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My grandfather made the best chocolate chip cookies I've ever had. I am a cookie freak in a family of cookie freaks and they are my seminal cookie, the cookie to dominate all other undeserving cookies in the world. I can still see them stacked in careful waxed paper layers in the tins, perfect chip-to-dough ratio, just a bit harder than your average chocolate chip cookie, lovely and bumpy and exactly perfect mix of sugar and salt.
He also made one of the most horrible concoctions I have ever smelled and never ate, something he called Ringtumdiddy that involved cheese and tomato soup (and apparently a little bit of beer) that I could smell through the door to the point of dry heaves when I came home from school on the days that he made it. You know, just in case I give the impression that everything he made was awesome.
He left no specific recipe for either. I think he might have used the Tollhouse one on the back of the yellow chocolate chip bag, in fact, but I can tell you for sure that the times I've tried to duplicate it in years past have resulted in cookies that taste nothing at all like his. This could be because while I can cook fairly well, baking has always eluded me. I think that baking - and by that I mean baking well - is difficult. It requires specificity and attention to detail that I lack, and that my grandfather mastered. I can bake a pie and it tastes good but the apples turn out just a little too oozy. I could tell you the one about the exploding bread machine but just in case you have no IDEA how big dough can get, the answer is big, quickly, very big dough, exploding from machine. My brownies are decent but to borrow and slightly alter a catchphrase, even bad brownies are good brownies. Failed hunks of warm chocolate? Right, that's a problem.
We thought he invented Ringtumdiddy but Google tells me otherwise.
When I read Angela at Disnazzio's wonderful reflection on making soup that - while modeled after her father's and her grandmother's - became her own, I cried both because I am a sap who cries at things and also because I related on such a very specific level to several pieces of the story. One, I currently lack my own dedicated cooking space in which to even try to fail at baking, (long story) and two, there is something about the season changing solidly into fall that brings food and my family much more strongly into view. Fundamentally I am a warm weather creature and the SAD, it can get to me early, so the temperature dropping and the light changing send me diving for cover and for comfort. The accompanying drumbeat of the approaching holidays seals the deal. There will be Christmas cookies, for sure, but they will not be that cookie.
I can therefore take a page from Angela's cookbook and buck up:
And then I thought about my dad, how he started cooking food to feed a family when he was not much older than HALF as old as I am now; he was a boy. And how he, and my Nonnie, and his own Nonnie (my, uh… Nonnie Emeritus?) all, I know now the way you know these things as you grow into yourself and your family, have the same fears and anxieties and need for perfection that I do. But at some point, each one in turn lit the stove and hoped for the best. And so I did, with – seriously – a lump in my throat from the anxiety.
She writes about this soup as a rite of passage, a claiming of a space in the family line that, while not exactly like the food of the very loved people who came before, is hers and that alone means more than enough.
I can see that too. Our lives as we live them are not like those of our loved ones who in some cases, like mine, are no longer living. We have different ovens - and in the case of cookies, I believe that the oven is the thing, really - in different kitchens in entirely different worlds. Given the epic symbolism of food and and family and feeding to love far beyond survival, this text box will not hold what a shortish Navy veteran standing at a counter in clashing plaids mixing dough and drinking
