If you don’t live in Manhattan, you probably haven’t put in major hours in our local bodegas, delis and green grocers, and may not know about the unusual treasures to be discovered therein.

The classic example in the East Village is the corner shop owned by a Punjabi family, offering standard fare (flowers, fruits and veg, beer, soda) and meeting their own needs with an epic freezer of meat substitutes, jars of instant curries, Vita cola and hot chai, appealing to the well-heeled, health-conscious Bobo with faux natural beauty products and new fangled granola bars, reflecting to India’s colonized past with a full shelf to British goodies like oat cakes, Hob Nobs, Heinz baked beans and Cadbury candy bars. 

In my direct neighborhood there are also often products scattered throughout that nod to the old school Eastern European presence. And so it was at Village Farm Grocery that I found tarragon soda.

One very green bottle peeked out at me from behind the seltzer. It was the color that compelled, as you can imagine. The Cyrillic-looking font on the bottle gave it away as something for the former Soviets among us. 

I got it home and had it on ice. Tastes faintly of licorice, rooty, very sweet and like tarragon. It goes flat quickly. Or I’m drinking it slowly. Sort of bad aftertaste, and plaque-making.

Tarkhun, as it is called in Russian, is made with Russian tarragon, which is hardier and less flavorful than French tarragon, which we westerners generally use to cook with and which is used to such elegant effect in classic cuisine like Sauce Bearnaise. My impression is that tarragon cola is not exactly common in the former Soviet Union, but like birch beer is here, available erratically and part of the cultural memory more than a regularly consumed drink.

This bottle was produced by the Natakhtari brewery, which makes beer in addition to fizzy drinks. Natakhari is in the Republic of Georgia and according to their website, owing to innovative technologies, modern forms and methods of management, they haveno analogue in South Caucasus. So I’m guessing that they are proud of their tarragon soda and I’m willing to accept it as a pretty good representation of how a tarragon beverage should look and taste.

My judgement is that tarragon soda is good for cultural anthropology but on the whole pretty yuck for consumption.

The cook crush recently predicted that the word “fond” (the caramelized bits of food stuck to the bottom of a pan after browning used to make pan sauces and to enrich braises and stews) will be lost in time.

My instructor Chef E. didn’t call it “fond”, she called it schmutz. I thought it was amusing, and as English was her second language, that schmutz was possibly the actual word used in Yiddish to describe those browned bits.

But the observation about the disappearance of the word “fond” seems true. Nobody on the food network calls fond by name, and most people use a vaguely pejorative term to describe it. 

In the Times magazine this week, there is a nice article on the midwinter pleasures of a slow cooked sauce with recipes for ragù, including one for a lamb ragù from Centro Vinoteca chef/Batali’s Iron Chef sous Anne Burrell. In the paragraph used to describe her technique, she repeatedly calls the fond created by browning ground lamb meat and vegetables “crud”.

I’m all for making cooking approachable, but let’s agree to keep the lexicon of cooking complex and specific, as it makes us more complex and specific (and therefore better) cooks, and let’s agree to use the proper word for this culinary fundamental, and to use words like “crud” to describe those things for which no other word exists, like the mix of gum and asphalt stuck to the bottom of your shoe.

In the culinary world, a stage (pronounced like the second syllable of “garage”) is an unpaid period of work given in exchange for the opportunity to learn new techniques and gain experience at the side of a chef of greater experience.  It is a more sophisticated sounding name for an “internship” and although no more familiar to the uninitiated than “externship”, better because it is unique to the food service industry.  

When I walked into the prep kitchen at Prune this morning for my first shift, I was suited up in white pants (terrible, I’ve never worn a shade lighter than charcoal on my bottom in the past) and a diswasher shirt (if given the option, I’ll take short sleeve snap front over voluminous chef jacket any day).

I was immediately given a recipe for pickled tomatoes and left to do my thing.  Over the course of the day I made a few side dishes, cleaned a lot of herbs, had the width of my bias-cut scallions constructively criticized, organized the walk-in refrigerator, chatted with the sous about running, bras, running bras and whether Vermont’s Champlain Valley is superior to Massachusetts’ Pioneer Valley (unquestionably), and located the working spice grinder when it was not in its place.

Before I left got my schedule for the month, learned I’m expected to trail the line starting next week so that I can work the grill station during dinner the week after, and ate some eggplant parm for lunch.

A room full of smart women cooking soulful food, listening to Caetano Veloso.  It was sort of love. 

Whatever name you give it, the headcheese is underway! 

Yesterday’s storm almost kept us from receiving our shipment of pig trotters, tongue and head.  But the materials came in at the last minute and I had prepared my brine in hopeful anticipation, so in they went for an overnight soak.

So ladylike!

Our classroom was the center of ICE Chef-Instructor attention this morning as I simmered the brined parts.  Two chefs asked to borrow the cooked head to show to their classes, and I have to admit that I felt like the most popular cheerleader on the squad when our resident charcuterie expert, a burly man with a severe glare, popped his head in to tell me that he was impressed with my initiative. 

I would worry that posting a gross-out photo of the simmered head might corrupt the notion of something truly lovely like headcheese (or as we’ve agreed to call it in class,  fromage de tête), but most people already find the notion of eating head completely taboo, and those that don’t may be fascinated by the way the simmering process changes the tissue composition.  So here is before:

And after:

Note the increased floppiness of the ears.  If you were wondering, yes, simmering the meat does result in the teeth being wiggly. 

I’ll finish the terrine by trimming the meat and packing it is the gelatin-rich simmering liquid tomorrow morning.  

Natural sausage casings are made from hog, sheep and cow submucosa, a collagen-rich layer of the intestines.  The bowl of sea creature-looking ones pictured above are from a hog and were used to make a szechuan pepper sausage.  They are superior to artificial casings not only for aesthetic reasons;  according to Midwestern Research and Supply, natural casings:

• Readily permit deep smoke penetration which creates a rich, balanced flavor.
• Protect the fine flavor of sausage, without contributing any conflicting flavorings of their own.
• Stay more tender and juicy, fresh in appearance, and have extended shelf life.
• Have a well-filled appearance which is appealing to the eye.
• Have excellent characteristics of elasticity and tensile strength, aka SNAP!!!
• Natural Sausage Casings help to protect and retain the fine flavor of sausage and seasonings.
• Superior tensile strength enables maximum yields for sausage manufacturers

I had been looking forward to today’s class from Day 1.  Making sausage is excellent fun and I can’t wait to sample our wares during our graduation buffet next week!

We kicked off  the set of “Great Men and the Great Food They Make” classes today with Mario Batali recipes.  After a droll lecture in which we learned that once upon a time in the not too distant past Batali was just a guy opening a restaurant around the corner, we went on to make a few of his greatest hits.

My assignment was to make a fennel-dusted sweetbread dish with a quince gastrique (sauce of vinegar and sugar) and agrodolce onions, shallots and scallions.

It was great not only to get right back into making real food after the sojourn through desserts, but especially to make sweetbreads that were more in keeping with how I think they should be served.  In the past we’ve braised sweetbreads, and used them to stuff quail.  Both of those dishes were gloopy.  Batali’s recipe resultedin crisp and, as far as offal goes, light meat, and the fennel and the texture resulted in it tasting and feeling like the creamiest sausage in the land.  The best part was that my classmates, heretofore avowed sweetbread haters, actually thought they were edible.

The question of time as a factor in the value of a food product was reflected upon in two different ways today.

In class we finished making puff pastry and used it to make more fruit tarts.  I made one with pistachio frangipane and apricots:

Puff Pastry involves a couple of different stages.  First you create the sticky flour and water dough called détrempe.  Then you pound out some butter to soften it, and shape it into a brick; this is called beurrage.  You evenly wrap the beurrage in the détrempe and roll the lot out into a wide sheet that consists of a thin layer of butter between two layers of dough.  You fold it up and roll it repeatedly, resting between roll-and-folds.  Eventually you have a hundred layers and presto you can use it for turnovers, beef wellington, cheezy poof sticks, whatever.

OR. You buy frozen puff pastry, because it has a better consistency than what you can put out, because it is cheaper when you factor the labor that goes into all that rolling, and because in my opinion this is an area of cooking where the hands-on love doesn’t actually add anything.

After class a few of us took advantage of the cool, overcast afternoon and shorter lines, and had lunch at the Shake Shack.  The Shackburger is very tasty indeed, made with great meat and griddled with a nicely salted crust.  The special sauce is well balanced.  And I don’t mind waiting in line.   

But at the end of the day it isn’t the best burger in the city.  The real charm of the Shake Shack is that it facilitates a civilized pint of beer in a lovely and lively park, rarely a legal option.   It is the atmosphere that makes the 45 minute investment in your burger worth it.  The mix of office drones, mommies, tourists, hotties, hobos and that one crazy Tarzan-looking dude stalking around shirtless looking like he’s just committed a felony makes Madison Park one of my favorite people watching locales in Manhattan, and being able to wash it down with Brooklyn Lager is the real treat.

Today we began the two-day production that is the making of Pâte Feuilletée (puff pastry).  (I’ll post a step-by-step of this tomorrow when there is something nice to look at at the end of the making-and-baking.) (Yawn.)

We also practiced making parchment paper cornets, which we then filled with melted chocolate so that we could practice cake writing script.  No letters today, only decorative squiggles, ala OK’s, below:

I’m not going to revert to that little wiseass who pestered her 4th grade teacher with enough “what’s the point?” attitude that he threw a chair at her.  I’m not going to  suggest that I will not need to know how to make fancy chocolate squiggles on cakes even though it feels silly to spend an hour on a Thursday morning tracing them out.  With maturity comes wisdom, and wisdom is knowing that you just can’t forsee when you might need to impress a potential suitor with a well-decorated cake.  Cooking school may put me on a path to my MRS degree, after all. 

We began our Pastry module on Monday.  So far it is perfectly pleasant - our Chef Instructor is a calm man of vast experience, a former commercial bakery owner, and a patient teacher.  Desserts don’t really get me revved up, but Pastry is the most overtly scientific part of the culinary world and I like food science, so I think the mod will go quickly.

We made three kinds of dough yesterday:

• Pâte Brissé(”broken paste”), a shortcrust dough with largeish lumps of butter that melt away to give you a super-flaky crust, used for sweet or savory dishes
• Pâte Sucré (”sweetened paste”), with granulated bits of butter and a good deal of sugar for a tender tart crust 
• Pâte Sablée (”sanded paste”), a heavy dough enriched with lots of egg that can be used for crusts or as a simple cookie base.

Today we used the Pâtes Brissé and Sucré to make tarts.  We blind baked the Brissé, which means that we parcooked it with crust weights so that it would be crisp and thin for an uncooked filling.  We also made individual tartlets with the Sucré.

We had a variety of fillings - both fresh fruit and the stuff that we poached on Monday, pastry cream ( used to fill e.g. éclairs - I find it sort of yucky, but people love that stuff), and frangipane, a thick, delicious, rich almond paste.  We all got to experiment with varying results but OK and I managed to make very mammarific tarts, indeed.  My raspberries look like strawberries and my pineapple looks as though it is a canned ring - I went crazy stuffing slivers of it in between some perfectly decorative wedges because the cream peeping out below the fruit creeped me.  As a result, my tart has a decidedly Betty Crocker 1957 feel to it. 

Behold the boobs:

Today I crossed a big one off of the list of Things To Do Before I Die, namely, Make Cheese.  We made fresh mozzarella in class, and it was so easy it was almost anticlimactic.

Cheese making begins by curdling unpasteurized milk with rennet (an enzyme found in mammalian stomachs) or another acidic substance.  Liquid is drained off and the resultant dairy mass you are left consists of curds.  To make mozzarella, the curds (2 lbs of them) are submerged in hot (180 degrees), heavily salted (6 oz kosher salt) water.  The curds become pliable when stirred and warmed gently to a consistently lump-free texture; they are then removed from the hot brine and kneaded by hand into a striated, stretchy, smooth ball.  This process is referred to as “Pasta Filata“, which means “spun paste”.  After the paste is spun, the ball of mozz can be braided (called a “treccia“) or otherwise bundled and submerged in ice water to congeal; it can then be wrapped in plastic or stored in cooled brine.  It can be eaten fresh or smoked and eaten later.

We used our fresh mozz in class to make some pasta sauces, some dense little potato cakes with sopressata, and the mozzarella en carroza (”in carriages” - how cute!) sammies pictured above, as well as for liberal snacking.

If you want to make mozzarella at home I promise you that you have all of the equipment:  a pot, a colander that can be submerged in the pot, a spoon, a bowl for kneading and a bowl for ice water.  And you definitely have water, and you should have kosher salt. 

Getting the curds is marginally more complicated.  You can make your own - there are kits or you can order rennet and go completely DIY, and both options are available for mail order at New England Cheesemaking Supply Company (the site is a mess, but the owner wrote a great book on cheesemaking and is a real cheesvangelist). 

Alternately you can buy packaged curds.  If you live in NYC you can get them at Alleva, the latticini on Grand Street in Tiny Little Italy, and elsewhere you should check wherever mozzarella is made on site to see if you can score some curds to take home.  I’m sure Pittsburgh, Boston, Providence or any once-gloriously Italian enclave have such storefronts. 

And in a very loosely related note, I may be alone, but I thought that the ending of The Sopranos was sublime.