Prosciutto

Eat well, eat more! Chew this one until you bust!

Serve with a green salad.

These little gems are what I like to think of as new-wave pigs in a blanket. The ham and fruit are a perfect balance of salty and sweet, and a sip of champagne complements the flavors perfectly.

This is basically a classy open-faced pizza.

Here’s a quick hot-roasted meal that’s as ideal for entertaining as it is for a busy weekday. All you need to add are some tossed greens and crusty bread.

This dish showcases the skillful skillet cookery and flavorful pan sauces that delighted me in Umbria. After lightly frying the veal scallops, you start the sauce with a pestata of prosciutto, anchovy, and garlic, build it up with fresh sage, wine, broth, and capers—and then reduce and intensify it to a savory and superb glaze on the scaloppine. Though veal is most prized in this preparation, I have tried substituting scallops of chicken breast and pork; both versions were quick and delicious. Serve the scaloppine over braised spinach, or with braised carrots on the side.

Here’s my version of our family’s favorite Umbrian road food: the torta al testo (or crescia) baked and served at Il Panaro, the outdoor eatery and truck stop near Gubbio (see this chapter’s introduction). The unique wood-oven-baked character of the Il Panaro torta is hard to replicate in the home kitchen, yet I’ve found that baking the breads in a cast-iron skillet gives very nice results. The dough is easy to mix and shape, so even if you’re a bread-baking novice you’ll have success with this one.

This traditional casserole of veal scaloppine is simple and simply delicious, with a multitude of harmonious flavors and textures. The scaloppine are quickly fried, then layered in the pan to bake, moistened with an intense prosciutto-Marsala sauce, and topped by a delicate gratinato of Grana Padano or Parmigiano-Reggiano. And though veal is customary, scaloppine of chicken breast, turkey breast, or even pork would be excellent prepared this way. The first step, of frying the meat, can be done in advance, but I recommend that you assemble and bake the casserole just before serving: reheating will toughen the gratinato and accentuate the saltiness of the prosciutto.

I adore lentils, particularly the green French variety, as well as the little black ones, sometimes known as beluga lentils because of their resemblance to caviar. Both of these types hold their shape better than the typical brown lentil, and their nutty texture and flavor are divine. This is my favorite fall salad, made a bit indulgent with the addition of prosciutto. I first made this for an autumnal baby shower, and it was a major hit. The earthiness of the lentils and prosciutto plays wonderfully off the color and sweetness of autumn's bounty of peppers. This salad works equally well with meat, chicken, or fish. Best of all, it can be served at room temperature, and tastes even better the next day. So, make the salad the day before, heat up the grill, pop a few corks, and enjoy the sunshine! Serve this earthy salad alongside the duck breasts with a glass of Russian River Pinot Noir.

Chef Graham Elliot, of restaurants Graham Elliot and Grahamwich in Chicago, shared this recipe as part of a Tree-Trimming Party Menu he created exclusively for Epicurious. Here's a salad that puts a twist on classic holiday flavors. Homemade smoked marzipan mingles with crisp prosciutto and caramelized figs on arugula dotted with a ricotta cream. If your ricotta is on the wet side, see our instructions for how to drain it, an important step before making the cream. The marzipan can be made up to five days in advance.

If pizza crust seems daunting and time-consuming to make, try this easy spelt dough, which is moistened with ricotta cheese and aromatic linseed oil. This rustic dinner is stunning to behold — thinly sliced apples and fennel sit on a tangy sour cream layer and are topped with lightly crisped prosciutto. The crust is inspired by classic German dough with Quark, a delicious fresh cheese, which keeps baked goods fresh. While your dough rests, preheat the oven and prepare the toppings — voilà, dinner! Great also as a party appetizer in the early fall with a glass of rosé or dry white wine, or with a chilled lager in the summer. Use a mandoline to slice apples and fennel about 1/8 inch thick. If you don't have one, try to slice them as thinly as possible to get flavorful brown edges. If you don't own a pizza stone, preheat an inverted baking sheet for 30 minutes as described in step 3. Place the dough on a piece of parchment paper, carefully slide the paper with the dough right onto the baking sheet, and bake. While the crust will not be as crisp, it will still be delicious.

How it fights fat Prosciutto's protein helps build calorie-blasting lean muscle, and the fiber in melon begins to fill you up so you can slow down and savor the next two delicious courses but not overdo it. Now that's a smart start!

This elegant, light salad is ideal to serve as a first course. Pink grapefruit and peppery watercress cut the richness of avocado, and a scattering of toasted hazelnuts and hazelnut oil in the dressing suggest a flavor of early fall. Prosciutto is a graceful inclusion, but you can leave it out for a lighter vegetarian salad if you like.

Quiche for one? That sounds ambitious, but the truth is, it’s a cinch to make yourself a small quiche if you have an individual tart pan, about 4 inches in diameter, with a removable bottom, and some excess tart dough in your freezer. And what a treat it is.

Any food historian will tell you that trying to track down the origin of a recipe is like chasing tadpoles. There are so many, and they all look alike. Even when you find what seems to be the original source, you can't necessarily believe it because adapting recipes is an age—old industry. Nonetheless, I thought I'd give the hunt a try with chicken Canzanese, an unusual recipe that ran in the Times in 1969. A Google search for "chicken Canzanese" yielded many results, a number of them facsimiles, or slight variations of the chicken dish that appeared in the Times. There's one on Cooks.com that's a close adaptation of the Times's recipe, another by Mario Batali on the Food Network's website and one by Anna Teresa Callen, the cookbook author and teacher, on her own website. Batali's and Callen's, which vary only slightly from the Times's recipe, are nearly word for word the same. Only one recipe that I found sourced the Times's recipe, which itself came from Ed Giobbi, a cookbook author, and was written about by Craig Claiborne. You can also find plenty of turkey recipes done in the style of Canzanese (Canzano is in the Abruzzo region in Italy), which refers to braised turkey, served cold with chopped turkey aspic. But chicken Canzanese, which is not mentioned in important Italian cookbooks like Le Ricette Regionali Italiane (Italian Regional Cooking), is completely different. When you make it, you understand why it's still kicking around after all these decades. After flash-brining the chicken, you throw everything into the pan at the same time—chicken, cubed prosciutto, sage, bay leaves, rosemary, garlic, chile, cloves, peppercorns, and wine—and end up with a dish that has the fragrance of Chinese steamed duck and the succulence of a Bolognese sauce. I sensed that it would be impossible to come to a conclusion about where chicken Canzanese originated (Giobbi's recipe was the earliest I could find), and this was confirmed as soon as I started calling people. Callen said she grew up in Abruzzo eating chicken Canzanese. Batali, who regularly credits people from whom he adapts recipes, said that he must have gotten his from Callen, and was apologetic about the borrowing. Giobbi, whose recipe came from a family friend in Abruzzo, suggested that perhaps Callen was influenced by him. When I asked Callen if there was any chance she referred to Giobbi's recipe when writing about her family's dish, she said, "Could be, very well." I didn't intend this to be an investigation—recipes are adapted all the time, it's one of the primary ways cuisines evolve—so I did not chase down the dozens of sites that appear to have copied Callen or Batali. One thing is clear, though: a good recipe has a thousand fathers, but a bad one is an orphan.

This is a different sort of frittata, not the neat golden round of well-set eggs that’s probably most familiar. Here the eggs are in the skillet for barely a minute, just long enough to gather in soft, loose folds, filled with morsels of asparagus and shreds of prosciutto. In fact, when I make this frittata or the “dragged” eggs—uova strapazzate, page 143—I leave my eggs still wet and glistening so I can mop up the plate with a crust of country bread. That’s the best part of all.

This old "gourmet" standby can indeed be spectacular, or it can be exceedingly dull. Everything rests on the quality of the ingredients. With good cheese, first-rate ham, homemade crumbs, and a little care in the cooking, you can't go wrong. If, however, you use indifferent, packaged boiled ham and ordinary cheese, and add insult to injury by overcooking them, you'll kill yourself wondering what all the fuss is about.

"Simple, simple, simple! Just throw it in the oven and jump in the shower." That's how food stylist Toni Brogan described this savory pie, a favorite in her native New Zealand. And it really is that easy—just line a pan with puff pastry, fill it up with onions, thinly sliced potatoes, and, in place of the usual bacon, prosciutto (left over from Ravioli with Green Beans and Prosciutto ), then crack some eggs on top and cover with more pastry. By the time everyone is out of the shower, the pie is ready to come out of the oven, all golden and flaky on the outside, layered with deliciousness on the inside. Though it's traditional to serve the pie with ketchup, we love it with some spicy chutney on the side.

Haute ham and eggs! These appetizers are protein-rich, and cutting out the crust makes them incredibly low-cal.

Any excuse to cook a pork chop is a good excuse, and here is one of Italian origin: You get to stuff it with prosciutto, not to mention buttery Fontina and aromatic sage.