According to my two teenage sons, I make the best chocolate chip cookies in the world.
I accept this compliment with the appropriate amount of gratitude and skepticism, because “my” recipe started life as a clipping from a women’s magazine at least 25 years ago, which I then taped inside my Better Homes and Gardens cookbook so I wouldn’t lose it.
Since then, I’ve changed enough things — bread flour in place of all-purpose flour, half the amount of salt, a little extra vanilla, no nuts, double the chocolate chips, chilling the dough when the kitchen is hot — that it only vaguely resembles the original.
The problem is that I have never written any of this down. I use the original recipe as a guide and make the adjustments according to memory. So if my kids decided to make cookies using the recipe taped in the cookbook, they’d end up with an entirely different cookie.
My go-to cookie recipe became the only cookies they want
“Mama, you need to write down the real recipe,” my youngest son said, again, a couple of months ago, when I was baking a double batch for the student council bake sale.
What’s funny is that these cookies have always felt to me like the laziest, most basic cookies in the world. There’s nothing fancy about them; I don’t even buy an expensive brand of chocolate chips. But they’re reliable and quick, and yes, delicious.
Part of the reason they became such a fixture in our family is because they were easy. I’d always enjoyed baking and, before kids, would regularly bake for friends and coworkers. Then I became a mother in my 40s, and I knew I wanted to create the kind of home where homemade cookies occasionally appeared after hard days, before big tests, or because it was raining outside and we had nowhere else to be.
Somewhere along the way, these cookies became part of our family life in a way I didn’t plan for. I packed them into school lunches, made them for road trips, beach vacations, sick days, and on request. When someone would ask, “Can you bake cookies?” these were the cookies they meant.
One year, my older son requested a giant chocolate chip cookie for his birthday instead of a cake. I told him I could order one from the grocery store bakery, but he wanted me to use my recipe. So that’s what I made.
My kids associate home with the smell of my cookies
Every once in a while, one of my sons will come home after trying an expensive bakery cookie or a friend’s mom’s cookies and announce, with complete sincerity, that it wasn’t as good as mine. This makes me laugh every single time.
There are obviously better cookies in the world than the ones I make in my kitchen with grocery store chocolate chips, but that’s not really the comparison they’re making. They aren’t looking for the objectively best cookie; they’re looking for the taste of their own childhood.
As an older mom and a writer, I think about memory more than I used to. I think about what my children will remember when they leave home, and eventually what they’ll remember when I’m gone. I’ve spent years preserving the pieces of my children’s lives that seem important. I’ve saved photographs and school papers, written letters and blog posts, kept journals and datebooks full of ordinary details of our family life.
I realize now that sometimes what lasts are the things that show up over and over again. The inside jokes, the favorite dinners, the holiday traditions — and a cookie recipe made so many times that its smell alone can take you home.
The cookies are a part of our family story
One day, my boys will be in college and live in apartments and homes of their own, and I won’t always be there when life gets hard or lonely or overwhelming. But I can put cookies in a box and send them wherever they are. And, if they want to, they can make the cookies themselves.
So yes, I’m finally going to write the recipe down, and I’ll make each of them a copy. Maybe they’ll pull it out in a dorm kitchen someday. Maybe they’ll make them for roommates, partners, or their own children. Maybe one day they’ll have changed the recipe so much that it barely resembles mine.
I think I’d like that.
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