Chocolate Chip Cookies

Yes, this is a post inspired by the recent David Leite article in the New York Times.

I love chocolate chip cookies to distraction, and I like David Leite's site Leite's Culinaria (it's a great resource for recipes from newer cookbooks), so I was excited to try this recipe, though I'm always skeptical of articles touting perfection. Along with articles promising secrets or anything in list form, they're click-through gold, but it's pretty hard to live up to the claim.

I made the dough on Friday with the intention of bringing them to the Sommerfest at pub in the woods (The Tourist Club). Each time I opened the fridge during the two-day chilling process, I grew giddier.

On Sunday morning, I heated up the oven and got out my scale, ready to measure 3.5 oz portions out onto the cookie sheet. The scale ended up being vital because I would not have made the cookies that large without actually seeing the weight. The recipe very coyly says that the cookie dough balls should end up being the size of a golf ball, but 3 1/2 ounces is more like a small baseball. I pressed a bit of sea salt onto the top of each cookie before putting them in the oven.

The first batch came out with molten-dough middles, which was good except for the salmonella fear. I kept the next two batches in a few minutes longer (20 minutes as opposed to 18), and the results were better.

The verdict: They were good, but the best? No. They tasted like bakery chocolate chip cookies, or like...mall cookies. Rich, melting, well-engineered, surely, but not transcendent.

The empress of all cookies

In my very early childhood, my grandmother used to come out from New York with giant cardboard boxes full of food she'd made or brought to make. She'd get off the airplane with pounds of frozen lamb, with barrels of olives, and with these goraybe cookies.

I don't remember any of it, but my mom tells the story well, and the few memories I do have of this grandmother are all pleasantly mingled with an overwhelming sense--that reduction of scent and memory--of food.

I have seven different versions of this recipe, all hand-written, all from different great-aunts, second cousins, or grandmothers. The ingredients are all the same, but the batch size and ratios are different. At some point this summer, I'd like to compare the recipes.

Goraybe (also sometimes spelled Ghoraybe) has just three ingredients: butter, sugar, and flour. But the butter is clarified and the recipes call for both powdered and superfine sugars. The effect is incredible. The cookies are dense but delicate with a texture that falls into that space of perfection between the poles of soft and brittle. The nuttiness of the clarified butter (you brown the milk solids just enough to give the butter the flavor) balances the sweetness to produce what I think is a totally transcendent cookie experience.

These cookies are so good that, when I was sixteen, I crashed my car after a platter of them spilled on my passenger's seat and I tried to pick them up while driving. I learned an important lesson that day: Before driving, always put the cookies in a container that seals.

Cookies as a meal

On Sunday, I made chocolate chip/oatmeal/pecan cookies using Joel's great-grandmother's recipe. Since then, I've been trying to exercise restraint, and as a result, there are still probably a dozen left.

Growing up, we had no cookie jar in the house because cookies never, ever made it that far.

Cookies are one of the only things I can think of that bait the angel and devil to take a shoulder perch. But they reason through everything, so maybe they're not so much angel and devil as little lawyers. In tiny blue suits.

Angel/blue suit #1 argues that cookies are dessert and meant to be eaten in moderation, as dessert, after a meal. It also points out that breakfast dessert and lunch dessert are not actual things.

Devil/blue suit #2 states that it knows the ingredients in the cookies, and that really, these cookies are not so different than breakfast. In fact, forget breakfast dessert, these cookies border on being proper breakfast food. There are two cups of oats, nuts and eggs for protein, and yes, there's butter and sugar, but what do you put on your toast, and have you looked at how much sugar is in even regular breakfast cereals lately?

This battle goes on a few times a day for as long as there are cookies in the house. Or at least until a couple of days have passed and another, distinct, tiny lawyer/devil/angel pops up to say, "Oh my god, those things are full of eggs and they've been sitting out on the counter for how many days? Forget worrying about whether or not they're breakfast or dessert, you're totally going to get food poisoning from those things." I get kind of an ambulance-chaser vibe from this last guy.