Thoughts from a Thinking Girl

The quarter sheet of paper, torn edges and now slightly gray, hosts a recipe written in the small and deliberate cursive of my first adult self. Five ingredients, simple directions. The paper doesn’t identify the source of the recipe. Nor does it disclose that I’ve made the cookies maybe three or four times total, since 1981, when I dated the college sophomore whose mother made these, his favorite cookies. I have kept his mother’s recipe, but I no longer have the slip of paper declaring that if either of us were still single in the year 2000, we’d meet up and pledge our lives to one another. It was in my wallet for a long time.
 

I don’t know why I was compelled to make the cookies recently. They were in my thoughts for several weeks, and given that to my son, potato chips and sour cream are the ultimate treat, better than brownies, chocolate cake and even candy, I thought it was time I introduced them to him. The cookies were, by the way, outstanding. Just as I’d remembered. A friend asked what I thought the potato chips added to what is otherwise a fairly obvious shortbread recipe. More oil and more salt, is all I can imagine, as ground up potatoes wouldn’t do much. Whatever it is, there must be an unlisted ingredient that transforms potato chips into an addictive substance; I secretly wonder if they’re dusted with crack. Lays, the commercial used to say. You can’t eat just one.

Nor can you eat just one of these deceptively light cookies. They ought to be classified as a controlled substance, and I hate to imagine what the little Keebler elves look like after a binge, crunchy cookie after crunchy cookie hitting their elfin heads with a salty/sweet two-by-four, comatose except for the effort to lick powdered sugar from their elfin fingers.

I was curious what would come up with an internet search of potato chip cookies. The very first listing was a Martha Stewart recipe that fancied up and expanded the ingredient list into something that would be a bit more, well, Martha Stewart. Toasted and chopped pecans, brown and white sugar. Come on. This is supposed to be a simple recipe, one made lovingly by a Midwestern Mom for her son, probably something she learned from her own mother or someone else who put the entry into the Lutheran church ladies’ cookbook. The second recipe was from Paula Deen, the exact ingredient list only doubled (no surprise) and cooked longer at a lower temperature. I’ll have to try lowering the temperature – maybe they’d come out a little less crumbly and easily broken.

Now that Paula Deen has been booted off the Food Network for a scandal even greater than the cooking-to-induce-Type-II-diabetes-while-being-paid-by-diabetes-pharmaceutical-companies scandal, it’s hard to want to cook anything from her kitchen. Even though she was the only person I’d ever seen take the meat off a chicken with her fingers so completely that the bones were left bare and dry; a skill set I bring to roasted birds whenever no one is looking. Perhaps Martha Stewart had to update the recipe in an attempt to distance herself from the disgraced Deen, protecting Stewart’s own fine upstanding history from further tarnish.

Back in 1981, a dorm room care package sent from a Midwestern kitchen delivered these little treats. I liked this guy, thought he was handsome, was intrigued by his vanity for knit sweaters and Jordache jeans, his perfectly combed espresso brown hair (although in those days no one drank espresso, so it was just considered dark brown), his contagious sense of self-confidence that might have matched how great his ass looked in the jeans, but whose virulent case of acne should have rendered him insecure and filled with self-loathing. Instead, he was a well-loved son of a good Christian woman who loved him and baked him his favorite cookies, filled him with a sense of love that transcended his skin condition. This was long before the hip and trendy “bacne” was coined, and dating a guy with back acne meant certain acts of love, which I won’t describe here. Mostly what I remember is that this guy’s mother loved him enough to bake him cookies with even more than the usual amount of oil at a time when people thought acne was caused by oil. She must have known something the rest of didn’t, and wouldn’t, for at least another decade.

Now there’s faith. And membership in a family that has its own honor roll web page listing ancestors who have served their country. This is a family that is proud of its members, the fathers and the sons, the wives and mothers who help from behind the scenes. Duty, loyalty, honor – and a great-looking ass in Jordache jeans. This was a good boyfriend, even though we were a bit too young for each other and failed to weather the storm of expected/unexpected events that would have taken us off our own individual trajectories.

Once I went with my boyfriend to meet his parents, have Sunday supper, and attend church services with them. The sermon that day was, unfortunately, about the death of Christ at the hands of the Jews, and I felt a touch conspicuous remaining in the pew when everyone else filed forward for communion, let alone remaining seated each of the three times everyone around me kneeled.

My discomfort at St. John’s Evangelical Lutheran Church was matched only by the pork chop, mashed potatoes and green beans Mrs. C. served for Sunday supper. With a tall glass of cold milk. Only later, with the cynicism I’ve acquired over time, did I begin to wonder if the menu items were planned, as it just as easily could have been roast beef or tuna casserole. But it might have also been a honey-glazed ham, or a pork loin roast. That anyone present at their table wouldn’t partake of their Sunday bounty was simply an unthinkable thought. My boyfriend felt bad and guilty, and wanted to ask his Mom if she could make something else for me to eat. I stopped him. It was too much to ask of a woman who sent cookie care packages to her son at college.

I ate the pork chop and washed it down with the cold milk. The taste and texture of the pork chop never registered in my mind; to this day, I have no idea what a pork chop tastes like. I was paralyzed with the pork-with-milk combo, paralyzed by the hypocrisy of my paralysis, since I’d grown up with milk at every meal just like every other family in my Midwestern suburb.

Hypocrisy squared. When I was very young, my mother cooked several of those pineapple-ringed/maraschino cherry-dotted hams. We even had bacon. I imagine the only reason she didn’t cook pork chops is that she didn’t know how to cook them, had never been in the kitchen with a woman who made them, couldn’t flip to a page of her congregation’s cook book to find a little something interesting to do with pork chops. But she did know how to assemble big, satisfying weekend deli sandwiches, roast beef, sliced turkey, or sliced ham, slathered with mayonnaise on a Kaiser roll. All of which we ate at home, around the kitchen table, washing it down with the ubiquitous glass of 2%.

Hypocrisy is underrated. It is the stuff of all good memories, all good family lore, perhaps all good religion. Sometime later, my parents became more consistent, and they removed bacon and ham from the food line up. They kept Hamburger and Tuna Helper, veal breast and lamb chops and brisket, and recently have attempted the food-chain-defying turducken. My Dad sneaks bacon at restaurants, but only if my Mom isn’t with him. My husband longs for spare ribs, and cooks bacon whenever I’m away on trips.

And thus we live with hypocrisy. Potato chip cookies – the name itself suggests a bridging of two worlds that don’t really need to be bridged. Although chocolate cake and French fries, my dessert of choice when I studied abroad, made perfect sense. But if anyone had dared to make chocolate French fry cake, I’d have to leave the table.

I’m grateful to Mrs. C and the long line of Lutheran women who assembled and passed down cherished recipes. I’m grateful to have been welcomed into her home and at her table. I was not her usual guest. Yet she was the kind of woman to love her son sufficiently to bake and send cookies, so she was the kind of woman to greet his poorly-suited college girlfriend with graciousness. The pastor didn’t know I was coming, so I can’t really blame him for the sermon, which he’d prepared without ever guessing someone other than his usual congregants would be in the audience. I’m grateful to that relationship and that boyfriend, although he was the last man I have ever been with who wore designer jeans.

I raise a crumbly, sweet, powdery sugar potato chip cookie in a toast – to long-ago loves and long-ago treats. Which are now on my family’s request list. Who knows – my son may end up with potato chip cookies in his college care packages.