What is not a cookie?

Some people may dissent, but I think cookies have to be shaped before baking, have to be sweet, and almost always have to be made of cookie dough. That leaves a lot of uncookies. I claim that the following are NOT cookies:

• Strudel, biscotti, komish bread, mandelbrot, and other similar things are baked from dough on baking sheets but formed in larger-than-serving-size units before baking and cookiefied only afterwards.
  
• I think the definition of shortbread is open -- it may be made in a perforated sheet and broken up after baking. But commercial shortbread like Walkers appears to be formed, then baked. Maybe yes, maybe no.
  
• Brownies, blondies, and other bars are made from batter (not dough), baked in deeper baking pans, and cut into shape after baking. Bars are not cookies.
  
• Cup cakes and petit fours are baked from batter in small cups or pans. Not cookies.
  
• Technically, Snackwells devils food squares are like petit fours, but everyone thinks they are cookies, so I guess that makes them cookies.
  
• Tiny tartes or tartlets are made from dough but are then baked in little tins. Not cookies.
  
• Doughnuts are fried not baked. AND not cookie dough. So not cookies!
  
• Biscuits, croissants, brioches, bread rolls, dumplings, twinkies, ho-hos, and other pastries are not made from cookie dough. Totally not cookies.
  
• Candy is made from sugar syrup, marzipan, nougat, chocolate or other non-cookie dough materials, though candy sometimes resembles cookies in size, shape, and flavorings.

Candy-like substances may sometimes be used to augment actual cookies made from cookie dough. You could, I suppose, go too far with that. But I guess the Mallomar is still a cookie.


Cookie vs. candy classification may be challenged by something like those sticky balls of nuts, cocoa, graham cracker crumbs, and bourbon or rum that some people make around the Holidays. They probably are not cookies even when edible.

• 
  
• No matter what you do with fruit cake you cannot make it into a cookie.
• Crackers are almost always savory or salty rather than sweet. More important: a cracker is often used as a platform for bits of cheese, meat, veggies, or spreads. Cookies are not used that way. A graham cracker is sweet but is eaten with cream cheese, peanut butter, or jam, so it’s not a cookie. No way.
  
• Melba toast, chips, pringles, goldfish, and so forth are not cookies. Obviously.

For an intolerably complete definition of what cookes ARE, see yesterday's post.

What is a cookie?

You probably think you know a cookie when you see one. You know when something is a cracker, a brownie, etc. But did you ever try to define it? Don't ask me why, but I tried. Here's what I came up with:

• A cookie’s dominant flavor is always sweet.

• A cookie’s size is somewhere between one bite and one portion:

A cookie should not exceed a single portion. Super-sized cookies are often too big for one portion, but people eat them all at once anyway. Or share them. This may be a passing fad.

Some manufacturers sell abnormally small versions of well-known cookies like vanilla wafers or oreos. Whatever.

• A cookie is made from cookie dough:

Cookie dough basic ingredients include flour or finely-ground nuts, sugar, leavening, sometimes egg, and sometimes butter, oil or other fat.

Special ingredients like oatmeal, peanut butter, fruit bits, nuts, liqueurs, chocolate chips, ginger, or vanilla allow for a huge variety of cookies. You know their names.

Cookies may have something like cinnamon-sugar, jam, or even a whole Hershey’s kiss added to the top or inside before baking. Think fig newtons, jam tots.

Macaroons and meringues are not exactly made from dough but are sometimes classified as cookies because they fit the rest of the definition.

Cookie dough generally holds its shape during baking, though the cookies may rise or expand.

• Cookies are formed:

By rolling and cutting with a cookie cutter or a knife,

By dropping lumps of batter and optionally flattening them, or

By making a roll, chilling it, and making slices.

Shortbread may be an exception.


You know any other way? Oh yes, by extruding from a cookie press.


• Cookies are baked in batches on a flat baking sheet.

• After baking, a cookie may be iced, glazed, sugared, embellished with candy-like substances, otherwise decorated, or sandwiched with another cookie, but no size or shape changes to the cookie-as-baked are tolerated.

• When served, a cookie is intended to be eaten as is – except if you are of the school that permits dunking, you boor.

Coming tomorrow: what is not a cookie?

Fall at the Farmer's Market

Another chicken that I ordered from Ernst Farm was ready for pick-up at the market this morning. A few farmers still have tomatoes, lettuce, cucumbers, and other summer produce -- I think they must have plastic or glass covers for these crops. Root vegetables, apples, cider pumpkins, squash, and cabbage are still plentiful. I bought my favorite treat: maple sugar candy.

An Old Guide to Paris

"Liberty, Equality, Gastronomy: Paris via a 19th-Century Guide" by Tony Perrottet describes a walk through Paris in search of restaurants and food shops of 200 years ago. His subject, Alexandre-Balthazar-Laurent Grimod de la Reynière, wrote a series of guides called the Almanachs des Gourmands during the Napoleanic era. Grimod wrote of "delicatessens, pâtissiers and chocolatiers — including the first reviews of an alluring new institution called le restaurant." A slide show features an image (right) that has a chance of depicting Grimod along with several mouth-watering images of Perrottet's dining experiences.

Perrottet's article describes his recent week-long stay in Paris. He visited the Palais Royale -- back then, a gourmet hangout, now, not so much. He ate some meals in historic restaurants, and he searched for the former locations of no-longer existing food establishments.

Who was Grimod? His guidebooks, which appeared in 1805 and 1810, have never been translated into English, so he's little known to American foodies -- Perrottet explains:

Grimod wrote his guides at a pivotal culinary moment, when Paris was flush with money from Napoleon’s imperial conquests and establishing itself as the gourmet capital of Europe. Filled with celebrity chefs like Marie-Antoine Carême, who served in the royal kitchens of Alexander I of Russia and the future George IV of England and other notables while also writing several classic cookbooks, it was also incubating the new culture of the restaurant, named for the soups called “restaurants” (restoratives) that were initially the new dining places’ staple. Unlike the old inns and taverns where food of variable quality was laid out in a family-style buffet, restaurants offered patrons private tables and the chance to choose fine meals individually prepared. They became tourist attractions in themselves, vying with one another in their opulent décor and presenting Parisians with dozens of fresh and exciting dishes printed on menus the size of newspapers.

I was captivated by this article, which combines historic detail with enjoyable details of a modern visit to Paris. I haven't been there recently -- this makes me want to get back there. And while Grimod, as noted, doesn't figure in much popular food and travel writing, I've definitely heard of his books in reading more serious histories.

The article, available online, will be in next Sunday's New York Times travel section.

It used to be a big deal

We really kind of took the release of the new wine from Beaujolais as an event years ago. It was fun. The year we were actually in Paris, the wine stores had nice promotional posters taped up in the windows. “Le Beaujolais nouveau est arrivé!” they read. In the US, some wine came by air and you could get it right away and the rest came slowly by ship weeks later. (They've fixed that, I think, by putting it all on ships but making the sellers hold it back until the magic release date.)

Now it's just another wine. OK, it goes with turkey, so it's nice that it gets to the US just before Thanksgiving. But the other Beaujolais wines also go with turkey. They are more complex and interesting to drink -- and they aren't any more expensive, either. Wine snobs and wine ignoramuses have banded together to make it a non-event. The latter in fact seem to think that a "nouveau" is a variety of wine, not just a very young one. Even Wikipedia has a big article where you can learn the legend.

So here I am, a curmugeonly blogger on an obscure hobby horse about how things were better in the past. I'll get over it. And I did buy a couple of bottles to have over the weekend. We'll do something better to go with the turkey -- and blog that too.

AND an update on how some people maintain the big-dealness of it:

If there’s an art to balancing a plate of hors d’oeuvres, a fat glass of wine, a cell phone and shaking your bootie all at the same time, the guests at last night’s Francophone Fest had it down pat. Fueled on the just-uncorked harvest of this year’s Beaujolais Nouveau and driving, multi-ethnic beats from all over the French-speaking world, party goers worked up a glow (chic speak for “sweating like a cochon”) on the Roosevelt Hotel’s Blossom Ballroom floor as they danced the night away en français. [see Francophone Fest: Shakin’ it at the Roosevelt]

Road Food, 1934

I just read The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain. (See Back to California Fiction on my travel blog for a report). Much of the action takes place in the Twin Oaks Tavern, "a roadside sandwich joint, like a million others in California." The narrator, Frank Chambers, a drifter, begins his story when he stops there after being thrown off a hay truck where he was stealing a ride. On the very first page, Frank orders breakfast from the Greek owner: "orange juice, corn flakes, fried eggs and bacon, enchilada, flapjacks, and coffee."

The enchilada almost immediately becomes an issue highlighting the ethnic tension that characterizes Cora, the owner's wife, who is central to the story. Immediately upon meeting her, Frank implies that cooking an enchilada means she's Mexican. She forcefully insists on her pure-white Iowa background.

Interesting California breakfast, 1934.

Vegetable Soup with Szechuan Pepper

When I ate a spoonful of soup with a couple of the Szechuan peppercorns in it, and chewed them a bit, they did taste like black pepper but not hot. And my tongue and roof of my mouth did feel slightly numb for the next couple of bites (but not like novacaine.) The soup -- with some home made chicken broth from the freezer, a little soy sauce, bok choy, celery, dried mushrooms, red bell pepper, and green onion -- was very nice.

And now for something completely different

I'm immersed in my Chinese cookbooks (most of them antiquated!) looking for what to do with the dried mushrooms, Szechuan peppercorns, and baby bok choy from yesterday's expedition. I'm still enjoying the memory of the aromas and odors of the Chinese grocery store -- appealing spices, fresh vegetable stand smells, somewhat dubious meaty and fishy odors, even illegally tobacco smoke.

For variety, I also looked at the food section of the Guardian online and found that maybe P.G.Wodehouse was inventing authors for them. The article's headline:

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's teatime treats recipes
If you're tired of British teatime, you're tired of life – especially if crumpets, muffins, pikelets or farls are on the menu

"A Bitter Feast"

The author of A Bitter Feast, S.J.Rozan, spoke at the Jewish Book Festival this week about her latest book. I asked if any of her books had a food theme, and she recommended A Bitter Feast, starring her detective Lydia Chin, American-born daughter of Chinese immigrants.

Chin, a private investigator in her native China Town in New York, begins with a case involving attempts to unionize workers in a palace-like Chinese restaurant, the Dragon Garden. As the plot becomes more and more complicated, Chin eats elegant Chinese food, American deli food, home-cooked meals made by her mother, and appropriate tea snacks supplied by the various shady community figures that she interviews. She also shops for food to help her mother, who is aging.

For a while, Chin disguises herself as an immigrant and works as a Dim Sum Lady pushing carts of food around the Dragon Garden. She describes the preparations: "the chefs' assistants loaded us up with dumpling-filled bamboo steamers and plates of turnip cakes and upside-down glass bowls holding mounds of eight-treasure rice." (p. 123)

For the final scene, she plans to entrap the man suspected of various crimes. He agrees to meet her at another restaurant, so she arranges a six-course Chinese banquet, starting with a cold platter and ending with fried bananas (p. 270) The day of the banquet, the restaurant owner assures her that he's obtained the freshest of sea bass. Before Chin and her quarry get to taste any of it, an unexpected ambush and shootout bring the investigation to a close.

Finally, having solved her case, she accepts an invitation from her investigator-partner Bill Smith: he cooks her an American meal. The last sentences of the book: "The tomato-glazed meat loaf filled the room with savory scents. Bill began tossing the salad with a dark dressing full of herbs, and I started to look forward to dinner." (p. 308)

A very foodie book indeed. Beginning to read it this morning helped propel me to the Asian market where I shopped this afternoon -- see Reading about Chinese food makes me want some and Chop Suey and Chinese History. Rozan's new book also sounded very interesting, and I plan to read it eventually.

Reading about Chinese food makes me want some

So I went to the Asian market a few miles towards Ypsilanti, and guessed what I'd like to cook. I bought some baby bok choy, some scallions and peppers, some Sezchuan peppercorns (whose flavor intrigues me, I don't know that I've ever had it) and a number of packages of frozen dumplings and steamed buns. At left you can see just part of the full aisle of dried mushrooms -- the variety is amazing.

The last image shows my choices once I got them home. I have some recipe searching to do!

Chop Suey and Chinese History

"On a frigid morning in February 1784, the Empress of China set sail from New York harbor." So begins Chop Suey: A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States by Andrew Coe. Although the title stresses Chinese food as the book's subject matter, this becomes the dominant theme only in the second half of the book.

The first half of Chop Suey gives a fascinating account of the interaction between the US and China during the early years of our country, beginning with the commercial voyage of the ship Empress of China. After a six-month trip, the ship reached the Pearl River and sailed past Chinese villages to the city of Guangzhou, also known as Canton. Thus began trade relations between representatives of the brand-new country (still goverened by the Articles of Confederation) and the world's oldest (governed by an Emperor who never gave audiences to foreigners).

Coe continues by documenting both American adventures in China (mainly by merchants and missionaries) and Chinese immigrant experiences in the ever-expanding USA and its western territories. Chinese labor contributed to gold mining, silver mining, railroad building, and many other activities in the West, and then Chinese joined the stream of immigrants coming into New York and other cities of the East and the Midwest. All kinds of prejudice, bigotry, and sometimes outright violence victimized Chinese workers and businessmen.

American fears of the foreign elements of Chinese culture often were expressed as conviction that Chinese people ate horrifying foods: rats, frogs, mice, cats, dogs and so on. Despite all the fears, some Americans began to try the food available in Chinatowns and Chinese neighborhoods. After the fascinating account of the early days of Chinese-American interaction, Coe gets to the point: Chop Suey was a type of Chinese dish that Americans began to try in the middle years of the nineteenth century; it became popular with Americans, and also became somewhat Americanized to please the less adventurous among them. It was frequently mentioned (with varying spelling) in stories about Chinese restaurants of the era -- for example, Coe cites a story in the Boston Daily Globe from 1891 calling one restaurant's "chop sui" very palatable.

KEY POINT: The later impression Chop Suey it was invented in American restaurants or by Americanized chefs for the visit of a particular Chinese diplomat named Li Hongzhang in 1896 is no more than an urban legend! The idea that chop suey was either completely not Chinese or that it was based on a "beggars' hash" made from odds and ends was part of what Coe calls the "chop suey hoax."

The popularity of chop suey lasted a long time, and made its way into American home cooking with canned and instant ingredients from La Choy company and other agribusiness sources. Coe traces the rise of more varied Chinese restaurants with wider roots in the many cuisines of China. The book is rich with a variety of information on both Chinese and American food history, as well as other history -- notably a detailed account of Nixon's trip to China and how Chinese state banquets played a role in the historic reconciliation of America and China.

Just as I felt when I read my favorite Chinese food book -- The Fortune Cookie Chronicles by Jennifer 8 Lee -- I feel as if I'd really like some Chinese food. Especially duck!

Miriam's Great Invention

My Kitchen Right Now

Chutney needs time to rest to acquire its best flavor. So right now I am making cranberry chutney for Thanksgiving dinner. I didn't follow the recipe 100%, but it has all the usual flavors: cranberries (of course), citrus, cider vinegar, spices, and dried fruit -- golden raisins and apricots. As I'm writing, it's starting to turn a beautiful deep wine red and to get nice and thick as it simmers.

For recipe see Chutney Recipes.

Jewish Cookbooks

The annual Jewish Book Festival is going on this week; around 100 Jewish Community Centers across the country host them. I'm disappointed that at our local one this year no food author is presenting. However, there's a big table of food books, new ones and classics.

Interestingly, there are no non-cooking food books, such as histories of food, studies of ethnic foodways etc. Two possiblities: there's no market for them. Or the suppliers of the books don't know about them.

I bought a mystery by one of the authors who spoke. It wasn't her newest book, but she said it was the foodiest. (I volunteered to drive her to the airport to continue her round of book festival appearances, so I asked her about food in her books). I will report on the book as soon as I read it.

Tapas in Barcelona

My friend Olga sent me this beautiful picture of what she was eating.

What's wrong with the Food Network?

My thoughts on the Food Network have never been so perfectly summarized as in this piece on how to make "Sardine Rarebit."

Influence

Continuing to think about the innovative ideas of President Obama, I read this article in today's New York Times food section: A White House Chef Who Wears Two Hats By Rachel L. Swarns. The cook, Sam Kass, who mainly makes family dinners for the Obamas also plays a role in developing child nutrition programs. In the past, he's been the executive chef at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum in Chicago "where he offered up free soup, encouraged food-related debate and sharply criticized the modern agricultural system."

So he's both a hands-on cook and an activist! From the article:

Mr. Kass, 29, forged a close bond with the Obamas while cooking for them and their children for about two years before they moved to Washington and has golfed with the president on Martha’s Vineyard. Behind the scenes, he attends briefings on child nutrition and health, has vetted nonprofits as potential partners for White House food initiatives and regularly peppers senior staff about policy matters.

Sam Kass appears regularly in the blog ObamaFoodorama.

Authenticity

In Dreams from My Father Obama wrote a fascinating and masterful account of his search for identity. As I read, I found myself thinking what a miracle it is that such a man could really be our president. I don't know how I failed to read this for so long.

In the final section of the book, Obama gave a long description of his first visit to his African family in Kenya. He uses quotes from various relatives to provide insight into his personal discoveries about family, colonialism, and many other issues. One quote from Rukia, a woman who had been a friend of his late father, discusses authenticity. Rukia, a historian, uses food -- a meal of tilapia fish stew and ugali cornbread -- to explore this topic. He wrote:

I asked her why she thought black Americans were prone to disappointment when they visited Africa. She shook her head and smiled. 'Because they come here looking for the authentic,' she said. 'That is bound to disappoint a person. Look at this meal we are eating. Many people will tell you that the Luo [her and Obama's tribe] are a fish-eating people. But that was not true for all Luo. Only those who lived by the lake. And even for those Luo it was not always true. Before they settled around the lake, they were pastoralists, like the Masai. Now, if you and your sister behave yourself and eat a proper share of this food, I will offer you tea. Kenyans are very boastful about the quality of their tea, you notice. But of course we got this habit from the English. Our ancestors did not drink such a thing. Then there's the spices we used to cook this fish. They originally came from India, or Indonesia. So even in this simple meal, you will find it very difficult to be authentic -- although the meal is certainly African.

Rukia rolled a ball of ugali in her hand and dipped it into her stew. 'You can hardly blame black Americans, of course, for wanting an unblemished past.... They're not unique in this desire. (p 433)

Obama Cookies

I'm reading Dreams from My Father and thinking about Obama. So this amused me.

The Fish Market

Today I stopped at the fish market in Kerrytown, where I had eaten lunch at the notorious (?) Community High hang-out, the Kosmo Deli. Since I've been reading Kurlansky's Cod, I was interested to see that the market offers salt cod -- also called Bacalao. This item that was once the cheapest and least desireable seafood now costs more than most high-quality fresh fish -- $19.95 per pound. To think that they once fed it to the most maltreated people I have ever read about: the slaves on the Caribbean sugar plantations. I have never tried any of the various dishes that can be made from salt cod.

At the market, I bought two flounders, which I believe came from the waters off Maine. (I think the flounder filets, nearby in the fish case, were from the Georgian Banks, once source of seemingly inexhaustible cod schools. Now the cod are nearly extinct, according to the book.) For dinner I baked them in a white-sauce based on white wine, flavored with fines herbs and lemon, and garnished with a bit of cheese on top. Very delicate.