Cookies-Divine

Since my surgery, I have worked very hard at eating cookies. There was a brief moment in my life when moderation ruled: in the years before the surgery, my sweetheart and I would stop at two cookies after supper. But after, it seemed, what did it matter? Occasionally I like to make the anosmic’s joke that “those who can’t smell, don’t.” As a parallel form of reasoning, if you can’t taste it, it’s as if you haven’t eaten it in the first place, so have another cookie.

A little over a year after the surgery I traveled to England, where I was reacquainted with the biscuit. Cheap and plentiful, they tasted of crispy sugar flavored with chocolate or ginger or textured with oats. And when I later went to visit the man I thought I loved, he had filled his cupboards with a variety of biscuits to greet me. He was, I suppose, another boyfriend who sought to fatten me up – though in this case it was for the kill (he traded me in for a newer-younger-thinner-and-quite-possibly-duller model two years – and approximately twenty boxes of biscuits – after he fell in love with me; I haven’t eaten a British biscuit since).

As store-bought delicacies go back in the States where I live, I’ve always preferred the crunchy: Oreos (the low-fat are crunchiest), ginger snaps, chocolate wafers that snap too, and shortbread that offers a soft crunch and that tastes clearly before and now as butter-sugar-flour. But lately I’ve been baking cookies again myself. I blame/credit my brother Bowman, who gave me the Milkbar cookbook for Christmas after we spent a fall day trolling New York in search of Milkbar peanut butter cookies for our peanut-butter-loving older brother. This cookbook is a revelation, its author Christina Tosi a genius. For me, it’s done for cookies what Rose Levy Beranbaum’s Cake Bible did for cakes. Making cookies with Tosi’s methods is like making cookies for the first time.

Aside from the miniature treats made in my Easy Bake Oven, cookies were the first sweet I baked by myself. I always made them by hand – creaming the sugar and butter with a wooden spoon, beating in the eggs and vanilla, adding the flour and baking soda and salt. The batter was reasonably smooth, but it sat in thick doughy masses, like a series of small mountains rather than one big sphere of yum. Now I’m mixing with my Kitchen Aid (orange, of course). Blending the eggs after the butter and sugars takes up to ten minutes in the Milkbar way. This changes the texture completely: the cookie dough becomes smooth, more like batter, actually, than dough. And Tosi tells me that you have to refrigerate cookie dough to get the right consistency when baked. As for baking, I have been experimenting to get the perfect texture; it took me more than three batches before I got it right. I’ve learned to let the cookies appear to be not entirely done when I take them out – the sides are browned, but they haven’t quite flattened, and unlike a cake they most definitely do not spring back to the touch. Instead they fall when they cool, so that the look is ultimately what one expects in a cookie, but the texture is just chewy enough, like the Milkbar delights I’d come to love and thought I could never reproduce myself.

At some time of in-between singlehood, a friend told me that it was a crime I didn’t have a family to cook for. Today I’m baking cookies for my students. Is this a relocated maternal instinct? Perhaps. But it’s also bred of the knowledge that they have quicker metabolisms than most of my friends and they don’t yet eschew cookies like grown-ups are supposed to. In any case, everyone needs an audience – readers, listeners, cookie-eaters. The best audience members – and you know who you are – are all three.

Eating in Color

Orange marmalade. Black licorice Scotty dogs. Red wine. I’ve been making mental lists of what I can taste – and what I like to taste – and these three keep coming up. I like to think I’m eating in color.

Orange is bitter and sour and sweet all at once. It’s the color that accents my kitchen (and much of the rest of my life). It covers my bedroom walls. It’s the color of my favorite mugs for tea. It houses my phone and notebook. Some mornings I carry my orange mug, my orange phone, and my orange ipad into the living room to start my day and feel both mortified at my apparent predictability and happy with this bounty of color all at once. But there was a time when I shunned orange. I wouldn’t wear it because I didn’t want to call any more attention to my hair than it already did on its own. And when I was in college I spent a weekend at an aunt’s house while she was having a breakdown; she had a downstairs hall or room that was bright orange, and I began to associate the color with this frightening and formidable white-haired woman who chastised my mother on the phone about her poorly raised children, making her cry 3,000 miles away from us. None of this was anyone’s fault – not mine or my brother’s or my mother’s or my aunt’s – but for years I worried that liking orange too much was a sign of some slight instability. My orange walls have been different tones, of course – yellow balances out the red, softening the shade I see. My oranges are the ones children use to color in the sun or the exact duplicate of a naval orange. And when I taste the marmalade my friend Irene gave me this last New Year’s, I taste not just the fruit but the very color of orange.

In another register entirely, I’m also drinking in color. My younger brother has changed his eating habits. When he visited me this winter, he had me get out my vegetable juicer to share his new tricks. He brought a box full of fresh beets, spinach, carrots, apples, cucumbers, and ginger. We experimented with combinations, which for me was an experiment in both taste and color. Though I loved the freshness of the light green pure cucumber and the sweetness of carrot, what I ultimately like best is a totally mixed concoction. Though I revel in drinking such virtue, the pleasure for me is in the process: washing and slicing the vegetables, then feeding them through to see what colors they make when liquefied. I might start with spinach for a deep dark almost moldy green, then add carrots for a layer of orange, which softens the green at first and then, with more layers, simply alters the orange. The beets turn everything deep dark pink, of course. And then the apples soften the shade again. When I drink it I swear I am tasting, in turn, green and pink and orange. I close my eyes and try to imagine the fruits and vegetables individually – carrots, spinach, beets, apples – but all I taste is delicious color. 

Sensation-less

Today I snuggled up against my skin after baking little French buns. At another time I would have smelled of almonds, butter and eggs, milk and sugar. I don't sense it, of course – not really anyway – and there's no one here to describe what I smell like to me. Lying in bed in the early afternoon, I try for a faint whiff of my lotioned arms after a shower, and I imagine the aroma from the oven of just a few minutes before.

I've been eating more. Baking more, eating more. It's compensatory, I know. But compensation for what? Missing smells? Missing family? I live within the barely perceptible sensation – barely because I don't actually want to feel it – that smell and love are commingling in their absence. My breath, my literal intake of air, feels empty. Love and being loved feel like the fullness of breath. Imagine this empty air. Breathe in. There's a clarity to it, but also a lightness. That's my missing-sensation.