Pretzel

The other day, I asked my little sister what her thought process is like when she feels suicidal. She sent me a series of texts. I created a black out poem out of them, for your enjoyment:

I feel happy aboit

continuing

Yea it just feels

truthful

thinking about how

there's nothing

like Lyon halls pretzel and sweet potato fries

I tried to keep the poem fairly optimistic. Let me give you some context, as to fully understand the situation, you need to know more about Lyon Hall’s pretzel.

Lyon Hall is a local restaurant in Arlington, Virginia. Google describes it as a “trendy French-German brasserie offering a meat-heavy menu & a unique beer selection”. Our family has been frequenting Lyon Hall for years, and we have witnessed both the menu size and the clientele increase over time. Some time ago, I’d say probably five or six years, Lyon Hall added a pretzel to their menu. The menu item appears as follows.

Warm Bavarian Pretzel

smoked cheddar fondue, honey butter, spicy mustard

9

The pretzel is worth nine dollars. It may even be worth more. To start off, it is a work of art. It is not shaped in the normal, pedestrian, mickey mouse pretzel shape. No, this pretzel consists of delicate, golden braids. Imagine a small loaf of challah, the color of dark, polished wood, glistening with butter, with the faintest dusting of poppy seeds, enough to add an interesting visual component, but not so much as to interrupt the purity of the pretzel flavor.

Next to the pretzel rest three little silver pots. One is silky and loose, a delicate yellow; the smoked cheddar fondue. The next is the lightest shade of offwhite, airy and soft, the honey butter (they probably whip the butter, to get this gossamer-like texture). The final pot is a muted yellow, with the textural element of mustard seeds, little brown beads to crunch.

The pretzel comes to the table hot, its crust yields a light crunch, a soft snap when you break it open. A burst of steam, your hands are warmed, damped. The interior is soft, puffing into clouds of dough, a bright white. To achieve this effect, I suppose they give the pretzel a brief run through the oven before serving it. The taste is magnificent, that of fresh bread, with the interior buttery, melting in the heat of your mouth, and the crust breaks up the monotony sheltering the dough from becoming too tedious. The mustard is spicy, hot, enthralling, the honey butter is comforting, soothing, the cheese is heart-pullingly rich.

And this is coming from someone who doesn’t even like the pretzel that much. It is indeed, very good for what it is, a pretzel. One might even say that as a pretzel, it is close to transcendental. I’m just not the biggest pretzel fan. But I do understand how a pretzel of such high quality might be the object that you think about to prevent your own death, were you a big fan of pretzels. When my sister orders this dish, she holds the silver pot of butter in one hand, and refuses to put it down until she has finished the pretzel. Then, she allows the rest of us to partake in the butter, assuming there is any left. She is a big fan of the butter, and of the pretzel.

If for some reason, Lyon Hall were to take this pretzel off its menu, would my sister be able to die unhindered? The answer is no, because even if the pretzel was gone, sweet potato fries would remain. There are many places that sell sweet potato fries, so I think my sister should be safe.

There was a point in time, far before I had ever experienced feeling suicidal, where I too believed that a dish would prevent my suicide. I distinctly remember telling my mother, over dinner at another restaurant, that were I ever to feel suicidal, all I would have to do was order this bread pudding, and I would immediately recover. This was at some point in middle school; I must have been thirteen or fourteen. The restaurant was called The Green Pig Bistro, also in Arlington, just a few blocks away from Lyon Hall.

I had first been there with the family of one of my best childhood friends, probably when I was nine or ten, and at that point it had just opened. I was enamored by their bacon burger at the time, which, as the waiter had proclaimed in a zealous tone, was not like other bacon burgers. Instead of having the bacon placed on top of the burger patty, resulting in an awkward eating experience in which you get either too much bacon or no bacon at all per bite, there were bacon bits mixed into the burger patty itself. What a revolutionary creation, I had thought to myself at the time. They also had cornbread, with a crispy, caramelized crust, which came out hot in a cast iron skillet. It was topped with salted maple butter that melted, greasing your fingers, into the bread as you ate it. This too, seemed groundbreaking. I was also shocked at the time, because my friend’s family ordered an appetizer and a main course and a dessert, something my family never did. The luxury, the opulence! It was a striking experience. I lost touch with that childhood friend a few years after that. I can never seem to keep in touch with people for very long.

The bread pudding, in comparison to the cornbread and the bacon burger, was really not all that. But, on this occasion, I had pleaded with my family to take me to The Green Pig Bistro (rather than going to Lyon Hall), and it was my first time trying it. At the time in which I am writing this, the bread pudding appears on the menu as follows:

White Chocolate & Cherry Bread Pudding - $10

topped with vanilla ice cream and crispy cornflakes

I don’t remember exactly how the bread pudding was served when I first tried it, but I’m fairly sure it was different, as I don’t like white chocolate, so I most likely would not have praised it with the fervor that I did. I think there was some component of bourbon, either in the bread pudding, or in the ice cream. Even when I was younger, I was a big bourbon fan.

Bread pudding is an interesting dessert. It is a child’s dessert. Now I think of it as something sickly and sweet. But I have always loved the combination of steam and frozen ice, desserts that dissolve into one another as you eat them, the cold and hot contrast on your tongue. This bread pudding was satiny, gooey, as butterscotch candy is, but with flour and butter added to the sugar. The ice cream tasted cold, cold enough to drown out the sweet, and saturated with the flavor of cream; I love cold butter, and heavy cream from the carton. It had a flavor like that.

So I told my mother, “If I ever want to commit suicide, literally just get me this bread pudding. I would, like, immediately recover.”

I had not considered, at the time, the possibility of a lack of appetite. I have always loved food. I cooked dinner for my family, nearly nightly, throughout high school. I made food for every dinner party my parents had. I had a subscription to Bon Appetit. I have read every book Ruth Reichl has published; I love MFK Fisher, and Julia Child. I have watched every season of The Great British Bake Off. I did a research project on the optimum acid content for meringue. I had an internship in which I wrote recipes and photographs for a company selling elderberry syrup.

I’d always thought that there was no way I’d ever develop a serious eating disorder, as I am too fond of eating. Of course, I had my calorie counting years, but I quickly got over them. But, again, I hadn’t considered that one of the unfortunate side effects of bipolarity is a lack of appetite. And I hadn’t really anticipated the strength of such a side effect, of the days of blankly staring into the refrigerator, at restaurant menus, dimly wondering if there was anything I actually wanted to eat. Thankfully, I often cook for my roommates, which gives me the motivation to cook for myself. And, you know, such is life. I still eat, just not as much. The bigger problem is, when I feel suicidal, I have no pretzel.

What else is there to stay alive for? I like shopping on Etsy, but my parents’ disapproval of my spending money is so deeply ingrained in me that my chest hurts when I check out at Trader Joe’s. I like buying people gifts, but even when I spend “my own money” on them, it is really my parents’ money. It must be, because when I tell my mother about these gifts, she valiantly tries to hide her disapproval. To be fair, I have been known to go a little overboard. I think that, if I’m not buying things for myself, it’s a little more ok to buy them. I know that my father regularly spends a couple thousand dollars on ski trips. Lately it’s been every other month, off to the alps or to Colorado. But that, of course, is besides the point. It’s his money after all. Is it his money or our money? Whatever is most convenient, I suppose.

But I feel as though we are getting derailed. Back to the original point. I have no pretzel. I need instant gratification to fight off the barrage of emotion my mind produces, but I cannot even resort to retail therapy. I live a hard life indeed.

Speaking of hard lives, my mother once attempted suicide after the death of her mother. Her mother died when she was seventeen years old, from what I can remember. I learned of this when I was on the phone with her, and I was telling her that it would be impossible for her to understand how someone suicidal feels. And then she said something along the lines of: when my mother died, I tried to jump out of the hospital window, and I had to be restrained. Perhaps she said that she had to be restrained by a doctor, or by a nurse. I don’t really remember the details, although I probably should, because the whole story consisted of one sentence.

After the death of her mother, my mother worked in Belgium for two months, and stayed with what became sort of an adopted family. I cannot remember the exact story of how she came to live with them, but it involved something along the lines of relying on the kindness of strangers. I think they met at her mother’s funeral.

My mother has always loved chocolate. I think it is a sort of “you always want what you can’t have” kind of thing, because she lived in Poland while it was under a communist government, before the dissolution of the Soviet Union. When I was younger, whenever we saw nutella, at any store and in any form, she told us about how, when she was younger, she was allowed one spoonful of nutella a day. They had to ration it. Her greatest dream was to have a bathtub of nutella. I have never liked nutella, but I used to pretend that I did, so as not to hurt her feelings. When I finally told her I didn’t like it, she responded with a bewildered, “Really?”

I have a theory that belgium chocolate is my mother’s pretzel. Sometimes we would stopover Belgium airport on the way to Warsaw. In the airport, there is a chocolate store called Leonidas. This is a popular chocolate store in Belgium, but they’ve also started selling their chocolates in a store that sells many artisanal chocolate brands. It is a store in D.C., and it is called the Chocolate Moose. The Chocolate Moose also sells novelty socks. I have a pair that has “Go Away” printed on it, or something to that effect. There used to be a Leonidas store in New York, but it closed.

My mom goes crazy for Leonidas. She once proclaimed often that it sells the best chocolate in the world. I have produced many counter arguments for this claim, and she has ostentatiously agreed with me. Deep down, however, I believe that she still thinks Leonidas is the best. I remember, when we visited this adopted family in Belgium, that we went to a Leonidas store. I remember a blast of cold air. It was chilly in the store, to keep the chocolates cold. I think they keep it at a specific temperature. There were glass boxes lined with pralines, grids of tempered white and milk and dark chocolate topped with swirls and little pieces of dried fruit, with crushed nuts and dollops of ganache. There were little circular boxes of candied oranges, cardboard boxes of fruit pate, blue ribbons and golden labels.

We bought a box of what must have been somewhere around fifty chocolates. I don’t think they lasted more than a couple of days. I imagine my mother, seventeen, the same age my younger sister is now. I imagine her saving money, putting some aside from what she earned working at the cafe, and buying chocolates, maybe four, tucked into a golden box and tied with blue ribbon. They were probably filled with hazelnuts and cream, gianduja or a praline of some sort. She might have held onto them in the same way that my sister holds onto the silver pot of butter, she might have refused to put the white box down until there were no chocolates left.

Some people have real problems, my parents say. Something like having your mother die when you are seventeen is probably the sort of real problem they are referring to. My sister and I, probably, shouldn’t need a pretzel in the first place. The pretzel is a drama we have created, we cannot help but think. My mother’s chocolates are not dramatic. My mother deserved to need those chocolates. I have heard people I like say that I have created the need for a pretzel by myself, because I have never really needed anything. I conjure up my own problems for lack of having any. Is this true? I don’t know. But the idea that it might be true is enough to leave me craving a pretzel.