I do love tea bread (or quick breads, or myriad other localisms for chemically leavened as opposed to yeasted breads). I often have strange leftovers: half a sweet potato casserole that wasn’t exactly what I had expected, half a jar of spiced peaches, a pint of homemade cranberry sauce with a little too much orange zest and ginger, three rather limp carrots, or a small bowl of leftover rum-soaked dried fruit. It follows that these leftovers would find their way into a loaf of tea bread.
The sad thing is, often these frankenstein breads turn out to be really yummy and they are very difficult to reproduce. The best one to date has been a bastardized pumpkin bread recipe that I used the leftover sweet potato casserole (with lots of butter, toasted hazelnuts, cinnamon and clove) in place of the pureed pumpkin, dried cranberries instead of the called for raisins and shelled pumpkin seeds in place of the pecans the recipe suggested. This was seriously awesome, get-up-in-the-middle-of-the night-for-a-slice bread. And will probably only happen again next Thanksgiving when we have leftover sweet potato casserole which is generally different every year depending on what I feel like throwing in there. Alas, my bread will be different, too.
I would pout, but I also like the fleeting quality of these quirky little gems. Creating culinary goodies is a bit like pastel painting on city sidewalks, the sensory enjoyment is shortlived but the memory of them can be lasting and occasionally haunting. Not a bad legacy.
