CAPIROTADA
I have had a lifelong love affair with bread. So it should be no surprise that bread pudding is one of my favorite foods. Actually, there is no real need to explain loving bread pudding. It’s got to be the ultimate comfort food; chunks of bread combined with milk and eggs and sugar. It can be leftover plain bread, French bread, coffee cake, croissants; any type of leftover bread will suffice. And then there are the enhancements. I have had bread pudding combined with dried fruit, fresh fruit, chocolate, remarkable sauces - any number of wonderful and sometimes unexpected things. I keep wanting to make a savory bread pudding and have collected recipes over the years, but still haven't tried that. Now that actually would be the ultimate; it would be the meal and dessert all wrapped into a bowl!

But like with so many foods, and I suppose many things we love, in general I think it all comes back to memories. Pleasant associations with particular foods stay with us all. My memory is of my mother making something called capirotada. A Spanish name, it is a bread pudding which in the past was traditionally made at lent, when meat was not consumed and some ingenuity was need for all the meatless dishes. Or it was a “clean up” dish, a way of using up foods in preparation for the Lenten fast. Both stories persist. Like any dish, and particularly regional dishes, the recipe varies from family to family, but the one I remember had very specific ingredients and although there are many bread pudding styles, no other recipes are, to me, capirotada.
Even though bread pudding is traditionally something that is made to use up the leftover bread, the reality is that once you get past the basics of bread and egg custard, what makes it memorable are the other enhancements, the interesting ingredients that make one version stand apart from another.

As a child who was only interested in food - at the eating part and not at the making part - all I remember of the recipe is that it had nuts and bread and some other stuff and then a sauce made from what I thought was candy because it was hard but crumbly, tasted sweet and was in a cone shape. I now know that it is called piloncillo which translates into cone shape and that it is a type of brown sugar pressed into that shape. Since it was hard it needed to be combined with a little water until it dissolved and became a sort of syrup which was poured over other ingredients. Then everything was mixed together and baked and when it came out was a delicious and an unusual treat.

Unfortunately, that particular dessert, like so many of the desserts I remember my mother making in my early childhood, disappeared by the time I was about 10 or 12. At that point all of the other kids in my family had grown up and mostly gone away. I am the youngest and was the only one left at home. It’s not the same to cook and bake for just one kid as it is for a bunch, I know. Not as satisfying I am sure and definitely not as necessary. No doubt other elements entered into it like my mother’s age and energy level. And, I now know that as you get older sometimes those sorts of foods don’t have the same appeal as they did in the past. Whatever the reasons, the end result is that there were none of those beautiful and delicious desserts being baked that I remembered from my childhood.

And then I entered my teenage years. Dieting into extreme thinness was not as common then as it is now and I think culturally my generation of girls were allowed to be a little more well-rounded than teens are now. So in my teens it was more about eating what I wanted to eat, and what my friends ate when we were out. It had nothing to do with the foods my mother was cooking. Teenage-hood took me into a time when all I wanted was store-bought stuff like Oreo cookies and bakery cokes and candy bars and oh deserter, hard shell tacos. Hard shell tacos are an American invention. Mexicans typically eat tacos on soft tortillas. But tacos with a hard shell, also known to some as deep-fried tortillas, was the way fast food restaurants offered their tacos, when they had tacos. Deep-fried, the round tortilla was bent in half to form a firm container to hold fried hamburger, shredded lettuce, some cheese and a little salsa. I thought it was pretty good and most people at the time thought it was authentic Mexican food. Luckily Americans have since evolved, with some help, into an appreciation of more authentic cuisine, be it Mexican or any other.

In any case the stuff I was eating was not home food. In fact no relationship existed to home-style food and that’s what I really wanted at that time. It was a way of distancing myself from family and my background as adolescents will do. So capirotada and other good things my mother made faded into the background. I went away, got married, she got older and with all the implication of those events, over the years capirotada was the last thing any of us thought of.

Now, a few years after my mother’s death, I kick myself for not having been more aware; more aware in so many large ways and small. The small ones being the lack of talking about things like cherished recipes which embraced a childhood. In search of that childhood food, I decided to research and find a capirotada recipe that most resembles the one I remember. Fortunately for me, these days we have the internet, and all manner of lost objects are possible to find. I did find the lost recipe with those ingredients from a memory I cherish. It was interesting to see how many versions of capirotada there are. Sort of like how many versions of bread pudding there are.

Having outgrown that childhood delight with sugary things and the capirotada, my current bread pudding favorite is a more simple one. It has all usual ingredients; good bread, eggs, cream, sugar, vanilla, but also has chunks of chocolate and just a hint of cinnamon. A confession - I do not make it; I purchase it from a nearby Pacific Whey cafe whenever I need a fix. I have asked for the recipe to no avail, but don’t worry about it too much. I know where to go to get it, at least for now.




CAPIROTADA
4 day-old bollilos* (or 1 baguette) sliced crosswise*
1 cup brown sugar or piloncillo, crushed
½ cup of peanuts
½ cup of raisins
1 cup of mild cheddar cheese
2 cinnamon sticks
(* or toast fresh bread in oven before using)

Place the sugar or piloncillo, cinnamon and water in a saucepan. Heat gently stirring constantly until the sugar is dissolved. Bring the mixture to a boil then reduce the heat and simmer for about 15 minutes without stirring. Remove the cinnamon sticks.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Grease an 8" square baking dish with butter. Layer the bread, nuts, raisins and cheese in the dish, pour on the syrup letting it soak into the bread. Bake the pudding for about 30 minutes until golden brown.

Remove the dish from the oven, let stand at least 5 minutes, cut into squares. Serve the pudding cold with some cream or crème anglais poured on top. garnish with sliced almonds.

*Billilos are Mexican rolls sort of like a crusty French roll but with a little sweetness to them – They are great with butter and your morning coffee.