Appetizer Recipes From Around the World.

The first course is a statement of intent. What a culture puts in front of you before the meal proper says how it expects you to eat — quickly or for hours, alone or in a crowd, with your hands or with cutlery. Some cuisines answered by building the entire meal out of small plates and never bothering with a main: Spanish tapas moving bar to bar, Levantine and Balkan meze covering the table so nobody controls the middle, Korean banchan arriving unrequested and refilled without being asked. Others use the opening to sharpen appetite rather than satisfy it — Peruvian causa layered cold with ají-yellowed potato, Japanese otsumami sized to a single sip, Italian antipasti built on cured pork and vinegar. The technique here is different from main-course technique. Small plates are judged on the first bite, so seasoning has to be assertive, texture has to be immediate, and the dish must survive sitting on a table for twenty minutes while people talk. Anything subtle is wasted; anything that goes soggy is dead. The recipes in this collection are chosen because they hold up under those conditions, and most of them scale into a meal on their own — which is exactly what the cultures that invented them do with them anyway.

117 recipes on this route