Subject Matters

I’m so sorry, blog. I’m sorry I’ve been neglecting you. I’ve been thinking about you, and I’ve been thinking about food – and making it – quite a lot. But my camera is broken, and since I forgot to spend a few years as a financial consultant before signing up for grad school, I can’t afford to fix it. And somehow, slapping together some philosophical writing and a recipe without at least providing a nice picture doesn’t seem adequate.

But I thought about you the other day, when Stephen Yablo gave a talk on “A Semantic Conception of the Truthmakers.” His argument had something to do with the relevance of “subject matter” to the truth of sentences, which was supposed to capture our intuitions about when statements can be technically incorrect but “get something right.” To get to these subject matters, we have to subtract part of the content of the sentence from the rest of it, which can be illustrated by very complicated diagrams segmenting logical space in various ways. Or, Yablo mentioned, it can be illustrated by a simple analogy, like the explanation: “A gratin is a quiche that’s not baked in a crust.” You take the idea of a quiche, then you take away the crust, and what you get is an understanding of a gratin. Similarly, with statements, you take everything the sentence purports to say, then you subtract the bits you don’t think are essential to what’s being talked about, and you get the subject matter.

The problem with this is that there’s really nothing accurate about that explanation of a gratin. A quiche that’s not baked in a crust is a crustless quiche. It’s made with eggs, milk, and any number of fillings. A gratin involves no eggs; it’s generally made with a béchamel sauce using cream, butter, flour, and cheese. Perhaps a better example would be an explanation of a frittata: a quiche without so much milk.

This got me thinking about savory bread pudding, because I made some recently and had to explain it to people who had never heard of such a thing (and probably didn’t yet understand why you’d want to eat it). I think the best argument is a comparison to Thanksgiving stuffing: savory bread pudding is like that, but with milk and eggs instead of stock. The result is a very rich and delicious main course.

Here’s the recipe. You can add and subtract fillings you please, as long as we’re still talking about bread, eggs, and milk.

Fennel and Chard Bread Pudding

1 bulb of fennel, halved, cored, and thinly slice
1 large bunch rainbow chard, chopped
1 onion, sliced
3 ounces cheddar cheese, grated
Handful of parmesan shavings
3 ½ cups crusty bread cubes, toasted in the oven until crispy
2 ½ cups milk
3 eggs
Salt and pepper, to taste

Sautee fennel and onions until soft and wimpy, and slightly caramelized. Then add chard to pan in handfuls, adding when sufficiently reduced in volume. Toss vegetables with bread cubes and cheese, put into well-buttered and suitably sized casserole dish. Whisk eggs and milk together, season with salt and pepper, and pour over (I’m actually completely unsure of how much liquid ingredients I used; the mixture should come almost to the top of the bread, but not quite. Bake at 375F for 40 minutes, or until set. Sprinkle top with parmesan for the last few minutes of baking.