Which is all a roundabout way of saying that when I saw lamb’s tongues at the farmers’ market recently, I didn’t get squeamish; I got excited. Then I got out my wallet.

I’m no stranger to eating tongue, having enjoyed it as a deconstructed deli sandwich at wd~50, with a playful Dr. Pepper glaze at Atelier (prepared by Alex Talbot of Ideas in Food), and, most recently, in exceptionally delicious sopes at Empellon Cocina. But this would be my first time preparing it in any form. Much like chicken feet, in its raw form, there’s no denying where a tongue comes from.

Because tongue is a braising cut, I thought I’d give it a try in the pressure cooker. I turned to Laura Pazzaglia of Hip Pressure Cooking for advice, and she in turn consulted with her mother-in-law in Basilicata. Laura’s recommendation was to peel the tongues first, give them 15 minutes at high pressure, let the pressure dissipate naturally, then check them.

I’ve never seen a recipe call for tongue to be peeled before cooking, so after discussing it with her, I decided to postpone that step. Into the pressure cooker went the tongues – plural; lamb’s tongues are small, so I allowed two per person – with some chicken stock and garlic cloves. It turned out that 15 minutes wasn’t quite enough, but an extra 5 put them right where I wanted: tender but toothsome. Once cooked, they peeled easily.

From there, I proceeded with Fergus Henderson’s recipe for “Lamb’s Tongues, Turnips, and Bacon.” Sort of. I substituted rutabaga for the turnips (and kale for the turnip tops). And the bacon was unsmoked, so I added some smoked salt. Even with those substitutions, the dish was delicious: hearty and earthy, brightened by a dash of vinegar, and with a rich broth to slurp at the end. My husband, who was subjected to “eat your liver; it’s good for you!” dinners as a child, was a little suspicious upon smelling it, but even he liked it.

What’s your favourite preparation for tongue?

It was tempting to see what a temperature-controlled sous vide approach could offer, but since not everyone has an immersion circulator, I wanted to try a different approach. Conveniently, I’d recently read a blog post about using calcium salts, specifically calcium hydroxide and calcium lactate, to react with the pectin in fruits and vegetables, strengthening their structure to allow them to maintain their shape better when cooked. (You sometimes see this with calcium chloride added to pickles to help them keep their crunch.) This in turn led me to a couple of other blog posts on the same subject. It seemed like a “fruitful” approach to try, even though I know from jam-making that rhubarb doesn’t have huge amounts of pectin.

I started by chopping some rhubarb stalks, then dividing it into two equal piles. One pile was soaked in a 1% solution of calcium lactate (I couldn’t find any calcium hydroxide, aka slaked lime) for 2 hours, and the other pile was soaked in tap water for the same time. I drained both and let them air dry for a while, before putting them into separate saucepans, each with the same amount of sugar and water, and half a vanilla bean. (Maybe not very scientific, but I was going to have to eat this stuff in the end!) I cooked them both at a gentle boil for 20 minutes, stirring occasionally.

The verdict?

The calcium lactate-treated compote is on the left, the untreated compote on the right. The treated rhubarb seemed to maintain its shape better, though it still fell apart somewhat when stirred. The untreated rhubarb disintegrated easily when stirred. Both were very soft when eaten.

I would say the difference was noticeable, but not necessarily significant enough to attribute to the calcium treatment rather than other variables (difference in pan size, evaporation, stirring, or heat regulation, for example). As usual, I realized after I’d done my experiment that I probably should have tried the technique with something that others have had success with in the past, so I would know what to look for. Still, I found this to be a qualified success, and I can definitely see myself trying it again in the future.

Take “apricot brandy.”

There are two distinct ingredients called “apricot brandy”: one is an unaged eau-de-vie, the other a sweetened liqueur. Obviously, they each bring very different characteristics to the cocktail shaker. But unless the recipe writer has chosen their words carefully, you can’t always tell which is intended. (After all, they knew what they meant, and only one of the two may have been available in their local market anyway.)

My friend Erik makes a good case that, the bulk of the time, “apricot brandy” refers to the liqueur, on the basis that well-made eau-de-vie is expensive and hard to come by, so wouldn’t likely have found much use in cocktails. He also suggests tasting the drink on your mental palate and considering which of the two would provide the most balance.

Then again, there’s the Hop Toad.

How to make a Hop Toad

• 1.5 oz apricot brandy (see below)
• 0.5 oz lemon or lime juice

Combine in a cocktail shaker, shake for 15 seconds, and strain into a chilled glass.

With either type of apricot brandy, the Hop Toad doesn’t really match any modern template of drinking: apricot liqueur would make it sickly sweet, but apricot eau-de-vie makes it puckeringly tart. Yet the eau-de-vie is what’s called for here. The closest relative in common circulation would probably be the Gin Rickey (minus the soda), although even that often has sugar added nowadays.

To my mind, the Hop Toad is meant to be a refresher, quickly made and quickly drunk while still frigid. The first time I tried one, I used Zwack pecsetes barack palinka as the eau-de-vie in question, and found it a bit harsh. This time, I used a different apricot eau-de-vie, and found it a much more pleasant experience. Tart, but refreshingly so, with floral aromas. Every time I swallowed a sip, I immediately wanted another, which I consider to be a good thing in a cocktail.

On top of ingredient confusion, there’s also a lot of name confusion: a single name can often refer to many concoctions, and “Hop Toad” is no exception. One common variation adds Jamaican rum to the mix, and in this iteration the eau-de-vie is sometimes replaced by liqueur, essentially producing an apricot-sweetened rum sour. Avoid it. The recipe above is the oldest one I can find, and is the one to use.

But after helping out with two Eleven Madison Park tribute dinners, and cooking a couple of EMP dishes at home, I don’t want to let this wonderful meal pass unremarked. I took pictures of many of the courses, though I missed a couple, namely the sturgeon sabayon, both the savoury and sweet black-and-white cookies, and the chocolate dessert. And of course, it seemed disrespectful to photograph the Jack Rose-inspired dish we were served in the kitchen itself! But below are the other dishes we enjoyed.

Hors d’oeuvres

Smoked apple tea

Quail egg on brioche with applewood-smoked  bacon

Yogurt lollipops with curry and lentils

Chickpea panisses with yogurt

Clambake with chorizo, apple and potato

Savoury dishes

Cauliflower tabbouleh with olives, orange and parsley

Foie gras with buckwheat, buttermilk, lemon and ramps (a close-up of this beautifully composed plate is shown at the top of this post)

Whey, fresh curds, caraway gnocchi and spring herbs

Lobster poached in Meyer lemon butter, with burnt leek and shellfish bisque

55-day dry-aged beef rib eye with wood sorrel and marble potatoes

Chuefladä cheese with potatoes, pickled mustard seeds and pearl onions

Sweet dishes

Egg cream

Cheesecake: goat cheese, Cara Cara orange sorbet, vanilla snow

Milk sorbet with buckwheat, honey and vanilla milk cream

In the opening chapter of her first book, Red, White and Drunk All Over, wine writer Natalie MacLean visits the famous Burgundy wine estate of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti. Her latest book, Unquenchable: A Tipsy Quest for the World’s Best Bargain Wines, is predicated on the idea that the wine world is much broader than such famous wines, which the vast majority of us will never share a room with, much less taste.

Nominally structured as “a wine for every night of the week,” the book takes MacLean to eight viticultural regions around the world, aiming to introduce the reader not just to great wines, but to great values. They may not have the cachet of “DRC,” but these are wines meant for everynight drinking, not special occasions. While it would be tempting to achieve this by plumbing the margins of the wine world (Eastern Europe, say), she avoids this pitfall, giving play to both Old-World standards and low-cost New-World regions like Australia, Chile and Argentina. Even in France and Italy, she suggests, bargains can be found.

Still, her definition of “bargain” runs into rocky terrain in some places. Living just over an hour away from the region, I was pleased to see Ontario’s Niagara Peninsula given its due. It’s a region I’ve explored pretty thoroughly, and one that has lots of great values, especially in cool-climate white varietals. So I was a little surprised to see that MacLean’s “first pick” for the region is Le Clos Jordanne Village Reserve Pinot Noir, which retails at the LCBO for $30 a bottle. Maybe I’m showing my income bracket here, but I don’t consider a $30 bottle an everynight wine, especially not on a Tuesday night where she has it positioned. (To be fair, she does comment on this selection that, “[V]alue is relative. […] Niagara pinots are a bargain compared to those in Burgundy, which easily top $50 a bottle as a starting price.”)

Her writing is at its strongest not when she’s discussing wine qua wine, but when telling the stories about the people and places behind the beverage. As an embedded (or should that be “immersed”?) reporter, she provides immediacy and context for what’s in the glass. No tasting note has ever made me want to rush out and buy a wine quite like MacLean’s depiction of Randall Grahm of Bonny Doon Vineyard in Red, White and Drunk All Over; similarly, Unquenchable’s descriptions of Australia’s wine regions renewed my long-dormant interest in those wines, which I had long ago, wrongly, written off as jammy and over-oaked across the board.

There’s no question that MacLean has a real talent for evoking terroir in words in a way that adds to the drinking experience. She also confesses, “I am more interested in people than in wine.” It’s more than evident that she enjoys both, and it’s an enormous benefit to her writing. If I want the soil type of a given wine region or chemical details on malolactic fermentation, I’ve already got the Oxford Companion to Wine. MacLean offers a more humanizing perspective, which helps you overlook the occasional technical fault, such as “estuary compounds” (perhaps that should be “estery”?) and “malo acid” (it’s “malic.”)

In addition to the entertainment value of the stories – referring to a pinotage tasting note of “skid marks on a hot tarmac,” she says, “Was the tarmac on a small airport or a large commercial one?” – there’s information here for many different levels of reader: before this book, I was only loosely familiar with the concept of “ladder brands,” and I even learned a thing or two about cooperage. At the same time, I found her rehashing of the screwtop vs. cork debate to be old hat, and was surprised to learn that, even in 2011, there are people who might not know that South Africa was a winemaking region!

The only thing I found jarring about the book was the hard-sell cross-marketing approach: each chapter ends with several references to MacLean’s website which, while useful, felt a bit pushy to me and interrupted the flow of the narrative.

Ultimately, I would recommend this book to anyone who has more than a passing interest in wine. Those who are already knowledgeable will appreciate MacLean’s humour and insight, while those who are still learning oenological basics will pick up a lot of information here, in a very accessible format.

This book was sent to me as a review copy.

So I mentally ran through the confit process step by step, and it struck me: the difference was in salting the meat beforehand. (“Confit,” after all, is simply French for “preserved,” and salt is a great preservative.) Which is how I arrived at the decision to cure the lamb shanks before cooking them, even though I knew it could lead to textural problems down the road.

To serve, I reheated the previously-cooked-and-chilled lamb shanks in a hot water bath, then seared them quickly in a hot skillet. I cooked up some lentils and made a parsley salad with shallots, roasted red peppers and a pimentón vinaigrette to go alongside.

Verdict? Well, this was my first time cooking lamb shanks sous vide. I used the table in Modernist Cuisine to choose my time and temperature (5 hours at 85°C/185°F), opting for a temp that would produce a fairly traditional texture. Even at that, though, they were slightly chewier than I would have liked. The flavour of the salt cure came through beautifully, though, and the meat had a lovely rosy colour from either the cure, the long-time low-temp cooking, or both. I wouldn’t say this dish was a home run, but it will definitely be worth revisiting.

Results to come…

I didn’t change anything about my technique from earlier roasts, but the whole process seemed to go faster and smoother than I remember. Clearly confidence plays a role in coffee roasting. I also managed to achieve a darker roast than I had in the past. I’m now sure that I hadn’t quite been hitting first crack before, since I could distinctly hear popcorn-like popping in this batch. Naturally, the coffee these beans produced was markedly superior to my previous efforts, with fewer vegetal notes. An eminently satisfying cup.

The one new thing I did do this time around was measure my yield: the 227g of green beans I started with (that’s half a pound) yielded 191g of roasted coffee, with the rest floating away as water vapour and chaff. Given what I paid for the raw coffee, that works out to about $16 a pound for the finished product, plus the energy expense and my time. Since that’s about par with what I would pay for locally roasted beans, I’m definitely not in it to save money!

Probably the most famous egg yolk foam is zabaglione, also known by its French name, sabayon. Traditionally a dessert sauce, or a dessert all on its own, zabaglione is made by adding sugar and wine, often Marsala, to egg yolks, and whisking it all together in a double boiler until it expands and thickens. The foam starts to become stable once the mixture reaches 120°F/49°C, and continues to thicken as the temperature rises, giving you some control over the final texture, from fairly fluid to nearly mousse-like. (And, of course, you can also make it in a whipped cream siphon.)

Egg yolk foams aren’t always sweet, though: I recently made two dishes involving savoury sabayons. For the “21st Century Tortilla,” the sabayon consisted of nothing more than egg yolks and water. (In typical el Bulli fashion.) In the case of “Oysters and Pearls,” the water is replaced by the liquid from freshly shucked oysters.

In fact, you can even look at hollandaise sauce as a savoury sabayon into which butter is emulsified. Personally, I’ve found that the thicker your egg yolk foam to begin with, the thicker your resulting hollandaise, though you have to be careful not to overcook it, which can break the emulsion by cooking off too much water or, as with any sabayon, curdle the egg yolks.

The first time I became aware of the concept of repetitiveness between dishes in a menu was in reading about Thomas Keller. I can’t find the exact source anymore, but it was probably in Michael Ruhlman’s book The Soul of a Chef, to this day one of my favourite pieces of food writing. (It’s also mentioned in Pheobe Damrosch’s entertaining Service Included.) From what I understand, when the tasting menu is being designed at The French Laundry and Per Se, if one course features a given ingredient, it won’t appear in any other courses – unless it’s a prestige ingredient like foie gras, truffles or caviar.

Although I try and make this a guiding principle when planning a multicourse dinner party, sometimes my desire to make certain dishes trumps my desire to avoid repetition. In my most recent party, for example, there were two courses – back to back, no less – that both involved a sabayon: the “21st Century Tortilla” and the “Oysters and Pearls.” Similarly, grapefruit featured in both the pork main course and the panna cotta dessert.

I justify the repetition by telling myself that guidelines are just that: guides, not carved-in-stone rules. I have so relatively few opportunities to cook from some of the cookbooks that I use for these parties that I’m not willing to let an arbitrary rule dictate my choice of dishes, though it will continue to inform that choice. Besides, I think there may just be a difference between elegant repetition, the echoing of grapefruit between the savoury pork dish and the sweet panna cotta, and mere repetitiveness, like having a menu with apples in every dish just because it’s October.