Grub Street

This February 14, you might want to resist the heart-shaped charms of the Whitman’s Sampler. To truly experience the pure, unalloyed taste of good chocolate (or “fine-flavor chocolate,” as the cognoscenti call it) and to really impress the chocoholic in your life, we recommend the bar form. No, we don’t mean the ones from the Korean deli or the office vending machine. We’re talking single-origin, bean-to-bar, and stratospheric cacao content (or, for the health-crazed, “raw”). Mast Brothers pioneered this once Eurocentric movement locally, but it’s no longer the only game in town. Here, a curated selection of homegrown new-wave chocolate for the Hallmark holiday and beyond.

You can find good cabbage any time of the year, but winter is the brassica’s finest hour, its moment to shine among the gnarly roots of the February Greenmarket. Red varieties planted in the summer and fall with their chalkboard-squeaky outer leaves and icicle-crisp flesh are best for shredding raw into salads. I Sodi’s Rita Sodi, who grew up outside of Florence, combines the red and the green with Robiolina, a soft and creamy Italian cheese. She calls the result a cabbage salad, but why not think of it as Tuscan winter coleslaw?