We have a recipe box in our house, which I didn’t even realize was a quaint thing to have until my friend pointed out that most people have glossy cookbooks, or just a bookmark for AllRecipes.com. Apparently, a collection of yellowed and fading note cards covered with questionable stains and written in bleeding, sloppy print is practically out of a Wes Anderson movie in terms of old-fashioned and whimsical items.
What’s nice about note cards is that you can tell which ones get used the most because they’re frayed on the edges and covered with strange marks, while the made-only-once recipes stay as pristine as the pages of an encyclopedia in a Millennial's bedroom. The note card that’s been used the most in our recipe box, so much so that you can barely read the smudgy blue writing, is for the best damn chocolate chip cookies in the world.
Stacks on stacks
My dad made them for me when I got cut from the soccer team in 7th grade and felt like the world was going to end, and I made them for new families that moved into our suburban neighborhood in North Carolina. When it was a friend’s birthday, I’d bring cookies to school for them, and when I was suddenly a new student again in 11th grade and too scared to talk to people, I brought cookies to school to make friends. My older sister has been away in college for three and a half years now, but we still inevitably get photos of the chocolate chip cookies that she makes for herself and her roommates, and it was the first recipe I remember my younger sister ever making. And of course, every time we make a batch, my mom reminds us incessantly that she was the one who introduced the recipe to Dad.
In America, making chocolate chip cookies is easy, but when you live overseas, grocery stores look different. In Kenya, we couldn’t find chocolate chips, and in Italy, there was none of the deliciously soft brown sugar that makes the cookies chewy and golden. So we’d wait for a link to the States — a relative coming to visit us? A coworker going on a business trip? — and then we’d pounce, demanding they bring us mountains of ingredients that we could stockpile.
Someone just got back from the States... We could tell who loved us by whether they bought Ghiradelli or the generic brand. (For the record-- when we were in America, we usually went with the generic brand.)
When I arrived at Carnegie Mellon, we went to Target to buy all the necessities. We got a towel, laundry detergent, and sacks of flour, sugar, and chocolate chips. Everything I'd need to make my dorm room feel like a home.
All moved in
Our recipe doesn’t call for browned butter or whipped eggs or gourmet chocolate disks hand-cured by Belgian milkmaids (do you even cure chocolate?). Just (American) pantry staples. And while an electric mixer will make things easier, you certainly don’t need one. Perhaps a more refined palette would call these cookies homespun or imperfect. But to me, they’ll always be the best damn chocolate chip cookies in the world.
The recipe can be found here.
