Sunday, March 23, 2003

The Oxford Universal Dictonary (third

The Oxford Universal Dictonary (third ed., New York 1955), provides as follows: Cookie: (ku’ki). Sc and U.S. 1730. [prob a. Du. koekje, dim of koek cake.] In Scotland, a baker’s plain bun; in U.S., a small flat cake, with, or (locally) without, sweetening.

Are they kidding me? No one reading this definition would have any inkling of the magic and magnificence evoked by those two precious syllables.  Here, I’ve been treating the damn thing as a reference source.  It barely qualifies as a paperweight. 

Let’s start with the “koek cake” - this isn’t whetting my appetite, for food or anything else.  Maybe some of you are more interested in it than I am but since American Pie I think I’ve had my fill of that kind of sweetmeat. 

Now for Scotland: I’m not familiar (thankfully) with their bakers’ buns, plain or otherwise, but I’m wondering to what the comparison is being made: a tartan baker’s tattooed ass, a kilted boulanger’s tush with a sacral ring, or maybe a caber-tossing patissier’s branded bottom?  Nothing could be farther from my thoughts when I think of a cookie.  And frankly I prefer it that way. 

Finally, once we get to the U.S., we find a definition that begins, in a pale, inadequate way, to approach the topic appropriately - a small flat cake, but definitely with sweetening. What kind of “locality” would call an unsweetened cake of any size or shape a cookie? That’s just wrong.  Wrong and cruel.  Either tell me where the “cookies” are unsweetened, so I can avoid ever going there, or don’t talk about it at all.  You’ll just scare the children. 

In summary: My faith in this particular dictionary is fatally wounded. But my curiosity about, and hunger for, the cookie remain unsatisfied.  So I suppose we must fall back on our own resources to understand this beloved baked delight.  My mind’s been on the subject lately because of all the hamentashen, but maybe I’m getting ahead of myself.  Having been spurred to this task by loyal Chuckleists and Chucklistas, I will proceed with Aristotelian deliberation by considering the most important (to me) exemplars of that most profound creation, the cookie.  And you can bet there’s not a plain bun or unsweetened cake in the lot.  I wouldn’t do that to anybody - and certainly not to you.

Golden Fruit: searching for a link to enrich the discussion of this primitive, larval form of this complex cuilinary phenomenon, I learn that they have been discontinued by those miserable craven elves from Keebler.  I’m so outraged I won’t even link to the “meet the elves” page, which is bandwidth-intensive and unflaggingly stupid.  The Golden Fruit biscuit is/was a sandwich of long, broad, flaky flat biscuits with fruit paste in the middle and a slightly sweet glaze.  It was good for lunches when I didn’t want to get too much of a sugar infusion in the middle of the day.  They came in raisin, apple, cranberry, and a few other flavors too, I think.  I could find out more from Keebler but screw’em. 

Fortune and Almond Cookies: it’s pretty well known that fortune cookies were invented a few blocks from my apartment at the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park for the 1894 California Midwinter Exhibition.  My local greasy chinese restaurant will sometimes give me these by the bagfull when I order the occasional chicken fried rice.  That’s, like, 30 fortune cookies.  I have no self control and obtain numerous contradictory and delicious fortunes forthwith.  Almond cookies are much more in the traditional “cookie” format, round and flat and crumbly.  I tend to believe these are actually chinese in origin; however, I know that they can be bought in outrageous bulk for low prices.  If I succumb to this temptation I deserve my own fate. 

Stella D’Oro Selections: These were always popular at religious events and I wasn’t proud of how much I liked them.  But there were a lot of different kinds of cookies in those bags and I could finish a whole sack before I realized I had made myself sick.  Anisette, biscotti, and the sugar-glazed ones were particular favorites, but I’d plow through them all.  In recent Stella news, be on the lookout for undeclared almonds and non-kosher cookies.

Circus Animals and Animal Crackers: I hadn’t realized the pink and white iced cookies with little candy dots all over them were a local specialty till just now.  I proudly grew up on these sugar-loaded morsels.  After years of testing, I personally concluded that pink tasted the same as white, but some of the animals were more fun to eat than others (however, some secrets will die with me).

Animal Crackers were always a favorite of mine because 1) they came in a cage-like box with a handle, suitable for swinging; 2) they called themselves crackers but if you were paying attention, they were actually sweet; 3) no one ever seemed to mind me eating them between meals.  They were also sufficiently realistic in detail as to lend themselves to many pleasant carnivorous games when I was a tot, and occasionally more recently. 

Lemon cookies: I remember getting these mass-produced in cheerful yellow boxes but I can’t find a link to that product so here’s an analogous image. These cookies were small and crunchy and seemed a bit effete to me, except if you ate a lot of them your tongue would start to burn from the acid in the lemony powdered sugar all over them.  Made me feel cooler in the summer.  Good with punch.  I enjoyed sucking all the sugar off and then finishing them quickly.  Oh, now I get it. 

Iced Oatmeal: I’ve always liked oatmeal (I make a mean bowl of oatmeal, you don’t know till you’ve tried it) and oatmeal cookies, especially when armored with a thick layer of solid sugar.  I typically preferred the chewy kind, and was okay with the raisins on occasion.

English Tea Dunkers: when I was six and my family went to England for an extended stay, my mother brought these home one day and I still haven’t finished thanking her.  They are about two inches square, very dense and firm, with an extremely hard sugar coating in different bright colors with different simple images.  You had to dip them in milk - and hold them there a few moments - before your teeth could penetrate that glucose plating.  I’ve never seen them since then (1970-71), but hope springs eternal.  Probably the highest sugar-to-biscuit ratio I’ve ever had in a cookie.  I can’t find a link.  If you know where to get these, act now and earn my undying gratitude.  I beg of you.

Flaky Flix (fudge, not that parvenue vanilla): a mainstay, and I think still on the market, though I’ve given up finding a link for them after 20 minutes of inexplicable disappointment.  These things are cultural icons, aren’t they?  I remember going shopping
with mom and making her get a box of these first and having her give me the money to pay for them so I could sit in the car and eat them.  In my family, this was exercise.  (We left the house, and I had to stand in line, and open the package myself.) I would vary between chomping my way down the length of the cookie, or breaking it longitudinally and eating the individual wafers.  That was a challenge and I’m not sure it was worth it, in retrospect - the cookies tasted pretty much the same either way.  (Yummy.)

Girl Scout Thin Mints, Samoas, and Tagalongs:  There really aren’t any bad girl scout cookies, but my original favorite, Thin Mint, has been supplanted of late by Samoas and Tagalongs.  The chocolate on the Tagalongs seems milkier to me but the Samoas are chewy, and I’m a sucker for caramel.  (No, not a caramel sucker.  That’s altogether different.)

Milanos: regular/mint/orange: another mass-produced favorite.  I ate a lot of these in college when I worked at the downstairs convenience store in my dorm.  They tended to be the major favorite of the endemic spoiled campus girls.  So I had to be careful with the Milanos - if a guy was coming down for munchies I hid them so as to preserve some modicum of masculinity (right), and if it was girls stopping by for a study break I could break them out and share the joy.  Like it ever went any farther than that; I was locked in a metal cage full of junk food, more an object of pity than derision - give me back my goddamn cookies…

Pinwheels: these were like mallomars, which I also liked (and which I could find on the ‘net where I couldn’t find Pinwheels), but they were in a sort of bundt cake shape and had a higher chocolate-to-marshmallow ratio, on account of the big hole in the middle where the chocolate coating would pool.  I would peel the chocolate off a whole cookie, then eat the cracker base, and then pop the naked, glistening marshmallow wad into my mouth; and next I’d just cram a whole cookie down my piehole at once, impatient with my own artifice.  Then I’d cycle through again.  They only came about 18 to a package so it was hardly sport to finish them during a half-hour cartoon show after school.

Fudge-covered Graham Crackers: these had the attraction of starting off as health food and then being made into something more important.  Sometimes there was a lot more chocolate than cracker.  Still a lunchbox favorite.  These are sold nationwide by myriad producers and distributors.  The fact I can’t find a link to them proves the internet is useless.  Of special interest is advice from Kel: peanut butter on chocolate graham crackers is even better than it sounds.

Entenman’s Chocolate Chip: There were several important cookies with which I was not familiar when I ventured east for college. Entenmann’s was a major discovery for me.  They were chewy, had a high chip count, and I sold them in my little convenience store.  Now they’re even being sold out here in California.  God smiles on the west coast. 

Archway Rocky Road (the only links I could find were nutrition and recall information, neither of which seemed very cheerful so I’m leaving them out): another east coast confection of enlightenment, the Archway Rocky Road cookie was large and very chewy. Irresistably scarfable.  Sold in my little shop.  Never lasted long around me, and vice versa. 

Chocolate covered Oreos: Here we start to stray from the mass-produced to the specialty food.  I first saw these in catalogues, but when the manufacturer started packaging and selling them in grocery stores it all became too easy.  I had grown weary of regular oreos; I have nothing against them but I don’t personally feel too attached to them.  But dunk them in chocolate and, naturally, the rules change. 

Now we get into the specialty foods - the ones that come out of my own kitchen, at which the rest of the cookie-eating world can only gape with envy and awe.

Cookies of the Gods and Holy Heroin: mom got this recipe, whence I know not, for big chewy cookies with lots of chocolate chips, raisins, oatmeal, cinnamon and nutmeg.  As she began turning them out on the baking sheets for the first batch and I scrambled for a spoonful of the luscious dough (cookie dough is a whole separate topic for me), she wondered aloud if she was making them too big.  Somehow she was convinced to stick to the recipe and wound up with enormous, taut - but yeilding - cookies riddled with dense globules of chocolate, redolent of spice and butter, cookies like none I’d ever seen or eaten.  I was in an Erich von Daniken phase and named them “Cookies of the Gods,” a name that stuck in part due to (rather than in spite of) my dad’s rabbinic accomplishments.  They remain the biggest and the best.  However, the last time I made them I wondered if I hadn’t pushed the envelope quite far enough, and cut the cookies, still hot from the oven, into quarters.  When these had cooled a bit, I dipped the interior corner of each such wedge into melted chocolate.  These were now dangerous - perhaps, too dangerous.  You could eat one in just a few bites and the chocolate levels were through the roof.  Kel took one, then several more, and then coldly accused me of producing heroin.  That, I liked.  It stuck.

Hamentashen: the King of cookies.  Almost every year of my life I’ve made these triangular sugar cookies with fruit filling.  Once we had our own place, I started experimenting with different doughs and fillings.  I have now perfected this ancient and revered art, such that friends who are true gourmands and sophisticates have dubbed me the very King of Hamentashen. (The regal references are relevant to the association of these cookies with Purim, of which, see below.) I can roll dough to an even 1/4 inch thickness - a dough lighter and more buttery than any ever previously produced, infused by secret ingredients with a delicate floral aroma.  I make my own fruit fillings on the stovetop, unequalled in variety, flavor, or consistency.  This year’s batch of hamentashen were produced with machine-like efficiency and are small enough to be popped in the mouth whole.  They are indescribably delicious, so I will stop trying. 

Thank you for your courtesy and attention.  You may now return to your regularly scheduled snack foods.