My Favorite Racist Cookie

Here, take a cookie. I promise, by the time you're done eating it, you'll feel right as rain.

— The Oracle (The Matrix)





These cookies and I have a troubled relationship. They were one of the first things G asked me to make, but one of the cookies that took longest to get right. As they sit now, they rate a 9 on the official cookie rating scale, which I say with some pride. But we both agree, there's still work to be done.

Black and white cookies are one of those really regional things("pop":Midwest as having-eaten-a-black-and-white-cookie:New York), though I personally feel they get short shrift. I'd never even heard of them before we met. They're really fantastic though—I really don't understand why they're not more widely appreciated. (And no, some episode of Seinfeld doesn't count as national exposure.)

The recipe I use is one of the few I can really call my own. I've played with it a lot in an attempt to mimic the cookie of his childhood—or more likely the cookie that he's created in his imagination as the cookie of his childhood. My initial cookies were too thick, didn't have the right flavor, and lacked sufficient size. It wasn't until I saw a one in NYC for the first time that I understood quite how large these are expected to be. And one of the most important steps forward came when he admitted that he just doesn't like the white side very much, which led to the 60% black and 40% white cookie.

Of course, who are we kidding here? It's not black and white. More like brown and beige. But I guess the brown and beige cookie doesn't roll off the tongue quite the same way.





Black and White Cookies
1¼ cups all-purpose flour
½ teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon lemon juice plus enough milk to make 1/3 cup
½ teaspoon vanilla
1/3 cup (5 1/3 tablespoons) unsalted butter, softened
½ cup granulated sugar
1 large egg
3 cups confectioners' sugar, sifted
2 tablespoons light corn syrup, plus more if needed
2 ounces bittersweet chocolate, melted


Whisk together flour, baking soda, and salt in a bowl. Stir together milk and vanilla in a cup.

Beat together butter and sugar in a large bowl with an electric mixer until pale and fluffy, about 3 minutes, then add egg, beating until combined well. Mix in flour mixture and buttermilk mixture alternately in batches at low speed or by hand (scraping down side of bowl occasionally), beginning and ending with flour mixture. Mix until smooth and refrigerate at least 15 minutes. While waiting, preheat oven to 350°F.

Spoon batter onto a large, greased baking sheet. The cookies should be quite large—one recipe will make about six cookies. Using fingers, spread cookies until flat and circular. They do not need to be extremely thin, but will puff up a fair bit in the oven. Bake in middle of oven until tops are puffed and pale golden, and cookies spring back when touched, 15 to 17 minutes. Transfer with a metal spatula to a rack. When completely cool, place cookies in plastic bag and leave in the freezer until hard. Return cookies to rack, flat underside facing up.

Combine confectioners’ sugar, corn syrup, and enough hot water until you have a thick paste. In a small saucepan over low heat, whisk until smooth and fairly thin. Working quickly, ice the flat underside of a bit less than half of each cookie (it will be necessary to continually adjust heat and liquid content). Return cookies to rack to drip, placing paper towels beneath to catch any drips. Combine chocolate (as well as any needed water or corn syrup) with remaining icing ingredients to make a thicker chocolate mixture and cover remaining part of each cookie.

Makes 6 large cookies.

The Official Cookie Rating Scale

G is a demanding cookie customer.


To be honest, G likes cookies in a way that I don't really understand. Before I met him, I always thought of cookies as just sort of being nice. Not great. Not terrible. Just nice. The wallflowers of desserts, if you will. There's not enough to a cookie, even a really big cookie, to pack the right punch for me. I have no time for nibbling. Cookies, almost by definition, are made for nibblers.

G sees the world of cookies very differently.

Pie, my favorite dessert, is apparently "gross". Cake is okay—sometimes great, but often just so-so (or worse). Bars and squares? Meh. Ice cream is a take-it-or-leave-it kind of affair, except on really hot days. About the only point we can agree on is that chocolate is fantastic. But cookies... cookies are just a step above.

I've made a lot of cookies over the course of our relationship, and at this point consider myself somewhat of an expert in his favorites. I've made more black and white cookies than I'd care to count. At some point, no doubt, I'll post the recipe.

In fact, I've made so many cookies that we've finally come up with an official cookie rating scale. The standards are high. Despite many, many batches of chocolate chip cookies, they still only rate a 6.5 out of 10. (10, by the way, is defined as the rainbow cookie [also known as a tri-color cookie], which is not so much a cookie as a thin layer cake disguised as one. It's also a hell of a lot of work.)

So when I say that a cookie made it to 6 on the official cookie rating scale, that statement isn't made lightly. This cookie, the newest addition to the official cookie rating scale, comes to you care of Milk and Cookies. It's a sable cookie with chocolate ganache, and was a hit with everyone who tried it. The ganache is too dark for G, but the high sugar content of the cookie itself balanced things out nicely.





I altered the recipe slightly, but it's pretty simple to begin with and delicious either way. Recommended to be taken with milk, once daily. Or more often if prescribed by physician.


Sable Cookies with Chocolate Ganache
225 grams plain all-purpose flour
25 grams cornstarch
200 grams butter, diced and at room temperature
100 grams confectioner’s (icing) sugar
2 egg yolks
Pinch of salt

100 ml (¼ cup plus 2 tablespoons plus 2 teaspoons) pure cream
100 grams bittersweet chocolate

Sifter or sieve
Medium mixing bowl
Plastic wrap
Parchment paper
Baking sheet
Rolling pin
Cookie cutters
Saucepan
Spatula


Sift together flour and cornstarch. Make a well in the center of the flour mixture and add the butter and sugar. Work together with your fingertips until no hard lumps remain. Add the egg yolks and salt, drawing in the flour. Work until the dough resembles coarse breadcrumbs. Do not overwork the dough. Roll the pastry into a log and refrigerate for two hours.

Preheat oven to 320°F. Prepare a baking sheet lined with parchment paper.

Remove dough from fridge and carefully roll out to a thickness of about 6mm. Cut out desired shapes using a cookie cutter. Place on lined baking tray and bake for 10-12 minutes, or until just golden on the edges. Transfer cookies to a wire rack and cool completely before spreading ganache.

In a saucepan, heat the cream until just before boiling. Pour cream over chocolate in a separate bowl; let stand for 1 minute allowing the heat of the cream to slowly melt the chocolate.

Using a spatula, mix cream and chocolate to make a smooth, glossy mixture. Place somewhere to cool, uncovered, at room temperature. Transfer to refrigerator to slightly set.

Spread ganache over the backside of a cookie, then place another on top to sandwich the ganache between. Return to the refrigerator to set.


Makes about 25 cookies.

The Un-Diet

G has been on a diet of late. He thinks he has a gut. He's 5'10" and 165 pounds. Say it ain't so!

I have no objections, really, though it means I have to search a little farther afield to find willing consumers of my desserts. Not a problem. It makes life more interesting, and it's a great way to make friends.



Okay, fine. I'm painfully shy and probably wouldn't make friends if you paid me. But it would be a great way to make friends if I were someone else.



That having been said, he seems to have hit diet-tolerance-saturation.

"I'm hungry," he says.
Well, says I, what would you like?

He wants to know what would be fun for me to make. Ha ha ha. Diet food is not generally too much 'fun' to make, as far as chef-me is concerned.

Cookies, say I.
The eyes go wide. "Cookies?"
"I'm kidding."
"No, seriously. Cookies?"
"Um..."





Thus it came to be that I made chocolate chip cookies, fudgies, and
brownie peanut butter cups all in one evening. Ah, the bliss.

The brownie peanut butter cups didn't really bake up the way I anticipated. They were still bubbling through the crust long after the advertised baking time was over (which they maybe shouldn't have been doing at all). So although a toothpick inserted in the center would have come out wet, the top was no so much "set" as resembling a Yosemite boiling mud pot. It was nearly impossible to get them out of the muffin tins—I assume as a result of their oddly volcanic baking activity. It wasn't much to look at, but it was pretty tasty.

Cookie Refuge

Hair curled just so, red lipstick flawlessly applied and blotted. The smiling, unrecognizable face belongs to a woman in a Spring Green Kitty Foyle, collar carefully starched and pressed to perfection, skirt largely hidden behind a floral apron. The woman holds one hand on her hip, the other held up as if to balance an invisible tray. To her left, a new and overly-white range—both stove and oven—gleams with an impossible shine. "General Electric Speedster Range, for cool electric cooking. Talk about speed! One giant surface unit gets red hot in 20 seconds..."


My mother has spent her life hiding from this. She has never actually seen the advertisement (nine square inches in the lower left-hand corner of page 81, purchased by General Electric for the May 1959 issue of Good Housekeeping), but it does not matter. She knows that this, or something like this, is there. And she hides from it. Not in a way that can be pinpointed in moments, so that someone could watch how the chin meets the chest, to render her person somehow smaller and less obtrusive. This is a more gentle, constant bowing of the head—in passage from room to room, in transition from hour to hour. Nothing overt to those who are not watching. Simply a quiet sense of humiliation, tagging along behind her.

By the time I was born, hiding from such shame had become more concretely an escape—a liberation—from pots and pans. There was rebellion in the purchased or microwaved. As if it might allow her to sidestep whole worlds of ideas. Oppression and prejudice and expectation and years of struggle. Rejecting homemade as a path to rejecting marrying early and to staying away from mathematics and perhaps even schoolchildren proclaiming worthlessness. "Fatty Patty Four-Eyes".

We ate separately, quickly, often dumbly. Distracting ourselves from what might be missing in front of the television, staring and silent.


More the type to mold than to rebel, I too took on a combative stance. Or I tried. But too often I tripped over the wanted-but-unwanted. Beautiful and loving and lovable. It would be so easy to have just a taste of that, however it might constrict me. But then... Don't be like that.

It was years before I allowed myself to seriously contemplate the apron. I cooked infrequently, and told myself I didn't enjoy it. Over time, though, it became more confused. Convincing myself that it was unsafe and safe simultaneously: giving into what is easy—and wrong. Moving beyond the primitive association between self-worth and oven mitts. Or both.

* * *

So, then, here is my confession: I love to cook. I find it deeply satisfying. For many of the wrong reasons, and some of the right reasons. And even more than that, I love my mother's cooking. Sparse and imperfect, and I couldn't care less. I love it more. There is an immediate, absurdist attachment to contentment in the tastes and smells I associate with my childhood. Instant safety to be found in a chocolate chip cookie.

At Christmas, as an exception to the rule, my mother would almost always bake gingerbread. It's not a kind of gingerbread that I've seen anywhere else—harder than the cakes which often get the name gingerbread but softer than that which is typically used to make houses. And to me, it equates seamlessly with home.

Probably as a gift, my mother acquired a wonderful collection of gingerbread cookie cutters. One set to make houses and one for a sleigh pulled by a team of reindeer. In later years it was a tradition to invite friends over for a gingerbread house decorating party. Some years we made more than 30 houses. I don't think my mother had ever baked so much in her life.


I start with this not for any particularly profound reason, but simply because it's where I started. We'll see where I go.