Here, Cookie, Cookie

Fruits from a Cacao plant: Photo from this very interesting site

The very idea of a 40-ounce coke makes me nauseous, and restaurant pasta dishes that could feed four come close. But my feelings about chocolate chip cookies six inches across are slightly different. Especially when they’re thin, crispy, and it could easily be argued that they were cooked too long or forced to an unnatural flatness. It helps take my mind off the dreary shame of why-can’t-I-stick-to-my-diet to feel sympathy for a cookie.

I buy them at the bakery around the corner, which is not exactly on the way home, but is only a block and a bit beyond my building, so if I don’t stop, if my legs keep to their steady rhythm I can easily entertain the idea that I’m really going to the park for a little more exercise. And once I’ve made the right turn, definitely not going to the park, I can distract myself by looking in through the big windows into the café part, and see people drinking lattes and working on laptops in a bright, airy atmosphere that reminds me of how much luxury we have that we now take for granted. Do you remember your first computer? Mine was a laptop, grey, warm, heavy: I dreamed there was a three-year-old genius tucked inside it. A little magical boy. It was one of those dreams of portent and wonder. But I digress.

At this café-bakery, the service counter is at the far end, where the door is, so once I enter it’s directly in front of me. If they’re not busy, I’m immediately asked what I want—and though I can hesitate, to walk out would be embarrassing. More damaging to my diet is that I have to pay for the cookie before I can touch it. I can’t put it in my grocery cart and carry it around for a while like a cat with a dead mouse before putting it virtuously back on the shelf. I can’t leave it in my cart for years, as I do on amazon. The cookie must be committed to before I’m allowed to even flirt.

It’s when I’m alone, breaking off bits to eat, the very crispness (staleness?) of the cookie making that action slightly more difficult than it should be, that I begin to identify and feel sorry for the cookie. Its extreme flatness reminds me of my own baking disasters, which generally occur when I’m upset, so my remembered self-pity gets directed onto this cookie which really has nothing to worry about, being just baked and fulfilling its destiny without a hitch. I’m also reminded of the girls in elementary school who were abnormally tall, or those later on who never grew discernable breasts, and how this embarrassed them and made them unhappy.

A perfect cookie, one that could win beauty contests or line up with its identical sisters in a store window drawing the eye and hunger with its proportions, grace, glaze and color: that cookie is easy to resist.

Well, not really. But that’s another story. Every cookie, like every tree, book and friend is loved a little differently.

when you have forgotten Sunday: the love story

—And when you have forgotten the bright bedclothes on a Wednesday and a Saturday,
And most especially when you have forgotten Sunday—
When you have forgotten Sunday halves in bed,
Or me sitting on the front-room radiator in the limping afternoon
Looking off down the long street
To nowhere,
Hugged by my plain old wrapper of no-expectation
And nothing-I-have-to-do and I’m-happy-why?
And if-Monday-never-had-to-come—
When you have forgotten that, I say,
And how you swore, if somebody beeped the bell,
And how my heart played hopscotch if the telephone rang;
And how we finally went in to Sunday dinner,
That is to say, went across the front room floor to the ink-spotted table in the southwest corner
To Sunday dinner, which was always chicken and noodles
Or chicken and rice
And salad and rye bread and tea
And chocolate chip cookies—
I say, when you have forgotten that,
When you have forgotten my little presentiment
That the war would be over before they got to you;
And how we finally undressed and whipped out the light and flowed into bed,
And lay loose-limbed for a moment in the week-end
Bright bedclothes,
Then gently folded into each other—
When you have, I say, forgotten all that,
Then you may tell,
Then I may believe
You have forgotten me well.

Gwendolyn Brooks

Christmas Cake

Fruitcake has a bad reputation in this country. It’s used most often to describe politicians of the other party, and even though I think that makes them sound far too inoffensive—when has a fruitcake ever stolen an election?—it’s one of those things you can’t change. So I’ll refer to it as my British daughter-in-law does: Christmas Cake.

When I first made Christmas cake, I was newly married, and we had rented a house with a big pantry on a thousand acre cattle ranch in Virginia. This was many years ago, and some of the ingredients I wanted—dried cherries and currants—were hard to find. I kept shopping, driving far afield, until I found the cherries, as well as good dried apricots; plump dates with crackly, sweet skin; dried figs, raisins and currants. I used fresh chopped orange peel, minced ginger and pecans I shelled myself. My mother taught me to add strong black coffee and black pepper to give the cakes a dark depth and spiciness.

My greatest discovery was that Christmas Cakes are like the people we all know who can drink us under the table and never stagger or slur their words. I’d make half a dozen cakes, cover them in cheesecloth and line them up in the pantry to age for six weeks. The experts said to dampen them with spirits once in a while. I watered mine like a five year old who’s planted her first seed. But not quite like a five year old—I had an instinct about it. I may also have dipped into one of those charming slapdash cookbooks of the fifties that advocated alcohol everywhere and often.

I used rum, brandy, cognac, whatever was to hand. The first year my husband was certain they’d taste like nothing but alcohol and wet cardboard, but the one we’d marked for tasting grew only more complex and distinctive, no matter how many days it spent boozing. The others, under their cheesecloth veils, waited like mail-order brides to be sent off intact, except that Christmas cakes never stab nasty husbands to death or drown themselves in the well. If you want a mail-order bride, I have a fruitcake for you.

They were wonderful cakes, much admired. Clamored for, even. I baked them as gifts for several years, until I moved to New York City and had no room for their incubation. They were dense and moist but not sodden; they caved in slowly under the knife, crumbling at the edges, like soil where there are no roots but many pebbles. The best part was that each bite was so satisfying, so rich and packed with different flavors, that you never wanted more than a thin slice. No hard sauce, ice cream or any other accompaniment was needed. Just that little piece of Christmas Cake, holding all the harvest, spices from once-fabled lands, and quiet November afternoons with the bite of brandy in the air.

Fruitcakes in the galaxy (fruitcakes in the galaxy)
Fuitcakes on the earth (fruitcakes on the earth)
Struttin’ naked towards eternity
We’ve been that way since birth

–Jimmy Buffet