Sara Jenkins has been cooking in restaurants around New York for several years now. (Her latest perch, Porchetta, in the East Village, serves a pork sandwich that’s worth the trip over in a cab. Or a plane.) She has a lovely sensibility, tradition-minded but delicately modern. OLIVES AND ORANGES: Recipes and Flavor Secrets From Italy, Spain, Cyprus, and Beyond (Houghton Mifflin, $35), written with Mindy Fox, offers a few surprises, like a Tunisian salad of grated raw turnips seasoned with nothing more than salt, lime and a little harissa (North African pepper paste) that I would have passed on if she hadn’t talked it up in her introduction. (She says it can sit for as long as six hours, but I liked it even better the next day. Maybe by then I’d gotten used to the idea.) She scatters bacon, onions and sautéed sugar snap peas on top of broiled salmon, and the sweet vegetables caress the salty meats. A simple stew of lamb, grapes and green tomatoes effaces any regrets over your unripe autumn fruit.
Jenkins’s pasta recipes are appealingly straightforward, like one that combines cannellini beans, mustard greens and anchovies and another with flaky fish, almonds and capers. But again, the unexpected: her Turkish-inspired concoction of noodles sauced with yogurt, mint and two pounds of ground lamb, at once sour and creamy, is a meat lover’s dream. Her cloud-textured panna cottas — one scented with orange zest, another with jasmine tea — get that way by being lightened with egg whites.
