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 beer while watching a black and white movie out of his peripheral vision meant to me.  When I think about it on the surface, I want the cookie back. As I write this I know what I want to see and have is him making them for me, stacking them in the tins, so much more than I care to duplicate his recipe.

I would even take him if it meant Ringtumdiddy every day, but we would still have to negotiate the Scrapple.

I won't get that, of course, so we make do. My sister is a great chef and a better-than-average baker too, who is studying food traditions as an academic and understands probably even more deeply than I do how important and ingrained they are. I can hold my own in certain kitchen quarters and can kind of fake his whiskey sour. My father doesn't cook often but when he does it's with the same attention to detail and generally delicious results. Just months after my grandmother died, our family vacationed together this summer - my grandparents' four sons, their wives, my generation of seven grandchildren and assorted significant others and now three great-grandchildren that he would be totally thrilled to meet. Most nights we made dinner in some collective fashion, which regardless of what goes on the table is the key that week. One day my godson, his youngest grandson, went up and made sandwiches and brought them down to us on the beach. He was born just months after my grandfather died and had no idea that this was his daily beach routine for years, and my heart exploded to the point that I didn't try to explain.

When we're together talking and eating, my grandparents come up a lot. More often than not there are Ringtumdiddy jokes, which I would detail but they would not be at all funny. Not only would you have to be there, you'd have to be us.  Chances are you have your "you" with its own jokes that would go right over my head too.

I might try the cookies again, someday, when I'm settled, although my sister has them covered and I can invite myself over to "help" when the December baking days roll around. She is also engaged to a man who makes me a peanut butter mocha cake from scratch for my birthday because he is nice and comes from an Italian family who bake together, so I might do just as well to focus on the whiskey sours. My mom has the barbecue and stuffed pepper recipes he actually did write down, splattered with ancient sauce stains, which are probably better for me given my greater talent for main dishes and adjustable spice situations. And thanks to Google, I might even try to see if Ringtumdiddy tastes as bad as I remember it smelled. Maybe.

Angela writes:

The soup did not taste like my dad’s.  It certainly did not taste like my Nonnie’s, which is the soup of all soups, and I almost don’t want to precisely recreate that one, because I feel about it almost the way I feel about the ocean (yeah, it IS that good).  It didn’t even taste the way I wanted it to (which was mildly irritating since for most of the afternoon, it smelled exactly the way I wanted it to taste).  Next time I will throw in a little more of this and maybe a little less of that, and leave it simmering a little longer.  But what matters to me today is that I want to do it again.  I didn’t get it exactly right, and that’s okay.  It’s actually kind of exciting.  It means that I couldn’t write it down for you, and I would have to, just as my dad has driven me mad for years by doing, walk someone through it, with instructions like “a little of” and “for a while,” and I would have to trust you to figure it out.

I miss him. I miss his cookies. I think he trusted me to figure it out, to try again until the dough doesn't explode. Somehow it all fits.

Other voices around the Web:

TW's read Love Song in a Foreign Language from Retro Food as part of the BlogHer 2009 community keynote this year and I think I was crying by the third paragraph although I wasn't sure why. Then she got here and I knew:

But listen to the tune…you know this love song. This is the dinner made for a mother with a newborn. This is the cake made to celebrate a son’s birthday…his favorite. These are the pork chops and potato pancakes counted on to bring a smile to her father-in-law’s face. These cookies sing holiday tunes with Mama in the kitchen with excited children. She tucks these memories away as she tucks the cookies in tins to give to her friends.

Here is video of her specifically, or you can scroll through the whole thing (which I strongly recommend.)

Lara Ferroni is a talented food photographer and writer who posted a wonderful entry at Cook and Eat about creating a family cookbook following the death of her stepmother. Family Recipe Central provides an electronic space to do this (and linked me to Lara, so thanks.)

Family and photography contributing editor Laurie White writes at LaurieWrites. She takes too many pictures of food, among other things.