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LEARN ITS COMPATIBILITIES Every piece of produce has a wide variety of spices, herbs, grains — and even other types of produce— that help to make it shine. Satsumas, for example, balance beautifully against vanilla in sweeter creations like shortbreads and parfaits, but can just as easily team up with a little bit of coriander and ginger as the perfect glaze to cut through the richness of duck. Treating an ingredient as a one-trick (or one-flavor) pony is a surefire way to miss out on its exquisite range. Pretty much any piece of produce has the ability to play nicely with dozens of other unexpected ingredients and build flavorful complexity — if you only give it a chance. “An essential aspect of great cooking is harnessing compatible flavors, which involves knowing which...flavorings best accentuate particular ingredients,” writes Karen Page in the kitchen must-have, The Flavor Bible: The Essential Guide to Culinary Creativity, Based on the Wisdom of America’s Most Imaginative Chefs , which offers some of the strongest charts, explainers and reference points out there for how to pair ingredients and flavors based on all of the senses. “A process of trial-and-error over the centuries resulted in…timeless combinations of beloved flavor pairings — for example, basil with tomatoes [and] rosemary with lamb. However, today it’s possible to use scientific techniques to analyze similar molecular structures to come up with new, compatible pairing possibilities, as odd as some might sound — jasmine with pork liver [or] parsley with banana.” When it comes to mirliton — with its apple-meets-cucumber clean taste — Hill discovered that cornmeal is (somewhat surprisingly) an ideal counterpart for the squash, and mirliton corn muffins soon became a hit at his house. “When I was initially trying to make my mirliton muffins, there were recipes that used mirlitons and wheat flour, and it always turned out horribly, because mirlitons have a lot of moisture and they discharge it while baking, so you get a soggy product,” Hill explains. “I discovered that cornmeal absorbs moisture, and that any moisture mirlitons can put out is absorbed into the muffin, so the resulting muffin is not only light and moist, but it’s this wonderful flavor that’s the essence of Mexican cuisine.” (If you’d like to try your hand at a batch of these for Thanksgiving, the recipe is on mirliton.org.) Mirlitons also have the unique ability to serve as the star of a sweet dish as much as a savory creation. Hill has been working for a while

people don’t have enough patience to wait and grow more,” he explains, understanding that his advice might not be taken to heart by many. “People want to eat the mirlitons that their grandma made, though, so I think most of them get consumed.” START WITH THE CLASSICS Speaking of grandmothers, the next step in learning how to really work with a piece of produce in the most creative number of ways is by starting with the classics. For mirliton, that means two things: stuffed mirliton and mirliton dressing. Ask 100 people in South Louisiana how to make stuffed mirlitons and mirliton dressing and you’re going to get 100 different answers — every family has their own, quasi-secret recipes passed down throughout the generations that they’ll swear by. There’s stuffed mirliton with sausage that’s the standard-to-beat for some, then it’s a trio of seafood stuffing ingredients — crabmeat, shrimp and crawfish — that’s the gold standard for others. You include a garden’s worth of vegetables in your stuffed mirliton, or you think that the meat-meets- mirliton flavor should shine through. You’re a spice-it-up devotee, or you believe salt and pepper (and maybe a little bit of hot sauce) can make it sing. Whatever your chosen path, mirliton is a vegetable simply begging to be stuffed, baked and devoured thanks to its naturally hollowed-out middle (once the seed is removed). With mirliton dressing, there’s the same ability to play around with family preference and personal taste until you find just the right combination to hit that delicious-meets-nostalgia sweet spot. Shrimp and mirliton with day-old French bread remains the classic, but adding crabmeat or sausage, or replacing the French bread with cornbread, are also stellar moves. “My introduction to mirlitons was backyard growing and traditional New Orleans recipes decades ago. My neighbor shows up one day with this Schwegmann’s bag full of these things, and said, ‘Do you want mirlitons?’ And I go, ‘Yeah, what do you do with them?’” Hill chuckles. “He goes, ‘I’ll send Gladys over with some recipes.’ I got stuffed mirlitons, mirliton casserole and mirliton pie. Mirliton pie has kind of fallen out of favor, but my sons request that for their birthday. It’s not at all a pie, it’s more like a banana bread. It has a such a unique flavor.”

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