Cabacou [cab-BAY-koo]

WHAT? Mon petit cheese. The name for this group of tiny goat cheeses is derived from cabre, which means "goat" in the patois of the Languedoc, coupled with the diminutive ending cou. Cabacou are about the size of a fat silver dollar, and they can be sold either young, when they are creamy and sweet, or aged. The rounds are sometimes wrapped in chestnut leaves, according to Steven Jenkins' Cheese Primer. Cabacou, he wrote, are "a joy, after Roquefort, the cheese of Southwest France."

WHEN? January 21, Jay Murray, Grill 23 & Bar


Clapshot
WHAT? Haggis's trusty sidekick. It may have an exotic name, but clapshot is nothing more than mashed potatoes and turnips. The vegetables are mashed with butter, milk, and chives. Some recipes call for the potatoes and turnips to be cooked separately. If you find this too taxing, go to any modern supermarket in Scotland, and you can buy ready-made, microwaveable clapshot. The dish, which often accompanies haggis, originated in the Orkney Islands off of Scotland; we're told that George Mackay Brown, "the Bard of Orkney," once wrote: "Clapshot is one of the best things to come out of Orkney." If you don't like your foods mixed together, next time you are eating haggis, ask for "tatties" (mashed potatoes) and "bashed neeps" (mashed turnips or rutabaga) instead of clapshot.

WHEN? January 25, Scott Connor, Seahouse Grill


Fideuá [fid-WAY-uh]

WHAT? Pasta paella. Rice may dominate the diet in the El Levante region of Spain, and it certainly is the starch Americans associate with that area's most famous dish, but the popular fideuá deliciously proves that paella needn't be limited to rice. Fideos, the Catalan noodles used in fideuá, are thin, round, and short. They're typically fried in olive oil before they are added to the paella, where they finish cooking in the dish's broth. The Lonely Planet World Food: Spain claims, "We don't know many Spaniards who eat this stuff. But we are told by a chef that it was recently developed because 'Italian tourists must have their pasta.'" To that, an indignant Spanish food and wine expert Gerry Dawes exclaimed, using a word we can't print here. "A lot of dishes are cooked with those noodles instead of rice," he told us. "It's Catalan pasta, and it's an integral part of the Catalan diet. Italians were not the first to introduce pasta to Catalonia. The Moors were in the 8th or 9th century." He added that a recipe in the cookbook Libre del Coch, printed nearly 500 years ago, calls for fideos.

WHEN? January 6, Juan Carlos Rodriguez, 1492 Food


Oreos

WHAT? Face it, you don't need us to tell you what an Oreo is. But, hey, how often do Beard House chefs serve 'em? We couldn't pass up the chance to tell you a few of the strange things we discovered about Oreos after some trenchant investigative reporting. (Alright, alright. We just plugged "Oreo" into a web search engine.) Anyhow, remember the Oreo personality test? If, for instance, you eat your Oreo one bite at a time: "You are lucky to be one of the 5.4 billion other people who eat their Oreos this very same way. Just like them, you lack imagination, but that's okay, not to worry, you're normal." etc., etc. (www.nonesuch.net). Then there was www.cockeyed.com, whose webmasters conducted and recorded an, ahem, scientific test to answer the burning question on all our minds: "How Much Is Inside?" As they wrote in formulating their inquiry, "In the United States, people eat Oreos by cracking open the two halves and scraping the white filling off with their bottom teeth. Often we are left with a garbage can full of black cookie disks. It seems like a shame to toss all these cookie shells. I wonder why the Nabisco company doesn't just sell a tube of white goo?" The website features a conceptual rendering of a tube of Oreo Goo.

WHEN? January 14, Peter X. Kelly, Xaviar's at Piermont