My Taste Buds' Interpretation of Heaven

I truly believe the best elements of cooking, the tried-and-true, home-tastes-like-THIS, type recipes are the ones fashioned by a combination of love and meager means.  Home-cooking is not five-star restaurant cooking.  It's a culmination of accidents, family folklore, and not-great-but-not-awful dishes that simply bookend years of childhood.  For instance, my Mom went through a phase when we lived in Arkansas of really loving, and pushing, the Taco Salad with Catalina Dressing.  There were kidney beans involved. Cheap shredded cheddar. Iceberg lettuce. Tortilla chips.  When I think of elementary school, Catalina dressing is never far from my thoughts.

My family never made bread pudding.  But it's the sort of dish born of some quiet moment by a fire years ago that I think must be not unlike the catalina-dressing-taco-salad creation of my younger years. Mind you, bread pudding has evolved into one of the more treasured of Southern gustatory endeavors.  The Catalina-Taco-Salad has not quite caught on with that level of enthusiasm. But I bet the first women to dream up bread pudding were not unlike my Mom.  Good, busy, thoughtful Moms who found something pretty yummy that worked, something simple that incorporated what was in the cupboard and didn't require a trip to the grocery store, or the market, or the fields. And it was dirt cheap.

Stale bread, milk, eggs, sugar.  There are only four ingredients to the simplest of bread puddings.  And like other brilliant food combinations (tomato+cheese, banana+peanut butter,  chocolate+anything), its simplicity is what makes it great.  Other genius Southern fare arose out of similar circumstances, gumbo, for instance, is nothing but leftover pig mixed with perfect spices, rice, beans, okra, and the most powerful of Gulf resources, the Shrimp.  It's a dish born of what was handy and what could be caught or grown oneself. Bread pudding, likewise, was a child of necessity, born of a mother's desire to serve something special and sweet without the pocketbook to afford the extra flour a cake would require.

Despite all the ills associated with carbohydrates and fats and calories (and I have suffered my own share of battles in that minefield), I have never believed that food, truly good food, was an evil.  It's a gift and a blessing, a provision of manna in the wilderness. The best of foods don't come out of factory concoctions and field testing.  The best comes from love and making-do and the passing on of secrets and the greasing of Grandmother's best cookie sheet, Mama's rolling pin. The best of foods never mean harm, only love and sustenance, only a small slice of shelter on the days the world seems bent on cruelty.  I do not believe it is wrong for food to be a comfort. In fact, in all of the worst days in history, I am positive joy was shared, peace delivered, love communicated, at a million tables around the world.  There was, and always will be, bread, and sugar, and eggs, and milk. So even on the worst days, the meager days (literal or metaphorical), Heaven waves hello from the tongue.