Red velvet cake is a mellow chocolate cake with an intense red color. A white cream cheese icing is traditional, preferably applied with such care that when you cut it, the cake’s redness is a surprise.

We’ve tasted plenty of red velvet cakes that were somewhat bland – cocoa in search of a focus. Then we tasted a red velvet cake so laden with orange extract that its chocolate flavor was barely perceptible. But the marriage of cocoa and orange was alluring – like candied orange peel dipped in chocolate – so we developed this rich butter cake spiked with cocoa and orange zest and colored a vivid red.

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Ambrosia is the name of a cold, sweet, chunky salad found in most southern cafeterias. We’ve reinvented it from top to bottom.

The original ambrosia calls for canned tangerine segments, canned pineapple chunks, mini-marshmallows, shredded coconut, and mayonnaise. It is bracingly sweet, but we often find it served, bizarrely enough, as a side dish with the main course, which seems out of whack – a salad created for someone who’d rather eat dessert first. But the idea of “a food for the gods” – a cool, creamy salad that isn’t coleslaw – appeals greatly to us, so we fiddled with the elements and came up with something new.

Here we substitute fresh grapefruit and orange for the canned tangerines and crisp cucumber and celery for the pineapple. Chopped avocado provides the soft creaminess of the marshmallows in the original. There is no mayo here, but instead a brisk dressing of buttermilk, lime juice, tarragon, and garlic, with the gentle sweetness of shredded coconut (a direct carryover from the original). It’s a salad with beautiful contrasting textures, pretty colors, and bright flavors. This ambrosia is as crunchy and cool as coleslaw but with herbal notes instead of vinegary ones. Like coleslaw, it’s brilliant paired with anything fried or spicy. Sometimes we serve a scoop of New Ambrosia over a small bed of arugula as the salad course in a larger meal.

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Come October in the South Carolina lowcountry, when the shrimp season overlaps high blue crab season, it’s time to make Frogmore Stew!

Named for Frogmore, South Carolina, a town of about ten thousand people in the low-lying wetlands between Beaufort and St. Helena Island, this stew quite literally seems to have emerged from the marshes: it puts shrimp and crab front-and-center, and it’s often served by outdoorsy characters, at hunting stations, fish shacks, and boatyards. And more than any other stew, Frogmore (which is also sometimes referred to as Lowcountry Boil) lives up to the spirit of one-pot dining, with whole, shell-on shrimp, split crabs, corn-on-the-cob, and smoked sausages bobbing around in a richly-concentrated shellfish broth.

Frogmore Stew is designed to be consumed outdoors, where its messiness seems less onerous, but if the autumn weather’s too chilly where you live, bring the party inside; this dish gets people in an upbeat, fun-loving mood the way a good soundtrack does, and for that reason, we often serve it indoors with clean dish towels for napkins, sheets of newspaper to protect the table, and plenty of waster bowls for the shrimp shells, crab shells, and spent corncobs. For a rare treat, be sure to suck on the shrimp before peeling them – the legs and shell hold tons of flavor!

Below, we provide a simple variation that makes this rustic stew a more elegant dish for a white-tablecloth dinner. Whichever way you choose to serve it, Frogmore Stew is guaranteed to bring warmth and festivity to your home this Fall.

What to drink: A tart white like an Albariño or even a Muscadet would be the right match for this stew’s marriage of shellfish and smoky sausage; if it’s wintry outdoors, open a medium-bodied, fruity red like Beaujolais Villages.

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