Daniel Boulud

In this easy yet sophisticated recipe, chef Daniel Boulud pairs a curry-spiced crab salad with sweet watermelon and bright cilantro and mint.

Daniel Boulud makes this oozy appetizer with Vacherin Mont-d’Or, a creamy cheese sold at top cheese shops. Camembert is as rich and runny as Vacherin Mont-d’Or, but much easier to find.

This luscious dish is deceptively simple: skate stuffed with duxelles, a mixture of mushrooms and shallots, served alongside creamed spinach. The rich skate and mushrooms go particularly well with white Burgundies from the village of Meursault.

Sweet, tart and strong, the caipirinha is mixed with the Brazilian spirit cachaça. Cachaça is similar to rum but made from sugarcane rather than molasses. “It’s more sophisticated than rum because it’s more pure,” says Brazilian artist Vik Muniz, patriotically.

Store-bought dried orecchiette gets tossed with a bolognese sauce made with just ham and ground chuck. Finishing the dish with chestnuts (leaving out the porcini and squash) adds a delicious and unexpected touch.

Daniel Boulud’s deliciously light and clean-tasting soup—a mix of sweet peas, favas, pea shoots, snap peas and snow peas—is on the menu each spring at his Café Boulud in New York City. The recipe appears in the Café Boulud Cookbook (Scribner).

Braising chicken in a liquid that combines onions, carrots, bacon and olives creates complex flavor relatively quickly.

With its basil-and-pine nut crust and bracing dressing of lemon juice and Dijon mustard, this lamb dish bridges Brazil and Provence.

For a sweet, fragrant dessert wine to match, Daniel Johnnes prefers M. Chapoutier’s 2005 Muscat de Rivesaltes. Other Muscats from the south of France also work well here, such as the generally more delicate Muscat de Beaumes-de-Venise.

This is Daniel Boulud’s take on Wiener schnitzel, a breaded and fried veal cutlet. He lightens the dish by making it with thinly pounded monkfish fillets, breaded on only one side. He serves it with a mix of asparagus, zucchini and butternut squash.

Guests at Bar Boulud are greeted with these golden French cheese puffs, with grated Gruyàre cheese and the mild Basque pepper Piment d’Espelette. Almost twice the size of ordinary gougères, they’re a bit like crispy, cheesy, slightly spicy popovers.

Broil the snapper on a baking sheet, then serve it with a salad that combines all the bright, crisp flavors of the original dish: fennel, radishes, bell pepper, citrus and jalapeño.

Okra and cashews are central to Brazilian cuisine; here the vegetable is lightly sautéed with slivers of garlic and tossed with the nuts for a great crunch.

For a fun yet elegant dessert, Daniel Boulud tops an easy, creamy ginger-mascarpone mousse with chopped mangoes and pineapple, raspberries and generous scoops of vanilla ice cream.

Chef Daniel Boulud prepares this classic, creamy veal stew with veal stock, sometimes adding sweetbreads and finishing the dish with shavings of black truffle. When preparing this dish at home, omit the sweetbreads and truffle and opt for store-bought vegetable broth—or even salted water—over veal stock.