77. Cookies

           

            American food is hard to define because there aren’t a lot of foods that are distinctly ours. And most of the foods that are distinctly ours have some origin in a European and American ingenuity that adapted something to our new land or something native to the land’s new people. I don’t know where the cookie actually came from but I do know that it is one of those foods that reinvents itself with every passing year and every returning holiday.

            I love cookies. In another life I must have been the cookie monster. I did not realize how American cookies are until I went and lived in England. There they have biscuits—hard little sweet crackers like our graham crackers or Oreos without the filling. When we made brownies for people they were confused about what they were. Was it fudge? Was it an undercooked biscuit? The neighborhood children fell in love with our chocolate chip cookies, but we were on a budget so first finding chocolate chips (only in specialty shops) and then buying them (small fortune) along with a terrible oven deterred us from making too many chocolate chip cookies. We did find “American Style” cookies at a bakery, but somehow the “style” lacked American flavor and we resigned ourselves to Chocolate Digestive biscuits (not a bad cookie substitute). At home we began our no-bake cookies pursuit, but I’ve always wondered if that wasn’t a cross between cookies and candy. And that pursuit was also for naught because corn syrup was impossible to find where we lived and Golden Syrup just seemed too sweet (who knew you could be sweeter than high fructose corn syrup?) so we delayed our pursuit of cookie happiness until we returned to the home of the free.

            So I’m certain that cookies—snickerdoodles, chocolate chip, oatmeal, peanut butter, etc.—are a clear representation of my American pursuit of happiness.