The Perfect Pantry

Dry bread crumbs (Recipe: egg noodle, cheese and cauliflower gratin)

There's a big piece of land for sale up the road from my house.

Costco, are you listening???

I'm an hour away from the nearest location of my favorite warehouse-type store and, while I don't go often, and I don't stockpile huge quantities of things in The Perfect (but kind of small) Pantry, I'd love to have a Costco closer to home.

I love their sides of salmon for $3.99 per pound. I love the soft, puffy bagels (heresy, from a native New Yorker....). I love the oatmeal-raisin cookies, the giant boxes of grape tomatoes, the bags of Empire kosher chicken breasts, the portobello caps and haricot vert at prices I can afford.

Most of all, though, I love the cookbooks.

Incredible bargains, eclectic selection, best sellers, no-sellers — I can't walk past the book aisle without browsing, and there is always something I don't have and, suddenly, cannot live without.

Last week, the brand new Fine Cooking Annual landed in my shopping cart — available at Costco before it's even in the bookstores! Good thing, too, because I was looking for new recipes that call for the dry bread crumbs I found on my pantry shelf.

Horseradish sauce (Recipe: horseradish dip)

Every item in my pantry falls into one of two categories: innie, or outie.

Innies — ingredients that don't stand alone, and are fundamental to the creation of a dish — include herbs and spices, grains and legumes, and dry pasta.

Outies can be innies, but they also can stand alone. Often used as garnish, or to enhance the flavor of a finished dish, my standby outies include things like yogurt, ketchup, cheeses, soy sauce, and my brand-new favorite: horseradish sauce.

Chickpeas (Recipe: lemon onion hummus)

Which came first, the famous Roman orator Cicero, or chickpeas?

According to some sources, chickpeas (Latin name cicer arietum) were named after a rather unattractive wart on Cicero's nose. Other sources say that Cicero, born with a less-than-perfect nose, was named after the oddly curled-up legume. Chickpeas are an ancient food, discovered in mesolithic layers in southern France and carbon-dated to approximately 6790 BC. Cicero's time was around 100 BC. Which came first?

Lemons (Recipe: lemon curd)

Oh, I love-love-love the Internet.

As I started thinking about lemons, I got a bit sidetracked (which happens more and more often these days).

Why, I wondered, are irredeemably bad cars called lemons?

Click, click, click. Wikipedia offered not one answer, but four, ranging from plausible to truly ridiculous.

I wanted to know more.

Click, click, click.

Eureka! That's the variety of most of the lemons we see in the markets in the US (except those who live in California, where wonderful Meyer lemons also are available). Lemon trees grow to 20 feet tall; a mature tree can yield up to 2,000 fruits per year.

Cardamom pods (Recipe: prawn fried rice)

If I had a dollar for every item in The Perfect Pantry that's reputed to be an aphrodisiac, I'd be able to take my husband out for a swanky night on the town.

Add cardamom pods to the list of "love" spices.

Whole wheat flour (Recipe: easy grilled whole wheat pizza)

I'm an every-other-decade kind of baker.

In the 1960s and again in the 1980s, I baked bread, sometimes every week. I started with a basic recipe for white bread, from the classic Beard on Bread, and slowly I branched out.

My pantry reflected that bread passion, with jars of unbleached all-purpose flour, whole wheat flour, rye, semolina, oatmeal, seeds and nuts and grains from the local health food store.

Now that we're nearer to the end of the 00 decade than to the beginning, I'm feeling the urge to bake again. (Actually, I bought Dorie Greenspan's book, after reading all the glowing reports here and here and here. But Ted's run off with it. I'm not complaining; he made glorious lemon madeleines!)

Ketchup (Recipe: football season chili)

No matter how old I get (and today is my birthday, so I know I'm getting older), I will never, ever, outgrow ketchup.

In my family, it was always ketchup, Heinz ketchup, that rescued the bad meals (mother's grievously overcooked calf's liver, hard as shoe leather), and enhanced the good ones (dad's perfectly grilled lamb chops). I put it on cheese omelets and mashed potatoes, and everything in between. Sure, ketchup isn't a vegetable, as the USDA now admits, but I could eat five servings a day.

Sesame oil (Recipe: bulgogi)

As a novice cook devoted to Julia Child's television shows, I learned that a mirepoix of three aromatic vegetables — onions, carrots, celery — flavors much of French cooking.

Cajun cooks also use a flavor base of three vegetables: onions, bell pepper and celery. They call it the Trinity.

My own trinity has nothing to do with vegetables, though it has everything to do with flavor, and it's most certainly aromatic. I call it the Cantonese 3-2-1 Trinity, and it's my basic stir-fry sauce.

Three parts low-sodium soy sauce.

Two parts oyster sauce.

One part sesame oil.

Paprika (Recipe: whitefish Hungarian style)

Sometimes, what's in The Perfect Pantry isn't exactly perfect.

The nearest market, five miles away in our village, has come a long way in the few years I've been living in this rural part of Rhode Island. I can always pick up brie and green tea and Nutella, along with organic dairy products and mango nectar, daikon and dried figs.

On the day I ran out of my favorite Szeged Hungarian paprika, in the telltale red-and-white tin, my little market was out of stock.

So, I drove another five miles down the road, to the larger supermarket. Once again, there was not a single tin of paprika on the shelf.

And so, off I went again, five more miles down the road (by this time I was three towns from home, and wondering if the fates were conspiring against me), to another supermarket. No tins there, either, but I did find this organic paprika. Rapidly calculating the cost of gas I'd have to add to the price of the spice, I bought it, hoping it would be worth the 25-mile road trip.

It's good. Good enough, but not as robust as the stuff in the tin.

Cornmeal (Recipe: baked polenta with braised wild mushrooms)

Want some mealie meal?

Not a mealy meal, which would taste horrible, full of sand and grit.

Mealie meal, also known as mealie pap or mielie-meal, is a South African name for cornmeal, which, no matter what you call it, means dried corn kernels that have been ground, either by stone or by steel rollers.