Posted on 03/04/2020 11:37:54 AM PST by nickcarraway
The deep East Bay locale, 30 miles from the city, has a different air. It's far removed from the bustling vainglory of San Francisco, the excessive hipness of Oakland and the poshness of the North Bay.
Concord is just Concord, your friendly neighborhood suburb, simple but replete with land and history and families. It’s one of the most populous cities in the Bay Area, credited with gifting the world Tom Hanks, Dave Brubeck, at least two of the Workaholics, Waterworld (or whatever it's called now) and the area’s great culinary contribution, the cheese zombie.
I recall zombies clearly from my days at Concord High School in the mid-aughts: bready white cloud puffs containing globs of melted American cheese, brushed with a sheen of salted butter. They were immaculate and nutritionally dubious, made flawless in memory.
Mount Diablo Unified School District students like me have been buying these things since the ‘60s. Early that decade, Mount Diablo High School bakers Decla Phillips and Helen Ballock improvised the breakfast treat in the school’s cafeteria kitchen, reportedly riffing on Ballock's husband's recipe for Piroshki. If Concord ever had a signature food, this is it.
As lore dictates, after zombies first caught on with the kids, Phillips and Ballock would arrive early to work each day and roll out sprawling sheets of white doughy fluff to meet daily demand. After the dough rested, the bakers would stretch it to fit baking pans, and layer it with cheese, and then another layer of dough.
The next step was crucial, as it separated the Concord zombie from a similarly named (but inferior, more sandwich-like) baked good native to the Yakima Valley. Concord zombies had to be sealed off so as to not allow the cheese to seep out of the fragile bun,
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
Concord used to be the cheap seats of the east bay, now it’s a peculiar mix of suburbia and illegal aliens.
Concord is the first place I lived when I moved out on my own.
I’d eat that.
L
How was it?
Ha, me too. I shared a house on Cape Cod Way with a few buddies in the early 80's. And yes, I loved cheese zombies in high school. Soft, warm, cheesy, buttery goodness! A couple years ago when I was visiting friends, we picked up a couple dozen for a get together to revisit the old delicacy.
Disgusting, it is worse than our cafeteria’s stuffed bread with spaghetti and mystery meat sauce entree
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