The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food

Used book in good condition, due to its age it could contain normal signs of use

Bread Pudding
SERVES: 4 to 6

At a country inn in Wales, I had one of those taste-memory moments that made me realize how a simple pudding of eggs, bread, and milk could in a flash call up a flood of memory so acute that for an instant I was right back in childhood. The baked dish was brought in, wrapped in a white linen napkin, the way Edie would have served it, and as it was spooned onto the plate I had my first whiff. Then, when I took a taste, the hot raisins bursting in my mouth, the sensation was so powerful that the tears rolled down my cheeks (adding a little salty flavor).

NOTE: I discovered from Edna Lewis how much better crushed sugar cubes are than plain granulated sugar as a topping. They're particularly good if you've stored them in a jar with a vanilla bean. Bread pudding is best warm, but it can be very good cold, too. I've even had it for breakfast straight from the fridge.

Ingredients
2 1/2 cups milk
2 tablespoons butter, plus a little for buttering the dish
3 slices homemade-type bread, crusts removed, crumbled to make 1 ½ cups
1/2 cup raisins
Grated rind of ½ lemon
1/2 teaspoon lemon juice
3 large eggs
3 tablespoons sugar
About 4 gratings of nutmeg (about 1/8 teaspoon)

For topping:
Crushed sugar cubes, to make about 2 tablespoons

For serving:
Heavy cream
   1. Heat the milk with the butter, stirring until melted.

   2. Remove from the heat, stir in the crumbled bread, the raisins, grated lemon rind, and lemon juice, and let cool to lukewarm.

   3. Separate the eggs, and beat the yolks into the milk and butter along with the sugar.

   4. Beat the whites in a clean bowl until they form soft peaks, and fold them into the pudding mixture.

   5. Season the mixture with nutmeg, and turn into a lightly buttered shallow baking dish. Sprinkle the crushed sugar cubes on top.

   6. Set the dish in a pan of simmering water, and bake in a preheated 325-degree oven for 1 hour. Serve warm with a pitcher of heavy cream.




Chapter One: Growing Up

 

When my mother was well into her nineties, she announced that she had an important question for me and wanted an honest answer. I steeled myself for something weighty, perhaps about whether I believed in heaven and hell.

 

Then she looked at me and asked: “Tell me, Judith, do you really like garlic?” I couldn’t lie. Yes, I admitted, I adored garlic. She looked so crestfallen at that moment that I was sure she felt a sense of finality about the wayward path her younger daughter had taken.

 

To her, garlic represented everything alien and vulgar. It smelled bad, and people who handled it or ate it smelled bad. Moreover, it covered up the natural flavor of honest food—and that was suspect. Those French chefs, for instance, why did they have to put a sauce on everything, anyway? No doubt to disguise the taste because what was underneath wasn’t very fresh to begin with.

 

In my mother’s house we were always being told to get rid of the smells, to make sure that the kitchen door was shut, that the windows were open. Not only was garlic banned, onions were permitted only when a lamb stew was being prepared, for which two or three well-boiled small white onions per person were deemed appropriate. That’s all that were purchased; Mother didn’t want our cook, Edie Price, sneaking a little chopped onion into her meatloaf. And heaven forbid that indigestible, raw pieces might find their way into a tuna-fish sandwich.

 

Still, I have to admit that the unadulterated English-style food I grew up on had its merits. I always loved our Sunday dinner prime rib roast with Yorkshire pudding, which my British grandfather, whenever he was present, would carve at the table, deftly cutting thin—too thin, I always thought—rosy slices. My father, Charles Bailey, who was called Monty because he grew up in Montpelier, Vermont, somehow never lost the mischievous charm of a small-town boy after he had to settle in New York City. When he married into the Hedley family, he made a point of carving clumsy, thick slices, and so was banished as the family carver. My mother took over. I can still see her standing at the head of the table honing her knife on a sharpening steel, and I would always try to sneak a nibble from the platter when she wasn’t looking. The knuckle-bone meat on a lamb roast was irresistible.

 

I am grateful, too, that those organ meats that people spurn today often graced our table: liver and bacon, beefsteak and kidney pie, breaded sweetbreads—I lapped them up and still find all forms of innards an earthy delight. Frugality was considered a virtue. One never let things go to waste, so our cook, Edie, learned to turn leftovers into wonderful dishes: crispy croquettes with creamy lamb, ham, or chicken inside; shepherd’s pie of ground-up leftover lamb with a mashed-potato topping; minced meats in cream on toast; stuffed vegetables. We also had a meatless night once a week, either for the sake of economy or because it was good for us to forgo the pleasure of flesh, I’m not sure. For quite a few years after I graduated from the nursery table to the grown-up dinner table, I thought when we were served breaded and fried eggplant or broiled mushrooms that they were a form of meat. Of course, I didn’t dare ask, because one wasn’t supposed to talk about food at the table (it was considered crude, like talking about sex). And if we indulged in appreciative sounds like “yum-yum,” we just might be sent from the table.

 

Nor could we make disparaging remarks if something displeased us. I remember how endlessly long the winter seemed when all that Mr. Volpe, our Italian fruit-and-vegetable vendor on the corner, could produce was overgrown root vegetables, sprouts and cabbage, and tired potatoes. Then what greens we could get were cooked so long that an unappetizing cabbagy smell permeated the air, and it was hard to get down our due portion. But we weren’t allowed to say a word. It did take me some time, though, to appreciate parsnips and broccoli. When, finally, spring broke through and we tasted our first asparagus, even though slightly overcooked, it was a treat worth waiting for. And we were allowed to pick up the spears with our fingers.

 

But I don’t remember ever going shopping with my mother in the city to pick out the first vegetables and fruits of the season. Food shopping was invariably done by phone, as though to keep a distance from the things of the earth. In the summer, though, a truck with fresh farm produce would do a tour of the lake in Vermont where we had our summer cottage, and it was fun to go out and greet the local farmer and get a look at what he had just pulled from the soil. Every week the butcher’s truck would stop by, and I once persuaded him to let me ride with him as he made his rounds. I was impressed with the way he wielded his knife and would lop off a slab of meat which, when he put it on the scales, would always come within an ounce of what the customer had ordered. The back of the truck was chilled only by a block of ice, and as the warmth of the summer day penetrated, the smell of raw meat became tantalizingly strong.

 

Meat was such an important part of everyone’s diet that when we were plunged into World War II and were suddenly confronted with rationing, there was a sense of deprivation. I was away at college in Bennington, Vermont, in those years, and we had a huge Victory Garden in which all had to participate. I remember how the erudite critic Kenneth Burke insisted that he conduct his class out in the burgeoning fields, because he felt that having our feet planted firmly in the soil and nurturing the fruits of the earth would encourage our minds to soar. We were also asked to volunteer for poultry duty, and I felt very virtuous beheading and plucking and eviscerating chickens by the dozens—all in expectation of a good dinner, of course. Bennington was known for its superior food, and I’m not ashamed to admit that, after sampling the fare at a number of sister colleges, I just may have chosen Bennington because I liked to eat well.

 

Meanwhile, back home in New York, meat was scarce. My parents had acquired a Kerry blue terrier, no doubt to fill the gap left by their last daughter’s going off to college, and they were finding it so hard to get enough meat to feed this hungry animal that they finally gave him to Albert, the butcher. Or so the story goes. The other version is that my mischievous father, now that there were no children around, had to take the dog out every night for what seemed increasingly long walks. Now, in those days, Third Avenue in the East Sixties was still a thoroughly Irish neighborhood; the el rattled through, and there was a pub on every corner. During the daytime, when my mother walked the dog, she began to notice how he would stop at several of the nearby pubs and pull her in, tail wagging in happy anticipation of a doggy treat. Then it dawned on her why those evening walks were taking Monty so long. She quickly made an arrangement with the butcher.

 

But back to those earlier childhood memories at the table. Above all, we always ate what was put in front of us, especially if we wanted dessert. To me those homemade desserts of British ancestry were the crowning glory of the meal, and I wouldn’t have missed them for anything. I still feel nostalgic for the warm chocolate steamed pudding with foamy sauce, the bread pudding with its crusty top and raisins bursting inside, the apple br...