06/19/2026
Once in a while I miss pan dulce. For El Nopal Bakery® Hojarascas® I'll make the trip to the Chicago History Museum and buy a lot of boxes to give to friends and relatives as they miss the cookies.
But I do miss bisquites and empanadas. My cousin found one bakery South side that generously has enough camote in their empanadas like we used to do. That's the way it should be with the camote. I might try that bakery but it's a bit of a drive.
I also miss full service bakeries like we were with uniformed counter girls wearing gloves and using wax paper as only our counter girls handle the Pan Dulce from display cases and pack in bags for the customers. We Never had any open racks of bread wheeled out in the front lobby either. My parents would never ever consider that. And our customers appreciated it.
We baked fresh twice daily. Any unsold same day fresh bread we would pack in paper lined boxes and donate the bread to the local churches like St Jude's, the Cordi-Marian nuns, and St Agnes who would feed the poor people. The churches would pick up the bread boxes at 5:00 a.m. and they were very happy.
Decades later both my parents had mini strokes (One day I'll go into detail on a major newspaper article that falsified our sales as low without fact checking with us and fabricated quotes that business was bad in Pilsen when it wasn't.) and the mini strokes gave my parents vascular dementia which accelerated their deaths. My dad was having heart issues so I took him to a cardiologist in the Western suburbs. It turned out the cardiologist and his mom were fed by the Cordi-Marian nuns when he was young in Pilsen. The doctor said "We probably ate your bread!" The cardiologist looked very kindly upon my father.
