The Lemon-Chocolate Bread

From Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink, Calvin Trillin’s article, “The Magic Bagel” left me thinking about how certain foods are inextricable from specific memories, places, events, and times in my life. Trillin’s quest to find the perfect bagel struck me as a comical yet tender gesture that I can easily recognize. Especially after leaving home for college, I often associate certain foods and restaurants with home. They are experiences and tastes that cannot be found here. Even the recipes my mother and I cook together at home cannot be replicated here because the meal is missing the quintessential company, mood, and association of home.

Home: the smells, the tastes, the familiarity. After living in Kalamazoo for nearly two years now, K is very much my home away from home. There are places like the Crow’s Nest with their crispy golden breakfast potatoes dipped in Ketchup, thick slices of banana bread, and egg scrambles generously laden with vegetables and cheese all piled onto a plate with a mug of steaming coffee on the side. The rustic brick walls, waxy wood floors, local artwork hanging on the walls, and back cellar feel of the place you get climbing the stairs, bring an element of charm that grows on you each time you walk in the door.

At home, back in Colorado, we have our regulars, places we return to every time my sister and I come home from college. They never fail to deliver the food experience that we are craving. We are endlessly changing, but there is a security in being able to always return to a meal that is familiar and constant when we are surrounded by a world that is always changing. When I am on the ski slopes, I find reassurance in the cup of rich hot cocoa that awaits me when we ski right up to the lodge and go inside to check and make sure our toes haven’t frozen together. If we’re at Breckenridge resort, it’s the overpriced greasy food at Maggie’s, a lodge that squats at the base of peak nine that I rely on for fuel and old times sake.

When I think of Trillin’s hunt for bagels, I think of lemon-chocolate bread. Every summer, they would come, crawling in from the baking sun to set up their white tents early on Saturday mornings, hammering in the stakes for the signs pointing to the farmer’s market. From the mountains to the plains, they came with cases of Palisade peaches and Rocky Ford cantaloupes, bundles of snap peas that could slice the air quicker than a knife, and watermelons that were so juicy they would seep through your fingers and leave a puddle at your feet. They roasted chili peppers right before your eyes, the fire churning in its metal cage, filling the air with smoke, its piquancy enough to make your eyes water, and your mouth, even more so. Harvested honey, fresh dairy milk, pasta noodles in every shape and color imaginable, and of course—the man selling the bread out of russet-colored wicker baskets.

How could you possibly pick? Pumpernickel, rye, Ciabatta, wheat, sourdough, white cranberry—but then—there was the lemon-chocolate bread. At first we found it an absurd combination, until it filled our mouths, white chocolate filling the small cavities of the delicate white bread, and the detectable taste of summer lingering, an incredibly light hint of lemon speckling the bread that lingered after each swallow. Needless to say, we found ourselves reaching again and again for another wedge of perfect bliss that was all ours, that became our little secret.

But when the heat of the summer goes out as quickly as it came, we are left with our remembrances of bread, the fruits harvested in our land, and our memories. Every once in a while, I remember the taste of the bread’s filling, it’s sweet yet elegant taste, and how it seemed to use the heat of the day to its advantage, melting into an indulgence enjoyed in the shade of the trees with my family, that was and still is, matchless entirely. I cannot help but think how someday I too might also have to hunt for something magical—the lemon-chocolate bread—in order to remember.