Melon Bread
A year ago, I wrote a piece for the ‘Authenticity’ issue of Potluck Zine, a wonderful independent magazine that celebrates stories of cooking, eating, and sharing food. Right up my street, as you can imagine.
I wrote a short piece about melon bread, shared here with permission. You can order the zine here, and thank you so much to the talented Carole Maillard for the accompanying illustration. Humbling that my little piece inspired such a wonderful image - how lucky am I?
It took me twenty years to realize that melon bread doesn’t actually have any melon flavoring in it. I remember being affronted when I discovered that – I’d been trying to recreate the recipe for my newly established food blog – and I felt a sense of betrayal. Betrayal tastes bitter, different from sour taste of shame – and I could taste them both, like I had been scammed, a keen sense of embarrassment that hadn’t been there before the wool had been pulled from in front of my eyes.
Melon bread doesn’t have any melon in it.
They call it melon bread because the crosshatching on top is made to look like the etchings on a honeydew. The bakery near my grandparents house was famous for their melon pan, and people would take the number 24 bus up to the Highland from the center of town to buy them especially.
Every summer, when grandfather would pick us up from the train station, he’d take us there, and we would get them while they were hot. You’re supposed to wait until they are cooled, so the outer layer would become crunchy like a biscuit, but we would never be that patient. I was young, and the pastry was bigger than my face, and I’d shove my face in it like I was smothering myself in a warm souffle pillow, before taking my first bite. At the time it tasted so sweet, and I felt like I could feel the freshness of the melons, and I’d tell my grandfather and he’d laugh. Looking back now, I suppose he knew that melon bread didn’t have any melon in it, but he never let on. I could taste them, and who was he to tell me otherwise?
One summer we started going on our melon bread runs almost daily. It was the first summer that it was just the three of us visiting – mama, my sister and me – and dad hadn’t come with us. He had to work, so he stayed behind, but he and mama still spoke to each other everyday. Every phone call would begin staccato, but after a while mama would start to cry and raise her voice as if in an aria, but once this happened grandfather would ask “who wants to go for melon bread?” and after a while we started lacing up our shoes as soon as mama would pick up the phone.
Grandfather had a navy Jeep, and we’d parked outside of the bakery on one occasion, waiting for our order. From the window we could see them all, lined up, stacks of them on baking trays, being fed into the large industrial ovens. The small, pale dough balls with deep scarring swelling to become light, sweet and delicate in the tender heat. I knew what it must be like, to be one of those dough balls, because I was encased in hot metal, too – the summer heat was beating through the car, and I started to feel peculiar.
Melon bread stopped tasting so much like the summer holidays, and more like a transgression.
Conflating our bakery trips with mama’s increasingly tearful phone calls, our palates seemed to change – away from our usual sweets and cakes, we started reaching for the pickles and dried fish that would make up grandfather’s bar snacks. After a while, he’d continue to rattle his car keys, readying to make the trip, but we preferred to sleep in. Our grandmother would tell him not to bother us – “the girls have outgrown them, now. Let them sleep.”
Whenever I have one now – and it’s not very often that I find it in the city I live in now, melon bread - I can’t say I savour it. Now I know it’s not there, I miss the melon flavor, the essence of which only ever really did exist in my imagination. I can still detect hints of guilt, of shame. But above all, I can taste sweetness. Bland yet overpowering, oppressive yet light – nostalgic but very present in that moment – the love that grandfather had for us, and his hope of making the memories of those summer melons sweet.