thomas Keller's Bouchon. A straightforward ganache—chocolate and cream — with a two-to-one ratio of cream to chocolate. Some sugar, in the form of corn syrup, is added, primarily for consistency. The chocolate sauce is only as good as the chocolate you use, so use the best you can.

Erin Rutherford of Charlotte, North Carolina, writes: "This sauce was a hit with my supper club — I served it with filet mignon encrusted in black pepper, cumin, and sea salt, and it was killer. It would also pair well with swordfish."

Espagnole is a classic brown sauce, typically made from brown stock, mirepoix, and tomatoes, and thickened with roux. Given that the sauce is French in origin, where did the name come from? According to Alan Davidson, in The Oxford Companion to Food, "The name has nothing to do with Spain, any more than the counterpart term allemande has anything to do with Germany. It is generally believed that the terms were chosen because in French eyes Germans are blond and Spaniards are brown."