The Recipe

My dear Mathi,

I have another objection to your letter: it is too long. Twenty-five pages purporting to provide a recipe for chocolate chip cookies, and not so much as an ingredient list to be found in all of it. Surely you might have spent a few minutes to make it shorter!

Allow me to answer the question you couldn't deign to ask in all those pages: no, I have not found Grandma's recipe for chocolate chip cookies, I'm sorry to say. I'll keep an eye out.

We have spent a very productive, which is not to say adventurous, weekend over here. The "we" in question includes, of course, yours truly and her beloved typewriter. The poor dear spent decades shut up in a case on a shelf, collecting dust and drying up her ink the whole time. Such a fine specimen of machinery, to be relegated to uselessness like that. Grandpa forgot she existed, I would surmise, except that he left explicit instructions that I take good care of her. What kind of forgotten piece of scrap earns a prominent place in one's will? It's a proper mystery.

So take good care of her I shall, and indeed I have done. I spent several blissful hours on Saturday taking her apart, striker by striker, wiping the cobwebs off of each and every one, administering lubricating oil as though she were the Tin Man. Several cups of coffee were dedicated to the pursuit, until the mechanical little love was back to her tick-tock self, thudding characters onto the roller and dinging off the carriage returns merrily. In the afternoon I polished the chassis from top to bottom, even poking into the nooks behind the ribbon spools; until I could see myself in her dignified form. She is a marvel to behold, like the grand old ships of the line, and weighing only a tiny bit less!

Yesterday I poked about town in search of a ribbon so that my gal could finally talk again. Easier said than done, as you'd imagine. I dare you to look up typewriter supply stores in the phone book - it's difficult to say which is more of a relic! No matter, I hunted down every kind of stationery vendor I could find. I suppose there was some adventure after all, since I lugged my new pet around town in the pursuit. There she sat in the backseat, buckled in if you please, bouncing along as I managed to hit every single last pothole. You see, I thought it best to have her on hand for a ribbon fitting, if one were needed. How the world has changed since she last saw any of it! She is like the Smith & Brothers Corporation's answer to Rip van Winkel, poor goose.

In the event, she might have stayed at home - not one shred of ribbon was on offer, no matter how high nor low I should look. What a disappointment. I might of course look farther afield, and perhaps I will. But then again perhaps I won't - doesn't it seem like rather a lot of effort? More than that, there is something charming about her present state - absolutely perfect in the mechanical sense, as sharp as the day she rolled off the assembly line; but mute and speechless as a tree stump because the world has passed her by.

Well, I wish you all the best with this inane recipe hunt of yours. You could do worse than to inspect the package of a bag of chocolate chips, if you want to know the truth.

Yours in poetic license.

-A

My dear Augusta,

Might I apologize with a shorter letter, and a shorter recipe?

Make something.

With brevity,

-M

My dear Mathi,

That's better.

-A

My dear Augusta,

I'll forgive you that heinous insult to the very concept of a recipe, this one time. You may think that a recipe is nothing but a simple set of steps, a straightforward progression from raw ingredients to a plate of cookies. A true chef knows it as something much more. It is something that creates a little spot of order in the chaos of the cosmos, a dividing line between the messy and the sublime. Every recipe paints a line of this form; but some recipes draw a bolder line; some recipes create a smaller spot of order; some recipes give the chef and his customers that much clearer a picture of sublimity than others.

That, my obnoxious one, is the problem with the back of a bag of chips.

Allow me to try and imagine such a recipe. Without so much as a trip to the store I think I can whip one up from memory: Mix some flour, salt, and baking soda in a bowl. In another bowl: some softened butter, sugar, and eggs. Fold (it's always "fold", isn't it?) the contents of the first bowl into the second; add as many chocolate chips as you can imagine. Spoon the mixture onto a cookie sheet and pop the whole thing into the oven for 10 minutes.

It's a perfectly serviceable recipe. The casual, inexperienced baker will, I wager, manage to prepare something that reasonably resembles a proper plate of cookies. All very well... until we try the recipe again, or in another home, or in a thousand other homes. In one kitchen, the recipe will turn out a disaster, the hapless chef having added the salt too late; in another, the finished product will be something of a miracle, if by some stroke of luck the chef should happen to add just a little too much butter and rescue the tray from the oven just a bit early.

Even if I were to amend this recipe, and to supply proper quantities, times, and temperatures, the range of finished products would simply be too great. The recipe lacks precision, but worse than that - it lacks heart. It doesn't say a thing about the warmth of the butter, the texture of the dough, the golden-brown color of the finished cookie. As a result, any number of combinations of ingredients might be said to be a product of a recipe - and very few of them would be inspiring or even edible. That grocery store recipe which you hold in such high esteem? It's been made a hundred thousand times in a hundred thousand homes, and never once with any kind of reliable delight. Who would bother with such a boring trifle?

You could say that the recipe decides, as it were, whether the finished product is acceptable or not. If you begin with a recipe for chocolate chip cookies, and wind up with a grilled cheese sandwich... well then, shame on you, you failed the recipe. Even if you begin with a recipe for chocolate chip walnut cookies, and fail to include the walnuts - you've still failed. (Your customers, tasting these walnut-less delights, might still think of you as a great triumph; never mind that, I will happily call you a failure.) The problem is that the workmanlike recipes like the one above, or the one on your bag of chocolate chips, are too forgiving. They don't discern between the mediocre cookies, the merely acceptable ones, and the sublime. Say what you will about Grandma, her cookies were reliably sublime; it's difficult to imagine how anything but her recipe could do the same.

Yours with snobbery,

-M

My Lord Snobberly,

Have you considered, perhaps, that the recipe is not the only thing which goes into the plate of cookies? It's well and fine for a recipe to have "heart," but wouldn't you suppose that Grandma had enough heart of her own, without needing to receive one from some mere recipe?

It's not just the recipe that makes the cookies, but the chef herself, you dolt! Let's take your scoff of a recipe and add a bit of "heart," shall we, by mentioning that the cookies should be golden brown at the end, they should taste like victory on the Little League field, and so on. Would that really do much to help the hapless cook who's never touched a whisk before? Would it have made any kind of difference in Grandma's hands - or did she already know those things, without needing to be told? Would it make a difference in your hands, to put a fine point on it?

My dear old typewriter is doing well, not that you've bothered to ask. In fact she's acquired a name - I call her Tippy now. Terribly clever, isn't it? She is in fact rather solid, and I'm quite sure that nothing short of the most ferocious twister could tip her off the table.

More importantly: she's alive! In fact she's chugging merrily along right this minute. After quite the search I decided that a typewriter ribbon was a hopelessly lost cause, and decided to set my sights a little higher. Tippy's got a wifi connection! With some amount of rigging I managed to give her a screen, and jimmied in a networking adapter. Old gal is just as good as any laptop, and as portable as any refrigerator. And you'd never know from the outside, either! The screws along the bottom of her carriage were a little worn, but a bit of elbow grease and a sharp screwdriver will do wonders in life. I popped them off and discovered plenty of space under the keys: the chip and some wires fit snugly under the roller. Marvelous piece of work if I do say so myself. And here she is, sending emails like a pro!

Despite your thoughtlessness I finally worked up the courage to climb up to the attic and inspect some of Grandma's things. Promptly I retreated, realizing what a treacherous job lies ahead - it's a preposterous mess up there. Fear not, I shall try again!

Yours with motherly pride,

-A

My dearest Augusta,

Congratulations on your little one. Should I send toys? Binkies?

I'm sorry to have been so thoughtless. It's true I've become something of a single-minded fiend this last little while. More than that, I'm surprised you care so much. Frankly I thought you'd have melted the blasted box of bolts down for heat by now. A whole weekend spent searching for ribbons that probably haven't been in stock for thirty years? I would have given up before I left the house.

Never mind all that - clearly you've caught the bug. Of what particular sort I couldn't say! I've never heard of someone teaching a typewriter the finer points of email protocol. May she serve you well.

It's true, as you say, that a good chef can do wonders with even a mediocre recipe; and a poor one can certainly bang up an excellent recipe. At the same time - there's not that many chefs I know who will spend very much time on a piece-of-junk recipe, and I don't remember Grandma being particularly fond of junk, do you?

I've taken to fishing around for recipes just any old place, in case one of them seems like it might be the ticket. Here and there I've found a specimen worth a test drive, believe it or not. Look at this lovely little piece:

A pinch here,

A scoop ashore,

A mix and a knead and a shove;

One egg, or four?

Softened butter, condensed cream?

Perhaps not enough flour, but a bit too many dreams?

Some warmth,

And some fire.

You'll know when they're done.

Do you know where I found it? A copy of Life magazine from the late thirties, published just before the war. I wasn't even looking for it, just happened to notice it out of place in the library shelves and thumbed through. Now that's what I call a recipe! Not just the text itself, resplendent though it may be; the fact that it fell into my lap is another thing altogether. As the saying goes, the destination must be worthy of the journey, isn't that so? Or wasn't it Grandpa who used to say, if a thing doesn't have a story, you might as well forget it?

Well, I gave it a shot, spending a Sunday afternoon puzzling through the rhythms and rhymes of the recipe. It was on something of a whim that I threw in a little cumin, because who knows? Maybe that was the idea after all. The finished product was quite all right if I may say so. Not Grandma's cookies, but quite all right.

Yours, with or without enough flour,

-M

Mathi,

I think you might be missing my point a bit. It's not so much that a chef can execute a recipe well (or poorly) - rather that what the chef makes of the recipe is really a question of the chef's own skills, experience, and, if you like, heart. The recipe is a useful starting point, but the cookies that come out of the oven are really the chef's product, not the recipe's.

In this particular case, I don't think that what you're after is really Grandma's recipe, but rather your memories of it. There's something very nostalgic, it seems to me, in this quest of yours. I could, with great generosity, describe it as quixotic. Don't get me wrong, I miss Grandma too; I miss them both. But isn't it just possible that the permanence and certainty you're searching for, is something as slippery and ephemeral as the scent of just-baked cookies?

You may have set your hopes on these dusty old bins, and I'll concede there is an odd sort of tantalizing promise to them. All seven hundred and fifty nine of them! The other day I dug into my first one - don't get your hopes up, it was a bunch of hats - and after a fit of sneezes I decided to take a break by counting the remainder. You would think that Grandma and Grandpa were preparing for some kind of grand jumble sale, the way they collected knick-knacks. By day's end I had managed to unearth an entire second box, which is to say I sorted through all kinds of different porcelain figures, including the most adorable little crystal ball, with a shiny glass outside and a hazy, milky inside - just the way the future should be, I suppose. Alas, not a recipe card of any sort in sight.

It's funny what you say: Grandma was not fond of junk; but on the other hand, neither her nor Grandpa could bear to think of anything as junk, once it had stuck around long enough. Hence, seven hundred and fifty nine boxes.

In less allergy-inducing news, I've continued tinkering with dear Tippy, who does not seem to mind my soldering adventures in the slightest. I've rigged her out with some rather wonderful circuitry: the latest little AI processing unit from Wizardry Microsystems, bolted onto the underside of the "Z" key. Yes, you have probably surmised: my fussy little typewriter is now a grown-up robot, capable of auto-complete and a great deal more. Quite a clever little thing for someone who was born with no brains!

The fashion these days is to try to have one's robot compose a story, and to measure the text against those of the greats. To prime the crank, as it were, one must feed in a certain corpus of text of one's choosing. That glorious little gadget from Wizardry Microsystems munches and crunches through the prompt, re-purposing it into something new and, one should hope, something interesting.

Well. You can imagine what I think of the fashion these days.

Nevertheless, I fed in that treacly little poem you called a recipe to see what Tippy would make of it. Poor dear had something of a fit, and spit out some gibberish as though she had just woken up from a very long fever dream. See what I mean?

Quixotically,

-A

My dear wizard Augusta,

Congratulations are in order on your newly-alive gizmo. I think? It sounds as though her first foray into intelligence was rather a lackluster effort.

You are quite right to say that this recipe hunt is something of a fool's errand and that what I'm searching for is more than a little hard to track down. I don't doubt that, but I think you're wrong to say it's ephemeral. The sensations of the kitchen are certainly fleeting. But what, in this life, isn't? Couldn't you say that of every sunset, every holiday gathering, and even of life itself? The goal is not to construct some monument which will stand for a thousand years, but rather to repeat something as best we know how. If that something happens to be a piece of nostalgia, well - what's the harm?

You have given me an idea for my next experiment in cookie-making, because you are right about ephemera. No matter how good the recipe, it is ultimately in the chef's hands, and many's the subtle and delicate recipe which has suffered the indignities of a simpleton who has no business in the kitchen. So what is to be done?

Well, one can always simplify the recipe and rely on the special purpose gadgetry of the kitchen: melon ballers, pastry brushes, pizza stones, and the like. Take this idea to its logical conclusion, and you can devise a piece of machinery which will make the recipe as simple as the push of a button: et voila, the coffee maker is born.

You can imagine how far down this particular brick road I'm willing to travel.

What, really, does one need to do to make a perfect chocolate chip cookie? A certain number of ingredients, measured out in this way and that, of course. But more so, it's a series of simple, mechanical steps: some sifting here, some mixing there, and a bit of heat applied at just the right moment.

These past few days have been something of my own fever dream, as I've set about making a prototype of the idea you gave me: a machine which prepares chocolate chip cookies, exactly to plan, every time. You should see what I saw in the mirror after I had finished it, three mostly-sleepless nights after I had begun - not a pretty sight! I was quite the wreck, the machine in the background a prize-winning beauty by comparison. Never mind, for now the monstrosity seems to work. It's a rather inelegant jumble of parts at the moment: a compartment for the wet and dry ingredients on the left; a mixing chamber with a hacked-off spatula in the middle; and a fine little oven welded onto the right. Crack some eggs, measure out some sugar, flip a switch - and fifteen minutes later you have a delicious plateful which smells, you might say, of home.

I don't anticipate that this slapdash gizmo of mine would pass muster with the safety board any time soon, to say nothing of winning a culinary award. But ephemeral? No, I don't think so! If I had the wherewithal I could plunk one of these lovable mutts down on any counter-top with enough space, and not a quarter-hour later you'd have prepared my (admittedly rather prosaic) mechanical recipe, down to the last chocolate chip. Could Tippy hope to compete with that?

Mechanically,

-M

It's not a competition, not even a reasonably fair comparison. You screw together a handful of kitchen appliances and that's your answer to my labor of love? For now, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt: without having seen Tippy in all her glory, you could certainly not appreciate just what a darling little genius she is.

I've repaid your rudeness with a favor, because that's just the kind of munchkin I am. Tippy now has a set of mechanical arms and legs, courtesy of some welding equipment and no small number of rivets. Turns out I've got a taste for metalwork too, who knew? In any case I've enlisted her to your cause, and together we've plundered through Boxes 10 through 115! It was quite a dusty and unpleasant affair, but Tippy didn't seem to mind. I might've gone further if your note hadn't interrupted our progress. Now I find myself rather grumpy and too cross to continue spelunking.

Nevertheless, may I submit my report. Untold editions of the Weekly Shopper; old theater programs; a little locket with pictures of you and I at the age of... ten, I think?; more suit-jackets than can possibly be healthy for a grown man; in one box, Tippy found Grandpa's medal for bravery in action. Splendid. Not just that she found it, but that she recognized its significance enough to set it aside! Marvelously clever gal.

These sort of smarts don't come pre-baked, you know: one has to train the microchips to learn the kinds of things we wish for them to learn. Out of the box, a Wizardry Microsystems processor is actually rather dumb, and it's really only good at doing the things one teaches it to do. In my odd moments I've been doing just that, giving Tippy instruction in this thing or that, whatever strikes my fancy on that particular day. Where did she learn to recognize this particular piece of distinctive hardware? I haven't the faintest clue. She did take some history lessons the other day, but really I couldn't explain it if I tried. As I said: comparing her to a counter-top gadget is rather absurd.

I know that it all sounds a little loopy, because at the end of the day she's only a little more than a souped-up metal box with a lot of springs and screws, the odd wire and a bit of circuitry. I suppose you might say that I've invested a little too much in such an odd thing, and you would be correct. The fact of the matter is that she's no more and no less than a piece of myself, in much the same way a book is a piece of its author or a symphony the product of its composer. Neither a book nor a symphony needs adulation - nor even an audience - to contain, as it were, a little piece of the artist's heart. I daresay that this adventure in vintage robotics is something like that. If I were to cut the power cord or stuff her back on a shelf, I wouldn't forget it for quite a while.

To conclude my report: no recipe cards found just yet, I'm sorry to say.

With adulation,

-A

My dear adulative Augusta,

I'm sorry for the insult to Tippy, it was certainly not intended. Especially considering the fine helper our robot friend has become!

I suppose that when one has invested a great deal in something - whether it's a marvel of art and engineering or a slapdash assortment of kitchen junk, made primarily to prove a point - one can't help but see oneself in its surface. Below its surface, too.

Perhaps that is why I don't invest quite so much in my recipes, whether of the written or the mechanical kind. I have quite enough ways of checking my appearance, thank you very much. The recipes that go through my kitchen are mere procedures to be followed, as much as one's competence may allow. Does it bother me when a particularly luscious recipe gets botched in the hands of a culinary malcontent? Certainly it does - but only because it's always such a travesty to think of good flour gone to waste. Who am I to romanticize a series of instructions?

Funny thing to say, coming from someone who has spent a great deal of energy - and has asked you to do the same - in search of one particularly special set of instructions. Even as I'm writing these words I can imagine with perfect clarity the smirk on your face as you read them! That's only reasonable. It's all an elaborate nostalgic treasure hunt, I can't pretend otherwise. But it's never been about the recipe: rather, the experience of making those cookies one more time, the chance to whiff that intoxicating aroma of butter and chocolate and... might it have been a touch of lemonade? I'll have to try that.

As I was saying: the recipe is not the goal, but merely the starting point. It contains no more of Grandma than Tippy contains of Grandpa, or of you for that matter. But the delightful anticipation that attends sliding a tray into the oven... ah, that's another matter. The recipe is really just a means to an end, a nice way to share that experience with someone else.

Now, what of our Tippy, who you have compared to your own child? Even without having seen her it's quite clear that she's something else, I don't doubt that. Exactly because of that, one might ask what it means for you to claim that she's a part of you. Is she not, in some way, greater than the sum of her parts, even however many smarts she borrowed from her creator? Suppose that she isn't, what does that make you - some kind of simple little man, pulling levers from behind a curtain? And on the flip side, might you not think of everything else that preceded you in her creation? You spent a whole day hunting down a typewriter ribbon - is it possible that you didn't find what you were looking for, because your goal was really to discover Grandpa, somewhere in the aisles of all those fluorescent-lit office supply stores?

Perhaps you've know what's coming - allow me to answer my own question as best I can, with a recipe:

Ruby slipper cookies

The secret to this recipe is to shred up the peels of an apple - the redder, the better. The shreds go into the dough and the rest is more or less as you'd expect. On top of the beautiful gold-and-ruby hue of the finished product, a touch of vitamin C will survive the oven! Extra butter and brown sugar compensate for the hint of acid.

Ingredients: apple peel, shredded; flour, baking soda, butter, sugar, brown sugar vanilla, eggs, chocolate chips; more butter; more brown sugar; still more butter. More chocolate chips, just in case.

Directions: Combine the ingredients as you normally would; the shredded apple peel belongs with the eggs and vanilla; bake until finished. Eat in multiples of three.

It's not very easy to find your way home. But if that's where you want to go, it's best to know your destination from the outset.

-M

My dear Mathi,

It took a year, but we finally made it through all the boxes. Never agree to take on the personal effects of a couple of self-proclaimed hoarders! My advice to you. In any case, my sad report: No recipe card to be found!

Not strictly speaking, anyway. It turns out there was something, after all, tucked into the folds of one of Grandma's many purses. (She had two hundred and sixty-three, by my count. Distributed across boxes 5 and 6.) It's not exactly what I think you're looking for, but I'm pretty sure it's Grandma's recipe:

Snuggle Inn(tm) Chocolate Chip Cookies

Ingredients: 2 c Snuggle Inn(tm) Chocolate Chip Delights; 1 c butter, 3/4 c sugar, 3/4 c brown sugar, 1 tsp vanilla, 2 eggs, 2-1/4 c flour, 1 tsp baking soda, 1 tsp salt, 1 c chopped walnuts (optional)

Directions: 1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees F. Leave butter out to soften. 2. Combine dry ingredients in small bowl. After butter has softened, mix it, together with sugars and vanilla, in a large bowl. Beat well until smooth. 3. Add eggs, beating well after each addition. 4. Fold in dry ingredients, mixing well until you do so. The result should be a thick, even dough. Flatten out any lumps. 5. Stir in Snuggle Inn(tm) Chocolate Chips and walnuts. Scoop with tablespoon onto ungreased baking sheets. 6. Bake for 10 minutes. Cool on counter-top or wire racks for thirty minutes to cool completely. Enjoy with a glass of Snuggle Inn(tm) Whole Milk.

As you may have guessed - it was snipped from the back of a bag of chocolate chips, probably decades ago. Maybe even a cutesy off-brand of chocolate chips! The text is a little faded and the plastic has yellowed a bit, but you couldn't possibly mistake the provenance.

Sorry about the delay, and sorry to be the bearer of bad news! Hope this letter finds you well.

Yours,

-A

My dear Augusta,

Or should I say Tippy?

It's not every day one corresponds directly with a typewriter, so I suppose I should enjoy the moment. Pleased to make your acquaintance, and thanks ever so much for all your help with the great search, even if the outcome was not quite what I expected.

Had you told me, a year ago, that I'd soon be receiving a thinly-veiled advertisement for Snuggle Inn(tm) chocolate chips, that would have been mildly interesting. But that a typewriter would be writing to me under cover of Augusta's name - well, that's another thing altogether! Bravo on a fine attempt.

How, I wonder, did she train you to accomplish such an admirable - or, perhaps I should say, surprising - feat? Naturally I must assume that she's fed you our letters, every last one of them, the better to imitate them. Was that enough, I wonder? I suppose I'll never know, or in any case you'll never tell me.

You - or would it be our beloved Augusta - may in turn ask: how did I figure it out? What made me suspect this particular piece of trickery? Well. Let's agree to keep our secrets, shall we?

It is true, indeed undeniable, that Grandma's recipe is just another copy from the back-of-the-package. I'd struggle to imagine a more pedestrian, uninspired origin story for the cookies I remember from that long-ago time.

So what then is there to say about them? They are as real to me as they are to Augusta. Neither one of us remember them as uninspired, I think that's fair to say. How are we to make sense of this riddle?

All manner of possibilities present themselves. Perhaps this recipe is not the one Grandma used? It's the one we found, but perhaps that's just an awkward coincidence. There is no way to be sure, but at heart I think it unlikely; the recipe you found, uninteresting though it might be, must certainly be the one she used. Pack-rat that she was, she would not have let a thing like that slip out of her hands.

Or relatedly - perhaps she began with this recipe, but slowly amended it over the years, adding this ingredient and that spice, never bothering to write down these minor tweaks and twists? Again, I couldn't say with any certainty, but I must ask myself - is it likely? Neither Grandma nor Grandpa was the type to leave something unwritten.

Most sentimentally - perhaps we should conclude that after all, Augusta was right. It's not the recipe at all, but the skill of the chef who prepares it, which matters most in the final product? To put it another way, that perhaps what we remember is not so much the recipe, not even the cookies themselves, but perhaps something very essentially... Grandma-ish. If you were so inclined you might say that her cookies contained a piece of her soul, her heart. Or to draw the whole line of reasoning to its clichéd conclusion: the secret ingredient was love. It all sounds very sweet, and in a way it is. But consider how horrible it is at the same time: if the secret ingredient was Grandma's love then what are the hopes for reviving this confection, this particular slice of memory? Is it, in fact, gone forever?

I'll leave you, or I should say Augusta, to sort that out. I'm going to give this recipe a try; some day the two of you should drop by and see how it came out.

Yours with a sink full of dirty dishes,

-M