Brandy Cinnamon Bread Pudding

When my lips first touched the love of my life, the world vanished. I felt only tender warm pressure and tasted a rich multidimensional sweetness. My teeth tentatively pierced a texture like no other, that resisted but gave way only to rush at me with renewed passion. I owe so much to the pretentious guy who bought dinner that night and suggested we deconstruct the dessert menu, but I've forgotten his name. I'm sure I went home with him, or he with me. How could we not after that encounter? My coup de foudre, however, was not a cute dude with spare dinero, but a particularly amazing bread pudding.

Now the tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao, nor can my recipe for brandy cinnamon bread pudding even remotely approach its Platonic ideal. It can only exist in the moment, in your kitchen, at your table, more specifically on your lips, your tongue, in your mouth. And when you taste it, you will understand. Aromas of cinnamon and brandy will fill your nostrils and you will detect a distant bite of nutmeg. The scales will fall from your eyes (well, your tongue I suppose), and memories of the abuse and neglect of stale, dry, and simultaneously soggy puddings made by well intentioned but inept hosts will go up like a flambé. Your mouth will fill with the incandescent light of transfiguration.

My lawyer says I need to "absolutely not mention pudding again," at my parole hearing tomorrow, so I'm posting the recipe and getting a few things off my chest. The ingredients are not complicated, but the preparation may be unique to you and your personal proclivities.

At the time Cupid's fork lodged itself in my brain, I was a poor graduate student, eating tuna and rice, studying at all hours, grading papers, writing a dissertation, and not getting enough sleep. I couldn't even afford a cup of coffee at that restaurant, much less dessert. I had to improvise a solution.

My friend Beth waited tables there, so I hit her up for the recipe. She asked chef Justin, and he dodged the question. I asked her to ask again, and she came back with a few ingredients. Cream. Brandy. Butter. Raisins. Cinnamon. Well duh. What kind of Brandy? Salted or unsalted butter? What kind of bread? Temperature?

"Can't you just dig around a little, find where he keeps the recipe?"

"I would get fired." Fair enough.

Out of options, I quit my part-time gig bartending at a kitschy hotel and applied to the restuarant. Two days later I was rejected.

WTF? I applied again. And again.

When I showed up in the kitchen, chef Justin said I was "overqualified" and asked me to leave the premises. Isn't my level of qualification for me to decide? So we didn't didn't exactly get started on any foot. But as fate would have it, a few weeks later his dishwasher suffered a random accident. Oddly, his replacement also didn't last long. They were desparate. When the phone rang I was sitting right next to it. Yes, I've been in prison since phones were wired to the wall.

As a dishwasher, you sometimes bus tables, and then you inevitably get requests for refills, side orders, booster seats, and directions to the bathroom, so you gain experience. I was trying to move up to waitress, which in retrospect was dumb, because what I really needed was to work in the kitchen, specifically on the desserts. A lot of staff were not allowed to set foot in the kitchen, and I was one of them.

I could tell they weren't exactly overjoyed by my work. The heat kills everything, so who cares? Traces of lipstick make a glass look lived in. Two months of feeding dishes into the machine, and someone else was hired into the kitchen before me. Then another. I sometimes I took bites of old pudding from the dumpster. But I was making even less money now and still couldn't afford even a monthly indulgence in the real deal.

Fed up, I tried the obvious thing. I confronted Justin.

"It's not written down."

What a pointless excuse. If it's in your head, you can write it down or tell it to someone in a matter of minutes. It's not like a lock combination where muscle memory takes over rational thought. For a restuarant you have to know exact measurements and how to scale the recipe depending on slight variations in available ingredients and quantities. This asshat was getting in the way of my happiness.

Had I fallen into a hedonistic fallacy, a reification of the epicurean? Hell to the yes. Dostoevsky said he would choose beauty over Truth with a capital T, or something along those lines. Don't quote me.

I chose bread pudding.

So in between cycles I stalked him. If you stay ahead of the flow of dishes, there are gaps where the average dish washer would take smoke breaks, or stare slack jawed into space. Sleuthing about, I figured out where the bread came from. I noticed other ingredients in addition to the ones he had mentioned. I found the trays of pudding soaking in their goodness. But I never saw him make the sauce or do the assembly. He seemed to make a game of hiding these crucial steps from me. Now and then I caught him smirking, enjoying the cruelty.

But what about the lowercase tao, couldn't we just write that down? Am I just being your Justin, dangling a portion of the epiphany of a lifetime in front of you only to say words can't do it justice? No. Trust me when I say I'm trying to help you find your own bread pudding. Justin was just being a prick, and he kind of got what he deserved.

I didn't intend to kill him, just scare him a little. This much I'm allowed to say at my hearing. Making threats is kind of a crime, as is apparently involuntary manslaughter, but I've done my time, and I have to say the culinary experience of my fellow inmates has benefited from my presence. If that's not good behavior, I don't know what is. I'm not sure how I'm going to explain all that without mentioning pudding, but you probably just want the recipe so I'll stop going on about my problems momentarily.

The truthful timbre of his screams, in between telling me that there was in fact no recipe, convinced me that he was just winging it. He had learned to bake from his mother, and she had made a bread pudding that he had never succeeded in recreating. I should have untied him. I should have recognized a kindred spirit, hugged and forgiven him. But I was overcome with despair and wandered away. The sauce I had been making to taunt him, too full of brandy as I had sloshed it into the pan, had boiled over, ingnited, caught some towels on fire, and well, lesson learned: Don't walk away from a hot stove.

Challah

Whole cream

Whole milk

Butter (unsalted, it turns out)

Eggs

Brown sugar

Raisins

Brandy

Vanilla

Cinnamon

Nutmeg (freshly ground, just a smidgen)

Salt

There you go. Has to be challah. Not stale. Not absolutely fresh either. Not quite day-old. Give it time to luxuriate in the cream mixture but don't let it wallow so long it disintegrates. I'm not going to offer specifics or variations because I'm sorry, if you can't proceed with these clues you're not going to get there. Do not chop the challah into ridiculous small squares. Do not substitute half-n-half for real cream. I can't tell you which brandy to get, because it has to be a brandy that speaks to you.

Do not bake this off in individual ramekins unless you want to alienate everyone you love by forcing them to chew through the rubbery crusts of little over-baked monstrosities. It goes in a deep rectangular pan, covered by foil for the middle fifteen minutes. Think mama-bear medium. Some people ditch the foil and end up with too much hard crust on top. Some start with the foil and fail to heat it through from the get go. Hello soggy center. Some put the foil on at the end, as an afterthought, kind of like the asshole wave when someone pulls in front of you in traffic. "I tried!" The hell you did.

By the way I've mostly forgiven Justin for accidentally driving me to bump him off. Even if he wasn't doing it consciously, I think he was trying to bring me to a realization of sorts. In his own way he served as a spiritual guide.

So where are the step by step instructions? Did you just scroll to the bottom expecting this to be handed to you on a cafeteria tray along with your reconstituted mash potatoes? I've had to work this out in my head like an exiled chess master. The prison doesn't even allow nutmeg in the kitchen because it's "hallucinogenic." This is not a recipe that can be conveyed through simple notation. You need be convinced, convicted even, like me, of certain things to truly grasp it. If you are worthy, the pudding will reveal itself. For you, maybe it isn't even pudding. It could be a greasy Rueben next to a bowl of tomato bisque.

There is one last ingredient, maybe the most important for me personally. My mother used to make me pudding, just ordinary pudding from a small cardboard box. She would stroke my hair as I started eating. When I was ten she passed away of a sudden illness, and no one ever made that for me again. I bought a package once, followed the instructions, and sat down in front of the result, but that glop was utterly cold and devoid of her love. Spoon still in mouth, I picked up the box and stared into the cardboard void. I'm still not sure what I was looking for, but I know that I found it years later, for at least one glorious moment.