If nothing else is perfect, why should a cookie be perfect?

On unattainable goals, inefficiency, and baking with local wheat and Mesquite Bean flours

The title of today’s essay is an homage to poet Bernadette Mayer, who is quoted in her NYT obit saying, “The idea of perfection in a poem is pretty stupid. Because if nothing else is perfect, why should a poem be perfect?” I returned to Mayer this week, as I baked shortbread cookies and thought about the special kinds of unattainable goals set upon women in the US. I find the idea of perfection in a cookie pretty stupid, too.

But I am all for deliciousness (a type of perfection) in a cookie, and I chased that goal by making shortbread with treasured ingredients: Locally grown and milled Red Fife whole grain flour from Hayden Flour Mills. Sonoran Sea Salt from Desert Provisions, which is based in Tucson. And Mesquite Bean Flour from Cappadona Ranch in Linn, TX, which I bought almost a year ago and have kept in my freezer, waiting for when “things would settle down and I’d have more time to bake.” That time has never come and also, that time is now. 

I’ve been thinking about this shortbread and the ingredients for months, leading up to Christmas. I used to bake dozens and dozens of cookies for the holidays with my mom and brothers. High school was when production peaked, since then it has drastically decreased and years have gone by where I didn’t bake anything for Christmas. This is not a cry for pity. No Christmas goes by without cookies, and I enjoy other peoples’ homemade ones along with store bought varieties. Moving to a city with a Trader Joe’s in 2017 certainly helped in that regard–the options are delightfully staggering and dependable. Making the transition from being a high schooler who loved to bake to being in college and then married, with children has seen me become very grateful for easy to purchase (and delicious) cookies.

And, as this year has progressed and I’m thinking, researching, and writing more and more about food, I decided I wanted to bake a cookie. But not just any cookie. And I wanted to draw on the origins of cookies, and the special ingredients I have access to within a short drive (or long one – the Mesquite Bean Flour is 17 hours away from me by car). Also, I would make this cookie from a place of play, as well as respect for the ingredients – not as an obligation, as some holiday cooking can become. The perfect cookie isn’t worth self-hate or exhaustion.

I recently finished reading Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century (first published in 1986) by Laura Shapiro and it gave a history to the occasional feelings of anger and resentment I harbor around the kitchen, and how it can be a tool to keep women isolated. While the book is ostensibly about cooking, I read it as a story of control. Elite women and burgeoning industries controlling food to different, self-serving, ends. The domestic science reformers sought respect, prestige, and power through changing the approach and perception of cooking – which was (is?) viewed as a lowly home craft, based on womanly intuition. These reformers wanted to turn homes into small places of business: efficient and respectable. By what standards? The standards of men in business and science.

I’ve written before about how screwed up it is that millions can't afford the cheapest food while I can purchase high quality ingredients that are priced fairly for what they are and still, plainly, are quite expensive. The reformers in Perfection Salad were very concerned about the diets of the poor. Did their concern carry with it racism, classism, and arrogance beyond proportion? Yes. And, Shapiro notes, writing in the 80s, “In striking distinction from the last century, today’s food experts display little interest in the diet of the poor and hungry. Feeding the helpless is seen as a job for those with a professional interest in such things, not for lovers of fine cooking.” It’s a broad sweeping statement, but I see the point still in today’s food landscape. Food justice issues and fine dining to foodie culture often seem divorced from each other. 

These issues don’t have to be separate, they aren’t naturally separate. That’s what I’m writing to remind myself of. The fact that millions go hungry in a rich country is an uncomfortable fact for those of us who can buy the expensive flour. But that isn't a reason for silence, it’s a prompt for conversation, investing in and broadening local food systems, and for expecting more from all levels of government (and actively resisting the policies that keep people hungry by lessening dependence on the global food system that is so damaging to us and the environment.) 

While I baked, I listened to a podcast about Mary, Queen of Scots, trying to imagine when in her tumultuous life she had her courts perfect shortbread. Shortbread has existed for as long as people had access to flour, fat, and sugar, and a way to bake them, but Queen Mary is often credited with its invention. The more accurate version is that it was under her attention, really the cooks in her court, that the cookie became more established and connected with Scotland through her stamp of approval.   

My ancestors lived in Scotland and immigrated to the US, possibly around the same time as other family members came over from Ireland during the potato famine which also affected Scotland. A family story goes that the family members who came from Scotland, once in New York, pretended to be Irish to be treated slightly better. I don’t know the origin of this story, and due to death and family estrangement, probably never will, but I treasure it. Cookies at Christmas make me think about family, the joy, loss, and complexity. 

I made two versions of the shortbread cookies: V1 with all wheat flour, and V2 with wheat and Mesquite Bean flours. I used bread flour because that's what I had. I used two different recipes (V1 recipe, V2 recipe). I liked the first recipe better, it made a smaller amount of dough and the final product was thinner. It’s definitely necessary to score the shortbread while it is still warm. I had a hard time getting V2 out of the glass pie pan and didn’t score it. I had to pry it out of the pan, and then cut it. V1 tasted like pure butter and sugar, I would salt it more next time. The texture was very crisp, and melted in your mouth. V2 tasted similarly rich, with a molasses/graham cracker note from the Mesquite Bean flour, and a sandier texture. I brought some to a friend and she highly approved of both.

V1 on top. V2 on the bottom.

Especially if you consider the start of this shortbread to be last year, when I realized you can grind up Mesquite Bean Pods (which grow in my neighborhood) into flour, then it’s a very inefficient process. And I’m embracing that. I don’t need the cookies I make to be perfect, I want to enjoy the process and make something I can’t buy at the store. Industry perfected something that was already perfect in its inefficiency and variety. Industry told us that the new highest accolade for food was “standardized and available year round.” We have suffered consequences since: Mediocre cookies flood the shelves. We eat them (or could) every day and they lose their specialness. Recipes for increasingly inventive and complicated cookies are published. People who have time make the cool new cookies. People who don’t have the time pick from the vast array of cookies available for purchase. I hope no one feels lesser about themselves because they can’t afford (the time or money) to make or buy the nice cookies. But I think some do.

Another big priority of the reformers in Perfection Salad was efficiency and so-called democracy. They envisioned a single menu for the whole US, made in an efficient manner. I laughed out loud when the book described the frustration of some of the reformers: They couldn’t understand why women didn’t listen to them, didn’t those housekeepers want to support democracy? When in fact, democracy was staring the reformers in their face and they just didn’t have enough of the vote to win. People want variety. Standardized cookies don’t light joy in my heart the same way wonky but delicious homemade ones do.

Reading Perfection Salad helped me map with accuracy the history that leads to me standing in my dirty kitchen, feeling like a personal and moral failure. It isn’t my overreaction, it’s history. It’s a perfectly reasonable reaction to how the US treats women and cooking. The reformers wanted to “free” women from this feeling by teaching them a semi-scientific, efficient method for cooking and keeping a home, but while also denying their multifaceted humanity. The unattainable goals set by the domestic science movement trickle down into diet culture and the endless messages to women that we’re not enough. 

In an effort to make cooking more efficient, the reformers were willing to eliminate personal recipes, multi-cultural heritage, and all the fun that can be had in cooking. I see efficiency sold to us in convenience dinners, boxed cookies, and health powders (drink this and you don’t need to chop vegetables!) Convenience should be at least sometimes questioned. Convenience would rob me of the joy of baking cookies, if I let it. And yes, also, I buy things that are already made. This isn’t about pretending I live before electricity and refrigeration was invented like some of the homesteaders on Instagram.  

Before baking my shortbread, I visited Hayden Flour Mills and met Emma and Jeff Zimmerman, the father and daughter founders. We talked about the local food economy at work in front of us: Outside the facility, Don Guerra of Barrio Bread was selling his loaves to a long line of people, and Sonoran Pasta Co cooked fresh pasta to order. Both Barrio Bread and Sonoran Pasta Co use Hayden Flour Mills flour, and produce some of their bread and pasta in the building behind where we stood. Being this close to the food I’m eating feels like a huge privilege, and it is – but it really should be more normal because it’s good for the people making and eating the food, and treats the planet well. Insisting that everyone should have enough food to eat, the food is of good quality, and the food is made with the planet’s health as a priority shouldn’t be radical. There is work to be done, and it is work, but it’s also often delicious.