When the first ingredients on the recipe you’re looking at are “one pound of butter” and “four egg yolks,” you know you’re venturing into seriously delicious eating territory. Cookies!
’Tis the season for wonderful homemade cookies, loaded with butter, eggs and sugar. Plus just enough flour to hold them together. I’m speaking here of Christmas cookies, but they could as easily be Hanukkah cookies or Fourth of July cookies or Happy Friday cookies. The date of the occasion doesn’t really matter, whether it’s Halloween or April Fool’s Day. The operative word is “cookies.” Cookies, cookies, cookies!
Sure, pies are good. Flaky pastry, delicious fillings, topped by vanilla ice cream or whipped cream – or both. Cakes with delicate, moist crumbs, stacked and held together with acres of scrumptious and often fanciful frosting, are equally delectable.
But cookies – humble cookies, too often overlooked in the dessert sweepstakes – are the real stars of holiday shows. And everyday meals.
Looking for a good night’s sleep after a tough day? A couple of bedtime cookies and a glass of milk – chocolate, if you really want to live it up – are just the solution. Like to indulge your sweet tooth in the middle of the afternoon? A cookie is a quick solution. Or maybe two cookies. Even three!
And if there’s one sure thing that’s in every kid’s lunch bag, it’s a cookie. I think it’s an immutable law of childhood. And, unlike carrot sticks, the cookie will definitely be eaten. Setting up a habit for the rest of the kid’s life.
Cookies are the ultimate portable comfort food. They could have been especially invented for more northern latitudes like ours, when winter rears its picturesque but icy head and we all need an occasional quick jolt of sweets to get through the day.
Not, mind you, that cookies themselves have calories. Or so I’ve been assured by my good friend Laura, who draws upon knowledge gleaned during her long career in hospitals to reach that conclusion. I mean, even if as a longtime personnel director she wasn’t – strictly speaking – involved in actual medicine per se, we all know that medical information just sort of seeps into the brain cells of those in proximity to the healing professions. Right?
I thought you’d agree.
And when times are tough and bad news comes along with depressing regularity, cookies – especially fancy Christmas cookies, red and green sprinkles and all – are balm for the soul.
Late getting home because you were caught in the slow traffic of holiday shoppers clogging up Loudon Road? No problem. Have a cookie! Ran over Freddy’s bike because he left it behind the car in the driveway? You deserve two cookies, at least. Missed the last Patriots game because the cable went out – again? Cookies all around!
And while we’re ordering cookies, let’s summon up a boatload or two of the delicate morsels for our country. It’s been a tough couple of years, at least for Americans who treasure things like decency, civility, and devotion for and adherence to our country’s laws and traditions.
Underscoring that was the death this last week of President George H.W. Bush. Not only was Bush President Ronald Reagan’s vice president and his one-term successor, he spent much of his adult life in public service. He enlisted in the Navy on his 18th birthday, six months after Pearl Harbor, and trained as a naval aviator. By the war’s end, he had flown 58 missions and survived being shot down once, when he spent four hours on an inflated raft awaiting rescue.
He went on after the war to marry his first love, Barbara Pierce, get a degree from Yale, and move his family to Texas, where he was a successful businessman and, eventually, a U.S. congressman, an ambassador and the director of the CIA.
His was an impressive life. It was interesting, and instructive, in this day and age, to be reminded of what a career in public service can be like, even if the glowing (and well-deserved) tributes, in the tradition of funeral orations everywhere, left out noting that the tall and soft-spoken patrician could also be – in the way of most politicians – a bare-knuckled brawler when he thought it necessary.
And it was distressing, at least to some of us, to watch the official funeral service on television and to see the camaraderie of our former presidents, the brotherhood they all easily and comfortably share, while our current president sat sullenly next to but so clearly not with them.
George H.W. Bush’s entire life stands as a total rebuke to, and a repudiation of, the man now occupying the White House, and it was painfully obvious to anyone who watched.
Alas, some things are beyond even the extraordinary power of cookies to make right. But at least we know they can comfort. Which is still a pretty good thing.
(“Monitor” columnist Katy Burns lives in Bow.)