dot.allison

I'm back and it hasn't been a month! Amazing. I must say of myself.
I think it's really that I have a reason to be back in front of the computer on a regular basis again. And pretty soon I'll have to find a little laptop that I can take to work or something.

Really though, I've got inspiration coming out of my ears right now and I don't know what to do with it. I don't even know what to do with that sort of thing anymore at all... so I just sort of ended up here. I was researching for my very first term paper ever (we're supposed to do two pages on our favourite food: mine are cookies of course) - and then I started thinking about the old days when cookies were cookies and life wasn't so complicated and then I read some old e-mails and old blog posts and I couldn't think academically anymore... I really hope this doesn't become a habit... But honestly, I don't know how to write a term paper! I only know how to write what I feel like.

I hope Chef K doesn't get very angry with me, but I think I'm going to write something along the lines of what I'm thinking right now because really:
There is no way that I could add to her knowledge of cookie making. And I'm sure she knows the history of cookies and how they started from little tests of cake batter to see if the oven was hot enough - and she definitely must know that cookie comes from the dutch word "koekje" that means "little cake" and how to measure and baking times and temperatures and why some spread and some don't. I'll bet anyone in the world that has ever been curious about cookies knows that chocolate chip cookies were invented in 1937 by Ruth Graves Wakefield -- the lady who ran the Toll House Restauraunt -- when she thought that the chocolate pieces would melt into the cookie, but they didn't.

I even found a little factoid that said that there was a bill introduced to the House and Senate on February 13, 2003 that wanted to adopt the Chocolate Chip Cookie as the official cookie of the commonwealth of Pennsylvania!

But, to me, the cookie represents so much that is good -- and I don't mean just taste. I mean in life... Just look at what the very smell of a cookie can do to a person: you walk into your home after a long hard day to find that the delicately sweet, buttery, tantalizing scent of chocolate chip cookies has permeated every room... and what do you do? You melt. "Oh, God, it smells so good in here," you whisper to yourself as your senses come alive again, your mind scrambling to find the fastest way to get one to your mouth.

For instance: I made about 150 five inch round, chewy, crunchy, peanut butter cookies over the holiday season, taking several dozen to a christmas party for some family friends. And there I saw one of the greatest things I have ever seen, several times:
You walk up to someone with one of those things; those big, shiny, familiarly stamped rounds, and they glance at it a moment, but then they realise what it is. Their eyes widen, you would swear their pupils dialate and they cannot remove their gaze as they say slowly "Is that a peanut butter cookie?". Your reply is a nod. "It's so... big..." They trail off. "Would you like one?" You say. And their head begins to shake, though their eyes still do not leave the cookie as their hand and arm slowly extend in much the same fashion as a five year old in the same situation. "I really shouldn't..." they say; but before they know it, they have taken a bite.

In short, there is a reason that the saying and the story go that mom makes you milk and cookies when you get home from a hard day at school. I wonder if that is where the beginning of the worldwide love for cookies begins: at home maybe, when mom uses them to get you talking about the stresses of the day, or grandma making them in celebration of your visit, or an evening alone with your favourite movie... Even just the smell, or the sweetness of the cookie itself, that has impressed such a powerfully soft, breakably delicious, joy into our psyche.

Whatever that reason may be, the history of the cookie, while having it's part, doesn't seem nearly as important to me as the simplicity, and truth in quiet moments, that the cookie itself represents to the wild and harsh world that accidentally created it.

"Sometimes, when we lose ourselves in fear and despair, in routine and constancy, in hopelessness and tragedy, we can thank God for Bavarian sugar cookies."
- Karen Eiffel, "Stranger Than Fiction" (2006)

A-ha! This is for you... If you get it, you get it, if not... oh well.