It’s the season of cheer, twinkling lights, Yuletide carols, and fighting over the cinnamon babka.
Todd, my native New Yorker friend of many years, sends me the babka from Zabar’s, the famous nearly-a-century-old specialty food store at Broadway and 80th Street in Manhattan.
Todd doesn’t intend to create tension in my marriage, but this is cinnamon babka, so tension happens.
Zabar’s has never revealed the specifics of its recipe, but what we do know is that this wondrous loaf is handmade from soft, rich, eggy, buttery yeast dough and filled with a thick, sticky, strongly spiced cinnamon-sugar-butter swirl and topped with sweet streusel-style crumbs and a sugar-syrup glaze.
It’s 22 ounces of divine pleasure.
You may give me jewelry, or Google stock, or the $8,800 La Marzocco GS3 espresso machine, but Todd clearly loves me the most, because he sends me Zabar’s cinnamon babka.
I am generally not a great lover of baked goods. You can have all my cookies. I don’t go crazy for bread. Cake, I can take it or leave it.
Then, years ago, that first babka arrived.
My wife Kristina has a normal person’s fondness for things baked. But she is also a person of supreme self-restraint. The only thing she carries to extremes is moderation. Thus, the babka did not disappear quickly.
And you know how it goes: ’Tis the season. Cut loose a little. Celebrate.
So in the spirit of the holidays, I took that first nibble.
This was a mistake. Zabar’s cinnamon babka is a gateway drug, and the drug it leads you to is more babka.
A single loaf is roughly 3,000 calories, of which I actually need, nutritionally speaking, zero.
Physical health, however, is the least of my babka problems.
Emotional health — by which I mean guilt — is another thing altogether.
And relational health — by which I mean the preservation of smooth marital relations — this is the big kahuna.
Of course when the cinnamon babka arrives, we open it immediately and each of us cuts off a slice and we stand there in the kitchen and eat it joyfully.
Then I send Todd in Texas a love note.
Then I go back to the kitchen and see if Kristina is still there.
If not, I cut off another slice and eat it.
After you’ve taken a slice, you rewrap the babka in the wrinkly plastic it came in, so it’s not immediately evident whether the babka box has been raided.
It’s possible that your partner will return to the kitchen and assume there’s as much babka left as before, and they’ll think more highly of you than you deserve.
Also, each time you steal more babka, you cut thinner and thinner slices, so as the loaf gradually shrinks, it’s not obvious that you’re the one shrinking it.
After you cut a slice and eat it, the key is to resist the urge to stand there and cut another slice and eat it. Even the thinnest slices add up, and before you know it, all that’s left is a pitiful, obviously pilfered portion of a previously perfect Christmas present.
And it’s clear you’re the culprit.
This year, Kristina has been quietly monitoring her diet, so I expected her to be extra-judicious in her babka consumption.
But now I have a feeling her year of calorie-counting was just a way of saving up for a babka-season splurge. Every time I’ve walked into the kitchen to steal babka, the babka has been markedly smaller than the last time I stole some.
Till now, there’s just one piece left. A remainder so slender, the sharpest knife in the world couldn’t possibly get two slices out of it.
When the end comes, the marriage dynamic shifts. Nobody wants to be the selfish scoundrel who takes the last bit of babka.
It’s a matter of honor to walk past it, to leave it for the other person, to selflessly sacrifice that final delicious moment of —
Never mind. I ate it. She’ll forgive me.
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