Tanya Bush is taking a walk. A very long walk for a little treat. Join her, won’t you? Bush is the co-founder of Cake Zine, pastry chef at Little Egg in Brooklyn, and author of the narrative cookbook Will This Make You Happy. Here, she journeys from New York City to her homeland of New Jersey by foot-slash-ferry for an underappreciated cookie.
When you have to wake up before sunrise for your job, you fiercely guard the days you don’t. Which is why I was profoundly pissed when my alarm rang at 4:30 a.m. on a morning I was ostensibly off the clock.
The plan was to walk to Jersey City with Brooks Headley. (Okay, mostly walk, with a short ferry interlude, given the Holland Tunnel isn’t pedestrian-friendly.) Brooks, a pastry chef through and through, had suggested Bread and Salt, a bakery I’d never been to but had admired for years. We were going to meet in the East Village at 7:15 a.m. to start the odyssey. Because I like making things hard for myself, I decided to get there on foot. I had just signed up to write a column about long walks to food destinations—I needed to earn it.
For an urban trek, the outfit is imperative,
For an urban trek, the outfit is imperative, so I fumbled in the dark for hiking shorts and a tank—a blessing for the scorcher ahead—anointed myself in sunscreen and tightened my Salomons. My route said two hours and seven minutes of walking, but the maps app and I are in a long-term acrimonious relationship wherein she underestimates my speed, and I beat her. I deducted 17 minutes from the estimate and set off.
I don’t know Brooks all that well. I love his books and writing, and I’m an ardent devourer of the desserts at his restaurant Superiority Burger. Griddled malt cakes, a sticky sponge covered with macerated strawberries that taste like candy, his date shake, oh heavenly date shake, salty and bright with orange zest. I knew that he had been doing the same long walk to Jersey a lot, and I needed an excuse to spend a day outside.
We made our way down Essex towards the lower tip of Manhattan. Almost immediately, Brooks started stopping. This made me anxious. I was forging ahead like I had a production list to get through. He was pausing under the bridge and telling me, “This is the most beautiful skate park in the world.” We stood for a few minutes in silence listening to the cars on the bridge overhead and I attempted to locate a profound thought—how did the graffiti get so high?—but mostly I felt sweaty. Then we were zigzagging back down the road so he could show me a tiled sign that said “DON’T BE A DICK” and pausing at a diner in an ’80s apartment complex that had an “interesting expo situation,” where the man behind the counter stared back at us warily.
Brooks has worked in kitchens for more than
Brooks has worked in kitchens for more than 15 years. That is wild to me. Making pastries is an exercise in doing the same thing again and again. Mix brioche dough every morning and ideally you become more attuned to it, the way it proofs faster on a humid day or dimples as it rises. For me, repetition has the opposite effect. At work, I hurtle through my list. I am inured to the pleasures of browning butter, of making choux for the umpteenth time. The churn of new produce doesn’t feel like a miracle so much as an inevitability. The blackberries are coming and I can’t get it up for them. Watching Brooks point out the way the light was slanting over the World Trade Center, I thought about how he didn’t appear bored at all. It seemed like the more times he walked the route the more he saw.
At the ferry terminal we boarded our boat. Somehow we were the only passengers on this Tuesday at 11 a.m. and, as we sped across the Hudson, I watched the city’s skyline get smaller. I thought about how much square footage of Manhattan I haven’t traversed. A seagull followed us, squawking. Then, suddenly, New Jersey.
We disembarked in Hoboken, where Brooks pointed out some of the oldest restaurant signs I’d ever seen. “Clam Broth House,” established in 1900. My calves began to ache. Passing the original Carlo’s Bakery, we decided this was an opportune stop for “hydration.” We loaded up on water and some pastries to bring to Rick, the co-owner of Bread and Salt, since he was graciously receiving us on a day he wasn’t actually open. Both of us gravitated toward the dot cake, vanilla cake and buttercream, entirely obscured by a psychedelic layer of rainbow sprinkles, an online phenomenon neither of us had tried.
At this point, any pastry would have commanded
At this point, any pastry would have commanded my attention; I was starving. As we chatted about baker’s ammonia and a mafia encounter in Napoli, he pulled a tray of cookies out of the oven. “Cookies are our best thing,” he said, “but no one buys them.” I could see why. They were misshapen brown mounds, hardened lumps fused together, not much to look at even if they were wafting a toasty smell. He offered me one.
Perhaps it’s the particular confluence of exercise and exhaustion, but it was one of the most delicious bites I’ve ever experienced. Roasted hazelnuts almost meaty in their decadence, swathed in a toasty sweet meringue that stuck to my teeth, so crisp it almost felt engineered. “What are these?” I asked. Brutti ma buoni, he said, a traditional cookie whose name translates to “ugly but good.”
He told me that he felt a spiritual kinship with this cookie, and that they weren’t very popular. “Maybe if you rolled them in multicolored sprinkles…” I said, only half joking. He looked at me as if I had spit on his mother’s grave. I opened the box from Carlo’s to show Rick the dot cake, garish in comparison to the brutti ma buoni. Now, none of us seem particularly interested in trying it. I reached for another brutti.
On the way back to the train Brooks
On the way back to the train Brooks and I admired my 40,000 steps before we parted ways at the PATH. He was going to the restaurant and I was going home. As I barreled underground, back to New York, back to Brooklyn, back to my neighborhood, I kept thinking about the cookies, and humiliatingly, about how to photograph them, how to make them more beautiful.
As a baker, most of what I make needs to look good enough to convert someone scrolling on Instagram into someone willing to wait in line. I’m always thinking about next week’s special, the next thing I’ll post. I tell myself it’s so customers will want to eat what I make, so they will choose my pastry as their little treat. And this is true. But I’m also a fiend for the dopamine hit. I want to be a part of the conversation. I’m not content making the same bun again and again. I wish I was the creator of the dot cake, even if I know in my soul it doesn’t taste that good.
Making my way through the Oculus to transfer trains, I stared at my photos of the brutti ma buoni. Unappetizing, something I would scroll past. Had I gone to Bread and Salt on a day it was truly open, I would have loaded up on the focaccias I’d seen online, the bombolini that I’d heard were so banging. I probably would have bypassed the cookies like everyone else.
Toasted Meringue Hazelnut Blondies
Photograph by Elliott Jerome Brown Jr., Food Styling by Micah Morton, Prop Styling by Emma Ringness
While I don’t think brutti ma buoni are ugly, I’ve translated their combination of toasted hazelnuts and caramelized meringue into a slightly more visual format: a chewy and fudgy brown butter blondie baked with a layer of crunchy hazelnuts on top and finished with swoops of torched meringue.
Source: www.bonappetit.com
