CHALLAH BOY

(Making challah in my NYC kitchen, ca. 2017.)

The pastry chef-owner of Breads Bakery at Union Square Park in Manhattan gave me a starter yeast dough (twisted by hand a small portion from his master batch) and said deliberately: use those for your future bread baking. One of the best results of that "inheritance" was this heavy and densely festive, aromatic dried fruits and nuts challah bread (it was after Thanksgiving that year that I had started making bread from scratch and anteing up my game for the holidays coming and thinking of gifting to friends and family something homemade and something perfect for the season). Challah is not presumptively a "New York" staple. But the tradition it brings is deeper, honorific and permanent for the New Yorker set. My food love for challah on the same note is not perfunctory, and I celebrate challah because it is beautiful straight out of the home hearth, or make a morning à la mode by serving challah french toast with huckleberries, maple syrup and a dusting of caster sugar lavender. Autumn in New York is a classic blues song slightly jazzed up to melancholic temper. Central Park is a dreamy scenery I imagine now with falling leaves on lover’s lane dotted with lamplights in dusk singing this tune. Madison Square Park is pretty, too, on autumn nights having a tall candle in the vicinity called The Empire State Building. Union Square is a maze-decorations of food booths favoring Austrian waffles and winter jams. And coffee never tasted more exquisite because you are wearing a roundup scarf walking back to your apartment from this park carrying a long bread. The air smelled of apricots, acorn and allure. When I made challah that autumn morning in New York I was in the mood for love— a kind of matinée idol swagger in the kitchen both semi-existing in New York and in a manga comic book series but far occidental with sonic intentions to feed the day! I remember stuffing the braids of my challah before baking in the oven ricotta cheese and coco nibs and more salted butter and a final rubbing down of good luscious olive oil on its bumpy body. The other night (fast forward to today in Maui) a foodie acquaintance, having spent time with him at his house, mentioned the Book of Salt, a fiction novel set in Paris about the hired home chef of Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas, had they had one that could be imagined by a food writer living up to the expectations (and palate!) of a socialite-literati-bon vivant-genius poet and fine art attaché like Ms. Stein who, assuming, ate well by virtue— and our conversation kept going and more interesting over rosé wine until way past sun down, cashews and sliced apples on our plates.