Today, I woke up thinking about shortbread.
Yesterday, my Dad and I went to go and pick up burritos for dinner (neither of us went inside, of course, but I felt like going along for the ride to get out of the house on a rainy day). While we were gone SOMEONE (it was the dog) ate half a banana loaf cake I was particularly proud of. I think my father was especially heartbroken as he was looking forward to a slice for dessert. Gizmo, poor lad, spent the better part of the evening with the hiccups from so much bread.
So today, I endeavored to bring new sweets into the house and could not stop thinking about the long, rectangular shortbread cookies my Mom used to buy and eat with a cup of tea. I thought she was very fancy for doing so, when I just wanted to gobble them all up completely.
There are lots of cookbooks in my childhood home. There is a copy of Betty Crocker’s Ultimate Cookie Book, several incarnations of The New York Times Cook Book, and Better Homes‘ cook books through the ages (one even has a recipe my grandmother snipped from a newspaper on April 7th, 1959.) None of them seemed to contain what I was after – a simple starter recipe for shortbread cookies. There were a few for chocolate shortbread, or chocolate chip, but as a fairly rudimentary cook and generally awful baker, I want to start with the basics.
I ended up using a recipe online that I’m fairly happy with (this is it, but it only makes 16 cookies). Afterwards, I started going back through the books to find a stew recipe, as we have stew meat ready for dinner but I’ve never made a stew before. Now, I COULD leave it to the “professional”, but at this point my Dad has made most dinners while we’ve been locked down together. While he is an EXCELLENT chef, and I am more than happy to enjoy his work, if I have any hope of learning to cook the way he can, I’d better get started actually trying some things while I’m here under his watchful tutelage.
In The Original New York Times Cook Book by Craig Claiborne (originally published in 1961) I found several things bookmarked by my Dad – a recipe for Steak Diane which I’ve not had in almost a decade, and a recipe for Apple Crisp, one of his signature desserts. But there, folded up in the back of the book was a piece of paper from The New York Times Magazine, from December 13, 1992. The article, entitled “Sweet Dreams” was written by Molly O’Neill, who sadly passed away last summer after a long battle with cancer.
Reading about her reminded me of my mother, and of my own love of writing. In her obit, a former student tells us that Molly encouraged us to think of writing as something that must be practiced constantly – like any other skill. Sometimes, I forget. I do a certain amount of writing in my job, and I forget that creative writing requires my regular attention as well. The construction of a good story is not simple, nor can it be conjured when the magic does not wish to be summoned. It comes from somewhere else entirely, and if the muscle is not regularly flexed, how can we expect to catch it when it chooses to appear?
So today, I baked. And I practiced writing. And I turned my mother’s clipping over – O’Neill’s story about her own mother – to find a recipe for shortbread cookies.