penuche, panoche

I have this thing about fudge. I don't know if it is a New England thing, a childhood thing, or what, I just know that when I was a kid, and it was summer, at some point there would be fudge. Miraculous stuff, made on marble slabs, creamy, rich and never, ever found at home. I suppose it had something to do with recipe cards that warned against making the stuff in cold weather, warm weather, humid weather, on a day that ended in the letter Y and any time between noon and four am, or something like that. whatever the reason, real fudge (not anything made with Fluff) was only found in shops, and sometimes those shops had Penuche.

Penuche originally referred to a coarse brown sugar, usually from Mexico. Around the turn of the 20th century, right around the same time that chocolate fudge was "invented", a brown sugar confection of similar texture to chocolate fudge started appearing under the name penuche. (Who knew the OED is an excellent food reference?) I found a recipe from 1919 from the book My Candy Secrets by Mary Elisabeth Evans for something called Mexican Penuchi that was made like fudge and contained three ingredients: brown sugar, molasses and water. The result tastes almost like it contains maple syrup, but the thing I wanted was the kind that my grandfather loved: buttery, creamy, a hint of vanilla, nuts. So I went forward two years and found a recipe for Panocha in a cookery textbook (yes, textbook) from 1921 that had exactly what I was looking for.

A note on fudge: seriously, if you are going old school and don't want to make fudge that contains corn syrup or marshmallow, you need a thermometer. It's going to be the closest you can get to an insurance policy. That being said, bad fudge that crumbles from overheating? Still tasty. I won't tell if you put it on top of your morning Cream of Wheat.

Penuche (adapted from Foods and Cookery by Mary Lockwood Matthews, 1921)

200 g brown sugar
200 g sugar
120 g milk
15 g butter
5 g vanilla
4 g salt
50 g toasted chopped nuts (pecans are common, I used hazelnuts)

1. Put sugars and milk in a large pot and stir briefly to combine. Boil to 238 degrees F and remove from heat.

2. Put butter, salt and vanilla on top of sugar mixture and DO NOT MIX. Leave it alone until the temperature drops to 110 F. This will help ensure small microcrystals rather than coarse crystals that taste gritty. In the mean time, warm your nuts a bit.

3. Add nuts and stir until your arm is about to fall off. The fudge will go from being shiny and glossy to dull and flat. Pour out on to a parchment lined sheet and mark for cutting. When cool, store in an airtight container

4. Fun Fact! Fudge is actually at its best the day after it is made, but those crystals do wonky things after that day, so better eat quickly!

Let's Try Science! Antler Cookies part 1

I sat in my living room, looking at a piece of naturally shed antler from Bend, OR, a box grater, and a tiny pile of shavings that were the result of almost an hour and a half's worth of labor.

This... was going to be interesting.

Cooks get excited about weird things. If it is stinky, obscure, odd and edible, chances are a cook wants to do something with it. So, there was a sense of inevitability in my soul when I first heard about antlers being an early method of leavening baked goods. "I! Have! To! Do! This!" The synapses declared it, and there but for the grace of St. Honore go I. Or something like that.

First: acquisition. Luckily the internet makes conversation between strangers possible, so Ron Zimmerman was not simply helpful, but also supportive of my internet stalking/agenda. A hunter, eBay, antique store... the age didn't matter, he stated. OK! I explained the situation to basically everyone I met. My neighbors casually made my day, "Oh yeah, "they said, "we sell them as dog treats at the pet store. " Genius!

Second: preparation. Um, dudes, bones is hard. Antlers are hard. I looked at the antler piece. The cats sniffed it. I consulted awesome people. Microplane, maybe? Well, kind of, and the result was very fine but miniscule amounts and the microplane needed an edge to work from. Well why not the stubbly, sharp, knuckle destroying side of a box grater. Aw, yeah... Still slow going, but the result was a powder finer than I had expected, certainly finer than my salt.

Yes, I thought to myself, I can work with that.

Now I just need to bake. And what should I bake? Cookies, of course...

the hands remember

It was one of those remarks that sticks with you. I was considering leaving my job with Monsieur Le Chef, and I wanted to consult with him first about the position I had been offered. (He was starting up a new venture himself and although he had given me the chance to tag along, there just wasn't enough work. That is how it goes sometimes.) He said yes I should take it, they would be lucky to have me but, and he meant this in the best possible way, "You need to watch your judgement, baby." And then proceeded to list examples. Sometimes, I hate examples.

What I am learning as my career progresses is that judgement is not in the head, it is in the hands. This is a tough lesson for me. I spend a lot of time hashing things out in my brain. I think and rethink. I create scenarios. I have an inexhaustible need to learn the hows, whys and wherefores. You ask me how something is made and I don't know, it is going to really bother me until I go and look up the answer.

And that is the problem.

Cooking is not about "looking up the answer". Sure that can help, but it comes down to those wiggly parts at the end of your arms, and your nose, and your ears, and all those other things not made from grey matter. I'm still learning to trust my senses. I'm not quite good at it yet. There was an incident at work, not long ago, when I looked at some bread dough and said, a la Miss Clavel, "Something is not right!" But my brain whispered sweet excuses in my ear. I went with my brain and paid for it the next day.

But I am improving. All of my recipes from Monsieur Le Chef are simply ingredient lists. No technique, maybe an occasional note. I have to trust that ethereal judgement will shape it. I made the chocolate mousse cake for the first time in over a year this weekend, and as I laid out my mise, I had no idea how it went together. I intended to just do part of the recipe, to be safe, to give myself time to think and remember. I was half way through the recipe when I realized that without any thought I had gone past my stopping point and set up everything to finish the whole shebang. And I knew what needed to happen next.

It came out lovely. The hands remember.

Broken.

Things do that, you know. Break. You can call it planned obsolescence. You can call it a bad emulsion. Or you can just fix it and go on with the important things.

The praline paste was broken, and was going to get thrown away. Like half a bucket's worth. I snagged it from an untimely demise and brought it home to fix it. Fix it, I did, now I have exquisite praline paste. Of course, I burned out the motor on my immersion blender doing it. Broken. So I ordered a new one. It arrived today. Fixed.

It made me think about broken things. Broken things are important in a way that whole things are not. Whole things are lovely and accomplished and get crossed off the to do list. They fall away like something memorized by rote. Broken things frustrate, challenge, teach. They become the whys and hows.

"Why is the stupid a/c broken the first week of 90 degree weather? How am I going to temper chocolate when tempered chocolate is just melting from being in here?"

It is a shame that we are such a disposable culture. Sometimes, yes, a broken thing needs to be discarded. Corporations, among others, plan it that way. But the worst possible method of teaching, to me, is the "start over" method. That may be what is required, but figuring out what went wrong first, exploring how to fix it, or why it cannot be fixed, that is where confidence begins.

It isn't just about doing it over and over again. It is about understanding what it is you are doing in the first place.

But you'll still have to throw away all that ice cream if your walk-in freezer dies over the weekend.

You're Laborers; you should be laboring.

I'm smart, and I'm not going to apologize for it.

I spent years working though all the psychological baggage that led me to believe this was a bad thing and I know that, in fact, it's a damn good thing. It's not that I am a prodigy of any sort. I'm not a wizard or some superhuman thingamabob. Just good and smart. And yes, I have an education.

You would think this would make my life easier.

Instead I chose to work in an industry that has a highly skeptical if not cynical view of the value of classwork. And why shouldn't they? They have earned their education in a very real and practical sense - apprentices were around long before the idea of a professor - and have all seen some of the lesser examples of education without practical knowledge. And it is not simply my job that has this viewpoint. Some of the best chefs out there scoff at the skills of the culinary school graduate.

I am very conscious of not waving my brains about at work. In particular, my immediate supervisor is not educated and is very sensitive about it. I have actually had to ask him to stop dismissing the skills of the instructors at my school because of things he felt I should know. I have never corrected his science when it is flat out wrong, because he is not the kind to respond to that well. I am tolerant that when asked what six times nine is, someone is going to check my math on a calculator. But dammit, I AM going to say something about that butter cookie they want to send as a lactose intolerant dessert. And it is really hard to not react strongly when the response is "So? Only milk has lactose."

I had great teachers in culinary school. Intelligent individuals who were perfectly comfortable with letting me know how much I wouldn't know when I got that piece of paper, even while they fed my brain. They encouraged me to get out there while going to classes to see what is really like, and I did. They understood, and helped me to understand, that what I was getting from them was a vocabulary. They gave me the freedom to fail. That freedom gave me confidence to try again, and try different, and question how and why and what. To learn. To be educated.

Is it any wonder that of all the options available to me for the long term, I want to be like those that valued my brain, challenged me even while letting me know that I was working in an idealized, sheltered environment? Could you blame me for wanting nothing more for the immediate future than a chef that is, if not as smart as I am, cognizant of what to do with someone who is smart?