Bread and butter anyone?

An obsession, by any other name, is still an obsession. And mine of the moment (later I may mention others) seems to be tortas de agua. Do you know what they are? Well, first of all "tortas" as they are called in Puebla (bolillos in D.F.) are individual-sized daily-baked bread loaves. You can eat them torta-style (filled with coldcuts, or whatever) in which case they are similar to the Subway Sandwich in concept.


But tortas are also delicious eaten hot with butter or cream cheese, though they are almost too filling to be satisfying - UNLESS you happen to be eating a torta de agua. These are made differently from the more common tortas de manteca, and the difference is precisely that: one is made with manteca (shortening) and the other is made with agua (water). The difference in taste is that, though they look almost the same, the former are just thick pieces of white doughy bread with no particular smell, while the latter are insanely, dangerously delicious - and I use these adverbs because they can become your obsession, or worse, if you have them around you can find yourself eating 2 or 3 at a time... I'm telling you - from the moment you get the first whiff of one, an encounter with a torta de agua is a religious experience.


Now, none of the above will be relevant to you unless you grew up perceiving bread as a snack food. That's how it was for me... we'd get home from school and that was our afternoon snack, and we loved it! I mean bread is soothing, comfortably filling, and yummy, especially topped with butter! My grandmother used to use REAL BUTTER (as opposed to margarine at our house) and when we went to their house (the B-sky's), bread and butter was the best snack in the world because, aside from the fact that the butter was real, it was at room temp. instead of refrigerated. Exquisite! Back at our own house, my mother sometimes allowed us to have those coveted open-faced peanutbutter-and-jelly sandwiches (though not often because she said it would spoil our appetites for dinner) and taught us the dubious delicacy of bread and mayonnaise... now my own kids go eeeeeeeeeeeewwwwwwwww, when they catch me eating that, but I still have a bread-and-mayo snack at times... I mean look at Harriet the Spy who ate only tomato and mayo sandwiches!!! Don't knock it till you've tried it! Totally delish... but I digress... back to the story.


So it was only when we were desperate for food, and our mother wouldn't let us have a snack, that we opted to sneak a plain piece of bread (sandwich white in those days) from the pantry to tide us over till suppertime. You see, by then we had very definite ideas about the whole bread-and-butter question, and believe me, plain bread was the last choice, but it was the one that would make the least noise when disobeying an order to wait until suppertime (no preparation needed, no telltale signs of the crime!)


Sunday mornings, we had bagels, lox and cream cheese. Here, I learned a good trick from my Dad. I mean, the table settings included butter and cream cheese, so it was a real dilemma trying to decide between the two for our allotted bagel. One morning I saw how my Dad resolved the problem and got to have his cake and eat it too by spreading on a LAYER OF EACH on EACH HALF of his bagel!!! At first I thought it was too much and totally unnecessary, considering that if there are two halves to a bagel you can spread butter on one and cream cheese on the other - you don't need to spread both on both halves!!! But, sometimes, as a treat, I followed my Dad's example and I can tell you that a combination like that is sinfully delicious!!! (so is peanut butter and cream cheese together on bread, though it tends to create a live bomb in your stomach during the digestion process, so you should try it in very small portions)...


And then I came to Mexico, where sweetbread is a dinner staple! You would think I'd have been in 7th heaven (as my mother would say), but actually, I don't like Mexican sweetbread except for cuernos sometimes, and even those lose their appeal once you've tasted a croissant in Paris. But, as luck would have it, Car was a die hard sweetbread-for-supper disciple, and even a "dunker" (another issue to debate in another post!), so we had it quite often (or rather, he would have sweetbread and I'd have bread and butter). One night, we couldn't find any change to buy sweetbread with, so he turned me on to a variation on my bread and butter ritual by spreading butter on a piece of pan Bimbo (still cracks me up that there's actually a bread called Bimbo - and it certainly is an apt name), and then sprinkling sugar on the top! And a new obsession was born!


Then there came the time when I got a constant and insistent hankering for peanut butter. I tried making it (it turned out good but eventually broke the blades of my blender), then buying the Mexican version, which was okay but not totally satisfying... Finally, I resorted to bringing it back with me from the States when I went for a visit, but it was too traumatic when I ran out (nothing beat Smuckers at that time)... today I can actually find huge jars of Skippy which satisfy the craving and last forever, but okay back to the question at hand (did you ever think that bread with or without a topping could become such an obsession???).


So as you can see, I was pretty set in my ways about how to eat bread by the time we got to Puebla in the 80's, at which time I learned to call bolillos tortas... but it wasn't until the early 90's, that I learned that there were two kinds of tortas! I had been teaching English one-on-one to executives for about a year when one of my students asked me what I was giving up for lent. I told him I wasn't Catholic and had never done anything like that but I asked him what he was giving up and he said tortas de agua. I asked what was so special about them and the next morning (we had an 8:oo class, and he always had his secretary serve us coffee at the beginning of class), I came in to find the table set with coffee and tortas - de agua! Well, I got it IMMEDIATELY!!!! I can't believe that I had lived 7 years in Puebla and never had one! And let me tell you, he didn't serve them with butter or cream cheese or ANYTHING, just plain old tortas with our coffee.... I mean, I went home and asked Carlos - WHY DIDN'T YOU TELL ME ABOUT TORTAS DE AGUA???


But of course I couldn't really fault Car, because he truly didn't know about them himself! He's a Chilango who'd never been to Puebla before... when we arrived here, it was the first time for both of us. And the thing about these tortas de agua is that you only get them in Puebla. They don't make them in other parts of Mexico - or at least not the same way - and even in Puebla, you can only get them early in the morning... the rest of the day, the bakeries produce tortas de manteca (I think the dough is easier to handle or something for large quantities). So if you don't know of their existence, or if you don't go out at the crack of dawn to buy your bread fresh, you could live your whole life in Puebla (or at least 7 years as in our case) without ever tasting a torta de agua!


Which brings me at long last to the point of this story! We hadn't had tortas de agua in a long time, because as I said, you can't get them except for early in the morning at certain places. But last weekend, we went out early to get tamales, and I asked CAR to stop at a place I knew carried them. Sure enough, I brought them home and they were gone in a half hour. I thought better not to have them around because I know how out-of-control I get around them. Then, yesterday I came home to find a bag of tortas on the kitchen counter. I was hungry after a long day at work and I passed up the tortas because I thought they were the regular manteca ones bought in the afternoon; I went directly to the rice and beans on the stovetop, another fave of mine served piping hot with jalapeños, and only after calming the voraciousness of my hunger, did I return to that bag, open it and take a whiff! OMYGD!!! Tortas de agua! And I wasn't even that hungry any more!!! And by morning they would be stale (the downside of buying fresh bread is that you gotta eat it the same day)... NO WAY! I took half of one and munched on it in ecstacy while I turned on the TV to watch a movie - Urban Cowboy if you must know. Then I went back for the other half while the movie was rewinding. Then I went back for another torta and spread both halves with cream cheese and took it upstairs to eat while checking out the computer. And finally, around 10 pm I had my "supper" (who was I kidding??) of - you guessed it! A torta de agua with cream cheese once again!


This morning, I had to entice poor Anto out of bed to help me take the trash down to the fork in the road where they pick it up once a week... "If you help me take it out, we can go on down to the store and get some tortas de agua, hot off the line," I said. He was downstairs and ready to face the frosty weather in 5 minutes flat.


So finally I've written this and here's my sad realization: sometimes it's better not knowing about something so wonderful because once you know, you have to RESTRAIN yourself from going completely bananas over it. I really feel sorry for gamblers, or drug addicts... it's gotta be scary... when you can't stop and you end up bankrupt or burnt out... only in this case I will end up supersized or dead.



But can you believe this?? I've finally finished this blog, and guess what I'm going to have right now? A torta de agua with butter - oh yes!!!