Off the Bone

I’ve owed several people cookies since the summer, and cleared the debt today. I’m proud and privileged to have friends who would actually walk to their nearest post office in order to mail me books when I cannot find them myself (the atrociousness of the food in W-town being matched only by the atrociousness of the sole bookstore), and since they are abundantly supplied with reading material, I can only make them more comfortable when they read. In the mail went boxes of Sunshine Biscuits (each batch contains three days of sunshine – hence the bad weather in the Northeast), Date Liebnizen,¹ and, pictured above, with chicken, Arbitrary Chocolate Cookies.

Arbitrary Chocolate Cookies came about because I’d been feeling a kind of void in my life of late, a sibilant absence. Self examination revealed that this was partly a quarter-life crisis, and partly that I didn’t know how to bake a good chocolate cookie. Some people find religion fills their voids, I found this recipe to fill mine.

Really the problem, and I’m likely conflating the life-crisis and the recipe book here, is that I’ve never really been able to muster that much enthusiasm for the concept of a chocolate cookie, never having had one that made me see them as an objective good the way chocolate cake, flourless chocolate cake, hot chocolate and 1-kilo blocks of Valrhona are. Cookies, it seems, can never be just chocolate – you have to trick them out and dress them up – not merely chocolate cookies, but chocolate chocolate chip, or chocolate chip walnut, or chocolate white chocolate chip chocolate chunk cranberry, yet nothing you can add, append, prefix or attach to a cookie involving chocolate can raise its appeal beyond that conferred by the basic concept of cookie + chocolate. Still, we feel compelled, by some ineradicable impulse, to enliven, intensify, and complicate – a simple incarnation of chocolate in a cookie does not satisfy – we must separate the cookie and the chip. We are content to leave our chocolate cakes to stand alone, robed simply in icing, flourless chocolate things resist all attempts to dilute their intense purity, brownies absorb everything in their stride, but the poor cookie is frequently overwhelmed and rarely satisfying.

Perhaps it’s the way we eat them – on the fly, sneakily, an after-lunch impulse or a pre-coffee weakness, a perennial reminder of being caught with our hands where they should not be. The depth and power I demand from things labeled “chocolate” may not be entirely compatible with this casualness. The composition of the ideal cookie should seem as spontaneous and childlike as the manner of its consumption, full of whatever the cook decided to throw in, in whatever proportions she might have had them. We want variety, and unforced harmony, and dark chocolate is a serious flavour. It makes tart things seem too tart, sweet things seem too sweet, nuts seem lightweight and oatmeal coarse and inappropriate.

I don’t know how to solve this problem, but you can’t really fit too much more chocolate into a cookie than is in an Arbitrary Chocolate Cookie. Tasting them, it seems like there’s nothing you could add to them that wouldn’t work – and nothing you could add that would. Put anything you want in the batter, and it will be… okay. Itself. A chocolate cookie with nuts in it. With dried cherries in it. With white chocolate chunks in it. Always, fundamentally, unshakeably, a chocolate cookie. A chewy triple chocolate cookie, a chocolate chocolate chip cookie, a chocolate death monster at midnight cookie. Think of a name involving chocolate…

This recipe works. It tastes… pretty damn good. But I suspect nothing you can do to it while remaining true to the basic intent behind it will really get it beyond PDG. I do, however, have fairly concrete ideas about how an arbitrary chocolate cookie could be re-imagined, and will be trying those out in a couple of weeks.

We wondered if those mini magnets were strong enough to hold an arbitrary chocolate cookie to the fridge. This is what Diana came up with.

1) Most Noo Yawkers are familiar with the concept of a Date Liebniz, if not its name – NYC delis invariably have two kinds of cookies in clingwrapped packages by the register. Date Liebnizen are the ones that aren’t Fig Newtons. For the rest of you, this consists of a layer of dates and chopped walnuts between two layers of shortcrust.

Arbitrary Chocolate Cookies
Adapted from The Cook’s Illustrated Guide to Baking

150g butter, in chunks, softened (10 tbsp)

300g light brown sugar (1.5 cups)
90g sugar (scant 1/2 cup)

4 eggs, beaten together with
2 tsp instant espresso
1 tsp vanilla

450g dark chocolate, melted and cooled till slightly warm to the touch (114F, if you’re being precise)

240g all purpose flour (2 cups), sifted together with
40g cocoa powder (1/2 cup)
8g baking powder (2 tsp)
5g salt (1/2 tsp)

325g bitter chocolate chips (12 oz)

1) Preheat your oven to 350F. Line baking sheets with parchment paper.
2) Beat the butter till smooth and creamy. Add the ingredients, in the order listed, grouped as listed (i.e. brown sugar and sugar go in at the same time, eggs, espresso and vanilla go in at the same time, etc), mixing well each time.
3) Refrigerate batter for 15 minutes.
4) Scoop onto baking sheets in golf-ball size lumps. Return to fridge between trays. You don’t want rock hard batter, but it should be firm when you scoop it.
5) Bake each tray for 10 minutes, then pull out of the oven and let cookies cool on tray for 10 minutes more, then remove from the sheet and allow cookies to finish cooling on racks.