Eat: For Summer Cooking, Embrace Simplicity

William Brinson for The New York Times; Food stylist: Suzanne Lenzer. Prop stylist: Susan Brinson.

Peak summer is upon us, the corn as high as an elephant's eye, tomatoes fat and nearly bursting on the vine. On the East Coast, down in the shallows of low tide, you'll find people doing the shimmy with their bare toes, or pulling hard with a rake, looking for clams. There is basil in the window box and bacon in the fridge. This is the time of year to make like a chef: Embrace the simplicity of this, and allow the ingredients to talk for themselves.

I put out a call to Seamus Mullen, the chef and an owner of Tertulia in Greenwich Village, to talk about that. Mullen is an interesting character, a Vermont farm boy who cooks as if working at a tavern in northern Spain, an unabashed culinary hedonist (reserve your whole suckling pig today!) who has written a cookbook, "Seamus Mullen's Hero Food," devoted to the idea that being careful about what you eat (not a ton of suckling pig presumably) can play a large role in improving your health.

The idea is not so much to eliminate foods from your diet as to herald those that demonstrably help your body: excellent olive oil, for instance.

Mullen is adamant about the role these hero foods of his can play in your life. Parsley is another example. Anchovies. Stone fruit. He has much to say about how they do a body good. "I guess that happens when you wake up one day and you're not in horrible pain for the first time in over 10 years," he said. (Mullen has rheumatoid arthritis. It laid him low. Past tense.)

But his beliefs are not evangelical. They are in his view merely suggestions. And they do not prevent him from embracing the delicious, nor from providing succor for those who can eat what he no longer can.

Two grand examples follow, summer food at its apogee, one recipe deeply Spanish in origin, the other New Englandish, with only a slight Castilian lisp.

The first is for the tomato bread — pan con tomate is the more elegant description — served at Tertulia. It is traditionally a humble dish, a way to make a single tomato and some old bread serve a family for lunch. Rub some garlic and a tomato over that old bread, drizzle with olive oil, serve? Not at Tertulia. "We made it a little better here in New York," Mullen said.

For this dish, use a box grater to shred the best tomato you can find, no difficult task at this time of year. Microplane some garlic into it. Add salt and a big drizzle of fruity Spanish olive oil, then a little less of sherry vinegar. Mullen recommends Montegrato Fino, which is available online. ("These guys are to sherry vinegar what Walter White is to crystal meth," he said, invoking the television series "Breaking Bad.") It adds an astonishing lightness and intensity to the dish. But a bottle of standard Spanish sherry vinegar found at the supermarket also tested well.

Now toast or grill a few thick slices of the best, most yeasty and Old World-style bread you can locate, then heap some of the tomato mixture on the top. Then scrape most of it off. "This isn't bruschetta," Mullen said. "We want the suggestion of the tomato, not the actual tomato."

Remain true to the dish's origins in this, at least: Pretend we can't afford multiple tomatoes.

Add a little more of that good olive oil and sprinkle a little flaky sea salt over the top. Serve the result immediately or, this being summer and the guests a little late, let it sit out with some wine for when they arrive. Thus is the taste of Spanish poverty transformed into a delicacy.

As a main course, Mullen turned me toward his youth, to the memory of an uncle driving west and north from the Massachusetts coast up to Vermont, a box of clams in the back seat, to a New England coastal feast made in the Green Mountains far from the salt air. His family would steam those clams over hardwood, but the recipe in "Hero Food" replaces the difficulties of cooking over a wood fire with the ease of adding some sautéed bacon and a healthy shower of pimentón, the Spanish smoked paprika, to a stovetop pot.

The recipe is no grind. Sauté the bacon. Add garlic. Add white wine, a lot of clams (littlenecks, the smallest of the quahogs, are best), corn on the cob and the pimentón. Cover and steam for 10 minutes or so, until the corn is tender and the clams are open. Then give everyone an equal portion along with some broth, scatter torn basil over the top and serve with a dusting of Aleppo pepper if you have it.

The dish tastes exactly of August on a plate, the saltiness of the clams amplifying what Pablo Neruda called the sweet, "virginal" flavor of the corn. Robin Thicke, who has the real song of the summer, "Blurred Lines," puts it differently: "I know you want it."

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