Rice-wine vinegar and white pepper add zip to a simple cucumber soup, and watermelon gelée adds flair.

In her book of essays, "Small Wonder," Barbara Kingsolver wrote a piece on poetry called Stealing Apples. "I rarely think of poetry as something I make happen; it is more accurate to say that it happens to me . . . When a poem does arrive, I gasp as if an apple had fallen onto my head." Some recipes are like that, too. They simply happen.

I'm presented with tomatoes, basil and pasta, and suddenly I know. The basil leaves will be fried alone in olive oil and lifted out with a slotted spoon to be scattered later, like crisp, green flakes over angel hair, tossed with strips of seeded tomatoes warmed in the basil-blessed oil. It's not a recipe exactly, just a response to a certain set of ingredients and a certain vacancy in a menu.
 

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Some dishes spring fully blown from the subconscious mind as if they had always been there, and I put them together without any dabbling or experimenting. The ingredients appear together because they naturally become available at the same time, or because they have a regional or cultural affinity for one another. Any technique applied to the ingredients must come out of my own experience.

Two years ago, I was entertaining a small group of women who were putting together a conference for a foodie organization called Les Dames d'Escoffier. I had promised them a light lunch, and without any conscious thought about what I would serve, I made some bread dough for French rolls, then I went to the cooler as if I had a plan. I reached for some eggs that came from a friend who keeps chickens. Then I grabbed a pound of applewood-smoked bacon that I happened to have on hand. I washed some Bibb lettuce delivered by a local farmer, and dutifully whisked together a dressing of red wine vinegar and walnut oil.

It wasn't until I sat down to eat with my guests, buttered a roll and plunged a fork into the poached egg on top of the salad that I was stricken with the uncanny similarity between this lunch and one I'd eaten at an outdoor café in a French town called Puy-en-Velay. I hadn't planned to serve the salad ahead of time. It just happened.

That salad was more like a spontaneous recollection, though, than a creation.

New dishes are those that emerge with no discernible connection to anything I have eaten before. Last summer, for instance, I was suddenly and perhaps unreasonably compelled to produce a cucumber soup with watermelon gelée. There was no call for the dish; no one was asking for chilled soup. I was under no obligation to use up any watermelon. But I knew I had to make it. I could picture the dish as clearly as if I had seen it in a photograph.

In all honesty, I had to wonder if I had seen it somewhere. But I have a pretty good memory for food, and for the life of me, I do not remember ever having eaten this cucumber soup or seen it anywhere in print. It was an apple falling on my head. And when I made it, it was exactly right. I was a child again. School was out and through an open window I could hear a lawn mower. A watermelon was on the counter and cold fried chicken was in the ice box. It would be a very good day.