Rogue Recipes

I never intended to post a cookie recipe. Making cookies and pastries, cakes and pies have never held a fascination for me. However, when you read this blog entry you will understand why I wrote, tested and will publish a cookie recipe.

This very funny note was sent to me by one of my readers and I want to share it with you.
He called it Rogue recipes! Here is his story.

Our family went on a bit of a cookie binge last weekend, starting with several rounds of oatmeal raisins that my mother baked. I was set to have dinner with my friend Albert on Sunday night, so I decided to finish the weekend with chocolate chips, which are his favorite.


Cookies are hardly brain surgery. But as my mother always puts it, baking is an “exact science,” so I always rely on recipes when the time comes for pastries. For the chocolate chip recipe, I turned to Irma Rombauer’s old reliable Joy of Cooking, the Encyclopedia Americana of culinary craft. My mother received it at her bridal shower in 1987; its pages are wavy from steam and spotted with over twenty years of sauces; it has, as far as I can remember, never misled us. And chocolate chip cookies are hard to mess up, no matter who’s making them.

The recipe from the 1986 printing calls for half a cup of butter (a whole stick). To put this in perspective, the amount of flour required is one cup plus two tablespoons. Not having my mother’s culinary savvy or intimacy with ingredients, I followed it without a trace of skepticism. I might have listened to my mother. She stepped in just once as I was starting, to comment that the proportion of butter to other ingredients seemed high. But who was she to argue with Irma Rombauer? I took another stick of butter out of the refrigerator and pointed at the measurement markings on the wrapper — we were going to the dictionary on this one. She put on her reading glasses and laughed, saying that she had mistaken half a stick for half a cup when following the oatmeal raisin recipe. Another of her kitchen “accidents.” She makes a lot of them, yet her meals are always more delicious than any recipe promises. I’ve often wondered if “instincts” might be a better label for them. I might have considered this, of course. I might have put my stubbornness aside long enough, even, to remember that her cookies had come out perfectly sweet and fluffy.

So I sent her away and went on mixing the batter, which became more delicious with every step. Cookie batter is, as far as I’m concerned, in the same class of sublime pleasures as massages and Caribbean beaches — if it weren’t for the raw eggs, I might never bother with the oven. I didn’t doubt Irma Rombauer one bit, that is, until I started rolling the batter into balls. It was unusually sticky — mushy, even. Even as I coated the little spheres with flour, they refused to hold their shape, which is always a bad sign for something that’s on its way into the oven. But I checked myself, told myself I was being fussy, told myself I was letting my mother get to me, again. I arranged them carefully and dotingly on the sheet, the way I used to write cursive in elementary school — respecting the margins, leaving plenty of space between each word/cookie — checked the oven temperature, slid them in, and set a timer for five minutes. The recipe says ten, but I am a neurotic baker (you should have seen me when I took on crème brûlée, poking my head in front of the oven every two minutes, like a prairie dog).

I checked after three minutes. No cause for alarm — the batter was glistening, spreading out a little more quickly than I expected, leaving the chocolate chips in the center, but, eh, whatever. I left them alone and shuffled about the kitchen some more, starting the cleanup, making sure the cooling rack was set. The timer went off; I checked again. Now they were utterly slick with butter and dipping ominously low. Two had run together — so much for my careful arrangement. I narrowed my eyes and looked for even just a hint of golden brown on the bottom that would justify taking them out prematurely, but they showed none, and I decided to be patient. Still, though, I didn’t take my eyes off them. After another two minutes, golden brown appeared. I put on my oven mitt, and all at once a series of tiny bubbles broke out over their surfaces. Here I lost my patience and practically yanked the sheet out in my haste. Their color was all right, but they were dismally flat — certainly not the perky little hills of oatmeal raisin that my mother had produced. I set a timer to let them cool and solidify for a couple of minutes, before I’d transfer them to the rack, and left the kitchen.

When I came back, what I saw on the sheet looked less like cookies than like volcanic rock. They had dried to an ugly dark brown, scarred by bubbles and bumpy with ripples all the way to their edges — I was reminded of what Hawaiian lava looks like when it dries. Disgusted, I grabbed a plastic spatula, scraped them off the sheet, and laid them on the rack. Fortunately, my mother had gone out — hers was the last commentary I needed to hear just then.

As I scooped them onto a plate to take to Albert’s apartment, I ate one. To say I chewed it wouldn’t be quite right — it was more of a gnawing, smacking motion, the kind you perform when you have to dislodge a Milk Dud from your molars. As a consolation prize, the flavor was just fine.

Fortunately, Albert’s oven-roasted turkey came out beautifully, but we agreed with a sardonic laugh that the cookies should be sent back to hell. Perhaps because they were tasty, or perhaps out of pity, Albert kept the rest of the batch we didn’t eat. When I see him tonight, I will ask him frankly which was the real reason.

I was really bummed by my butter snafu, but butter is one of those things, like a puppy, that one simply can’t stay mad at. I saw Julie & Julia earlier this year, and one of the parts I found really charming and dead-on true was the “Is there anything better than butter?” monologue. I mean, who didn’t identify with that? What I should have remembered as I baked those cookies was that brief but delightful scene with Frances Sternhagen as Irma Rombauer, cautioning Julia Child about the treacherous territory of cookbook publishing. One of the things she mentioned was that, under pressure to produce such an encyclopedic cookbook, she didn’t bother to test every recipe.