One of the things I like to do outside of writing is cook. Particularly, I like to bake. And eat said baking. I find it therapeutic. I do! Both — baking, and eating. Especially the eating of cookies. But first, the baking. I’ve also long had this idea that delicious food should be linked to poetry, somehow. And today, I’ve decided that I’m going to find the associations between my favorite cookies and some poets I like reading. Have you ever thought about such a thing?
If you stick with me here, maybe we’ll find some common ground. And maybe not. Maybe you’ll come up with some better associations than I will. If you stick with me until the end, though, you can have one of my much-loved cookie recipes to try.
I’ve made a list of the 10 types of cookies I bake most often. Of course, I make others now and then, but these are the favorites in my family, and I find myself craving some of them regularly, such as the peanut butter cookies. Don’t you LOVE peanut butter cookies? Unless you are allergic to peanuts. Yikes!
Here are the cookies I’m going to try to match up with poets. No order of preference. The recipes are all super delicious, and a random listing will keep my brain excited while looking for the hoped-for, poetic associations.
Snickerdoodles
Pralines & Cream Wafers
Peanut Butter
Chocolate Chip
Lemon Shortbread
Thimble (aka Thumbprint) Cookies
Russian Tea Cakes & Chocolate Tea Cakes
Soft Iced Butternut (or Pumpkin)
Strawberry-Yogurt Sugar
Frosted Eggnog
I will list each cookie again, assign a poet, and then give a brief reasoning for my associations. (Runner-up poets may follow each entry.) And then I may never think of these particular cookies again without certain poets’ faces imprinted on them, while I bite off a nose or ear...
Snickerdoodles: Eve Merriam. There Is No Rhyme for Silver author, who wrote both for adults and children, and who is famous also for the delectable “How to Eat a Poem.” I might be biased because we share first names. Snickerdoodle is a nonsense word, it evokes childhood silliness, and it sounds like a kid’s poem. (You might prefer Robert Louis Stevenson or Edward Lear for these cookies.)
Pralines & Cream Wafers: Elizabeth Bishop. Classic and elegant, these cookies taste like an elevation of Nilla wafers, no doubt more similar in quality and taste to original vanilla wafers invented by Gustave Mayer, ca. 1900. A creamy, lacy wafer, with a modern twist. Straightforward, and refined. (Also resembles Maya Angelou.)
Peanut Butter: Sharon Olds. Rich, creamy, peanutty flavor. Earthy, pungent, stirring. (Cheryl Savageau, but with crunchy peanut butter and dark chocolate drizzled over the top.)
Chocolate Chip: Billy Collins. This everyday workhorse of a cookie is loaded with rich, brown-sugar goodness and bursts of chocolatey pleasure. Like the choco-chip cookie, Collins represents the daily North American experience, but he never lets us forget that familiarity can be sublime.
Lemon Shortbread: Robert Sund. One-time editor of The Sullivan Slough Review, student of Theodore Roethke, and author of Bunch Grass. I always think of lemon grass when I look at BG’s wheat-colored cover. A stark, pure, sweet and sour, buttery, crumbly, natural cookie. Both a little self-conscious.
Thimble (aka Thumbprint): Pablo Neruda. This vignette of a cookie highlights a frame of either rich butter or peanut butter, and in which the impression of a thimble, or a thumb, is filled with a stained-glass-like jewel of jam, as sweet-tartly simple as Bristol raspberry, as delicately subtle as Georgia peach, or mouth-wateringly sophisticated as Damson plum. Odes, sonnets, and exceptional, metaphoric imagery. (Rainier Maria Rilke, with more old-fashioned, jelly varieties.)
Russian Tea Cakes & Chocolate Tea Cakes: Philip Larkin. Tea Cakes bring to mind Dr. Zhivago, the old Samovar teahouse in Seattle, and Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, which I’d bet Larkin would have obsessed over if he hadn’t fallen so hard for Thomas Hardy. These powdered-sugar delicacies melt in the mouth like black and white clouds, but that give way to a clean soil of flaky butter. The chocolate variety is like Larkin’s dark visions. Cookies that evoke universal themes of love, mortality, and solitude, in their domelike mountains of lushness. (I could imagine Ruth Stone in a Baked Alaska version.)
Soft Iced Butternut or Pumpkin: Rita Dove. A charming and generous cookie, reminiscent of a Long John maple doughnut, but wildly evocative of late summer, autumn, and early winter. Warm, spicy, luxurious. Real food. Soul food. (Ditto, Camille Norton)
Strawberry-Yogurt Sugar: Floyd Skloot. Author of Approximately Paradise, and many other striking poetry collections (and novels, too). You might expect the commonplace with a base called “sugar,” but this cookie’s taste is fresh, light, and cakey. Smells suspiciously like winter holidays and yet also like summery strawberry shortcake. Don’t worry that you might be watching the familiar night sky — remain prepared to spot and name new stars. Every night. Skloot is a poet who can teach you to reach inside for your own best writing just by reading his. This cookie might teach you a thing or two about how to elevate a plain sugar cookie.
Frosted Eggnog: Emily Dickinson. This cookie is the one she might have liked best at Jane Austen’s dinner parties, had Dickinson been a fictional character. A simple eggshell-white-on-white cookie with dreamy, creamy egg tones, powdered gently with nutmeg or cinnamon. I don’t normally like eggnog, but the idea of getting to bake this delicately-flavored cookie a few weeks a year when the ’nog hits the supermarkets has recently converted me to annual eggnog buyer. It probably won’t get me to like Dickinson any better than I modestly do. But the cookie just tastes so like what Victoria Magazine would taste like, if it could be tasted. And Ms. Em is my go-to Edwardian, who was admired greatly by Victorians, if not her own earlier peers. (William Wordsworth, Romanticist, who could get into some posset or ’nog, as well. Or should that be “snog”?)
I’ve decided to share my recipe for Thimble Cookies, as it’s one of the few I haven’t already handed round to my besties, and as they may be the only ones reading this post, they deserve a new recipe, wouldn’t you say? And Pablo would be pleased. There’s no special recipe-print-feature; you’ll have to copy and paste. (Photo of baked Thimble cookies at the top of this post.)
Thimble Cookies (aka Thumbprint Cookies)
From the Kitchen of Eve Hanninen
Makes 3 ½ dozen cookies
¼ cup packed brown sugar
¼ cup granulated sugar
¼ cup unsalted peanut butter
¾ cup soft butter or margarine
1 tsp vanilla extract or vanilla bean paste
2 eggs, separated
2 cups flour
½ tsp salt
Your favorites jam(s)
Preheat oven to 350°F. In a large bowl, mix sugars, peanut butter, butter, vanilla, and egg yolks until smooth. Stir in flour and salt until dough comes together and dry ingredients are incorporated. Shape dough into 1” balls and place about 1” apart on ungreased cookie sheets. If you want to be historically accurate, use the top of a thimble to press deep, little wells in the center of each dough ball. Otherwise, press the dough in with your thumb. Very lightly beat the egg whites together, and then brush beaten whites over the tops of all the unbaked cookies. Bake 10-12 minutes, or until light brown in color. Remove cookie sheets from oven, then transfer cookies to baker’s/butcher’s paper to absorb excess butter while they cool. After 15 minutes, spoon dabs of jam into the “thimble wells.” Allow to cool completely before serving and eating (if humanly possible to resist eating beforehand).
Variations: If you want to make “peanut butter and jam” cookies, alter the recipe to ½ cup peanut butter and ½ cup butter. If you want an “all butter” cookie, omit peanut butter and use 1 cup of butter.
Ode to a Thimble Cookie . . . for Pablo. From my hand, to your mouth, the cookie like a glittering button. You chew. You swallow. You smack your fruit-slicked lips. A single crumb winks and then is swiped by your tongue, back into the recesses of your longing. ¡Delicioso!