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I have been haunted by a Strawberry Brioche Bread Pudding. Since my first visit to Tartine Bakery (in San Francisco’s Mission District) four days ago, I have been unable to stop thinking about it. I dream about it at bedtime; I crave it when I wake up. At random moments, I find my thoughts turning ever so irresistibly to visions of its mushy, eggy, strawberry sweetness.
Proust would be proud. I suspect that, like the equally soggy madeleine, the power of Strawberry Brioche Bread Pudding, its power to saturate the mind, lies not merely within its custardy goodness, but somewhere deep inside the recesses of memory.
But first, let me say that memory or no, Tartine’s Strawberry
Brioche Bread Pudding (SBBP) is unreservedly good all by itself.
Eggy brioche, soaked in milk and sweet syrup, tastes just like crème
brulee, but with more body and texture. The mushiness — and
I use that word in absolutely the very best sense — is balanced
by perfectly browned, chewy bits of brioche crust. One part dissolves
languidly on your tongue; the other gives you something to sink
your teeth into. Topped with slices of fresh strawberry coated in
rum-tinted syrup, SBBP comes heaping, and slightly warm in a generously
sized bowl. All you need is a fork to be transported to sensory
wonderland: a perfect swirl of sweet, starchy, chewy and smooth.
It’s on the second day of the post-SBBP era that I begin to unravel the mystery of its hold on me. Driving home from dinner at my parents’ house, I’m trying to remember if I’ve ever had anything that light and sweet before. The first thing that pops into my head is An Pan, or the red bean-filled buns from Japanese bakery Panya in New York City’s East Village. The bread surrounding the sweet bean filling is so light and fluffy that it’s almost like eating toasted air. I’m then reminded of the ubiquitous Japanese “French” bread. Lighter than angel’s food cake, in fact, almost a parody of bread, Japanese bread is white bread taken to its logical conclusion: pure white, airy, and devoid of nutritional value, it reminds me of…Wonderbread.
Take me back to 1979. I’m 8 years old, dancing around my mother as she pushes a shopping cart down the supermarket aisle. I’m being a brat, begging her for chocolate pudding, smooth peanut butter and Wonderbread. As the granola revolution worked its way into the mainstream, my mother had become a devotee of sour homemade yogurt, chunky natural peanut butter with the oil on top, and whole wheat bread. Whole wheat bread came in a brownish plastic bag with the head of some guy in a helmet printed on it. Where was the fun in that? Wonderbread came in a shiny white bag with pretty multi-colored polka dots. Sometimes, it had Snoopy on it. Old helmet-head vs. Snoopy? No contest.
Usually, my mother and I did not see eye-to-eye on the bread
question, but once in awhile I made enough of a nuisance of myself,
or perhaps she would be in a particularly indulgent mood, and we’d
end up with Wonderbread instead of helmet-head. And that was cause
for rejoicing. While most of my friends took Wonderbread for granted,
I cherished each perfectly white, airy slice. Of course it wasn’t
the taste — everyone knows that Wonderbread has none. It
was rather a small chance to eat the American dream. To fit in.
As a Japanese American kid, I was just grateful that
my mom packed sandwiches for lunch instead of the freakish bento
boxes that Mitchell’s from-Japan mother packed for him. The other
kids teased him mercilessly as he dutifully ate carefully prepared
bits of fish and pickles from a bed of white rice (sometimes he
had maki sushi — don’t I envy him now). But Wonderbread was
wondrous indeed — it could spare you Mitchell’s fate and make you
an American. While that loaf of bread lasted, I could remove my
sandwich from its wax paper bag (even though everyone else had Ziploc)
with pride. I was normal, sort of. Hopefully Mom had packed bologna
and cheese and not scrambled egg with mayonnaise and lettuce, as
she sometimes did. But it hardly mattered, because whatever was
inside was sandwiched between two gleaming, uniform slices of WONDERBREAD.
I’ve come a long way since then, or at least the long way back to where I began. Now I fill my own shopping cart with the same foods my mother once chose: chunky peanut butter, whole wheat bread, and a host of other things she never dreamt of finding in a 1970’s supermarket: organic baby arugula, free-range pork tenderloin, fresh, silky shitake mushrooms. Instead of longing for the generic and mass-produced, now I fetishize the hand-made and homegrown. In the words of artist Daniel Martinez, “I can’t imagine ever wanting to be white,” or white bread, as the case may be.
SBBP is a long way from white bread. It may be bread pudding, but it’s brioche bread pudding, thank you very much. To sog up such a fluffy, tender little bread seems perverse at best, but I think the folks at Tartine are on to something. SBBP is high-class comfort food. It comes with fancy credentials while satisfying our most basic sensory cravings. It’s novel, yet familiar, and this balance is precisely what gives SBBP the power to conjure memory and to incite shameless, naked craving. For me, it’s a little bridge between the past and the present, a small index of my progress in the world. The foodie in me need not be ashamed of that little girl who pined for Wonderbread, even as I breathe a strawberry-scented sigh of relief at her demise.
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