Out of sheer laziness and a lack of desire to synthesize even a short wikipedia page about it, I believe that the word “cookie” is probably European in origin maybe and describes any relatively flat mixture of carbohydrates that is eaten by people and animals. As someone who passionately believes that as long as the most basic of constitutive elements are present, you can call any food item anything, what cookies are as defined by the experts means very little to me.
For example, what is the difference between jam and jelly? Maybe the difference matters for marketing purposes, but everyone knows that the true difference is that one cannot jelly one’s penis down someone’s throat.
This is important, obviously, (to me) because I have participated in very heated arguments about what it is that defines a cookie. Does a cookie have to be sweet? Contain butter? Be edible?! What is edible? What are tortillas? I hope to explore these questions and more in this blog post as I outline my special, personal relationship with cookies. Or not because most of this shit is stream-of-consciousness nonsense I write when I’m not hungry, which is almost never.
Cookies are a near and dear thing for me because like the holy grail or some strains of Buddhism, it matters not the goal that lies at the end, but the journey you make in getting blah blah blah. In my search to bake or find or extort the perfect cookie, I have consumed more oats and chocolate and butter and probably lots of bugs than is healthy.
My mom and I sometimes make cookies, but we usually leave that process up to the good folks at whatever company makes oreos and the momofuku milk bar on 13th street and 2nd ave. But knowing how much butter and sugar and parts of bugs probably go into cookies, we try and make our own, healthy versions but we have since conceded to the fact that butter and sugar are pretty fucking important.
We tried to make our own kind of radical cookie, which contains wheat germ, pudding, and a quarter of the butter the recipe calls for. Then we sat around in the kitchen eating the dried buffalo turd-shaped abominations that came out of the oven and talked about politics or why Americans are fat. My mother has many theories about both and sometimes they combine in interesting ways.
“I heard 33% of Americans are obese! What about when the next war happens with China? Have you ever shot at a fat person? So easy!”
I had this conversation over break. Apart from thinking that war with China is inevitable, my mom used to tease the fat kid at her school and throw stuff at him (like rocks). The kids called him “fatso” which sounds hilarious in Korean (Ttung-Ttung). I like to imagine the kids made “you’re so fat…” jokes like “ur so fat that the next geopolitical crisis in Northeast Asia will concern territorial claims over you” but they were probably too hungry to form such large sentences.
While this teasing may have been a product of some form of deeply rooted socio-economic angst (if you were fat, you were probably not toiling in the fields) it’s still pretty horrible. Also hilarious. As my mom likes to say, morality is ambiguous in the developing world. Lol mom.
Anyway, she also likes to complain about how much butter goes into everything. She screamed when I put a whole stick of softened butter into the mashed potatoes I made for thanksgiving and told everyone at the table to avoid them. So cookies are something we generally avoid making together because the politics of butter in my family borders on the fanatical.
I have since searched elsewhere for cookies and the Lord hath provided (mostly at ADPhi and Music Department events). I like M&M cookies because studies show that rainbows make things taste like they are heterogeneous when it’s actually all the same shitty gelatinous sugar matrix (I’m looking at you, Skittles). I also like the concept of garbage cookies, or cookies made of random crap, loosely held together by butter and sugar. Of course, the nature of butter and sugar makes it so that you could probably throw real garbage in there and it’ll probably taste passable as long as you don’t burn it.
But my favorite kind is the kind you eat when there’s nothing else to eat except in that tin you got for Christmas four months ago and it’s 3AM. You are studying for a final so you go to town on the motherfuckers while getting crumbs all over your keyboard. THE BEST! Really, it’s the worst, but that moment where you find that tin hidden underneath your unwashed unmentionables is true magic, like goddamn Christmas or plate tectonics.
So returning to the question I posed earlier, what is a cookie? Also, what makes a good cookie? Science is inconclusive, so let’s leave it alone. If someone ever tells you that they have the answer, he/she is a false Messiah so throw rocks at it.
Do you want the recipe for the worst cookies my mom and I ever made?
Wheat Germ (The rest of the bag you bought 70% off at the health foods/Chinese medicine store)
Splenda (Because sweetener-induced cancer is still preferable to obesity)
Butter (a quarter of what you would usually use. Eyeball this amount)
Vanilla Pudding Mix (How long as that been under the sink?)
1 teaspoon of Kosher salt
Mix the butter and splenda together or something. Add the dry ingredients and mix as long as it takes for the main character on Dae Jang Gum, the wildly popular Korean serial drama, to sort out the morally ambiguous dilemma facing her in this particular episode, and then spoon out in turd-sized chunks onto a baking sheet that you forgot to grease. Put it in the oven at a high heat and then take it out and tell your dad that the reason the house smells so bad is because you were playing with fire over the sink. Eat two or so with your mom and throw the rest out.
I’m sure vegan cookie recipes exist out there, but in our defense, we had bought a shitload of wheatgerm before realizing it actually tastes like the dirt you scrape off of a root vegetable so we were trying to get rid of it. And I was too lazy to connect to the internet and my mom doesn’t know how.
Anyways, the point is that they were still fucking cookies.
