Kathryn Ross column: A cookie is not a dessert, but can be a tasty touch of home
In recent years it has become a custom at distinguished restaurants or at special dinners to serve a cookie as dessert.
A cookie is not a dessert.
At least not by my standards, but maybe it's a generational thing and maybe today's parents do not have time, as with so many other things, to bake cookies for or with their children. Rather than being that treat that kids grab with a glass of milk after school, cookies are no longer a common snack.
When I was a youngster cookies were just something you grabbed because they were always there in the cookie jar or just out of the oven. Of course I was lucky that by the time I came around my mother was a stay-at-home Mom.
She wasn't always. My sister Pat, 10 years older than I am, was shuttled from grandparent to grandparent while she grew up because then my mother did work outside the home. Life had changed for my generation. Even at that, my sister did know how to bake cookies learning at her grandmother’s elbows.
When I was young my favorite cookie was what we fondly called Big People's Cookies.
It was a thick chocolate cookie almost five inches in diameter that was frosted with milk chocolate icing. They weren't for kids, at least not for grubby-faced, sticky-fingered kids like me, according to my sister.
They became Big People Cookies when my sister baked a few dozen to take on a weekend trip to the lake with my aunt and our older cousins. Pat wouldn't let me have one when I reached for it, saying these are Big People Cookies. So they were one of my favorites along with Toll House Cookies, better known today as chocolate chip cookies.
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I graduated from college 10 years after I graduated from high school. It didn't take me that long to go through college. It took me that long to decide what I wanted to go to school for. That's why I have always said to younger people that they should take a year off before deciding what they want to study in college.
They might learn something different about themselves in that year and that they want to do something totally different than what the guidance counselor suggested.
After I matriculated in December I headed for graduate achool at West Virginia University in Morgantown to study Appalachian literature.
One day I received a care package from home from my sister. Anyone who has one, knows sisters can be untrustworthy even though they can be your greatest ally and your closest friend. They can also be a jokester.
I tore open my care package from my sister and inside I found a plastic bag. At first glance I could not fathom why my sister had sent me a bag full of horse manure. It was full of brown ovals molded into a pile that for all the world looked like what a horse leaves behind it.
Then I noticed the can of chocolate icing and realized that my sister had sent me a box of unfrosted Big People Cookies. I was delighted and called my sister to thank her. After pulling them apart and smearing them with icing they were great with a glass of cold milk. But they weren't dessert.
Dessert is crème de menthe over vanilla ice cream, crème brûlée, cheesecake or pie, not a cookie. A cookie is comfort food, a welcome treat after school or a midnight snack. A cookie is not dessert, it is a touch of home in a lonely dorm room far away from family.
— Kathryn Ross writes a weekly column.
This article originally appeared on The Evening Tribune: Cookies aren't dessert, but can be a tasty touch of home
