I would like to file a grievance with chocolate chip cookie recipes.
| Chocolate Chunk Cookies ½ cup shortening ½ cup butter ¾ cup brown sugar ¾ cup white sugar ½ tsp salt ½ tsp baking soda 1 tsp vanilla 2 eggs 2 cups flour 8 oz semisweet chocolate, chopped (or 1⅓ cups chocolate chips) 1 cup sliced nuts, if desired Heat oven to 375°. Have greased or paper-lined cookie sheets ready. Cream the shortening, butter, sugars, salt, and baking soda. Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each. Beat until light and fluffy. Sift in the flour and mix in. Then stir in the chocolate. |
This recipe comes out of my great-grandmother's binder. It's nice to know that chocolate chip cookies made their way into my great-grandmother's household. This recipe (which looks like she cut it out of a book) might actually be older than chocolate chips themselves. I haven't checked this, but I'm pretty sure chocolate chips were invented for the cookies. Can we talk about how a single cookie recipe literally created an entirely new type of chocolate factory?
I have made a lot of chocolate chip cookies using multiple recipes. Every time, without fail, they have bake into sad runny splats unless I add a lot of extra flour. But this recipe's has that crisp, self-assured tone that one finds in home economics textbooks from the era when no girl could graduate high school without mastering biscuits and white sauce.
Also, we found this in a personal recipe binder. Let's set aside aside the fact this happens to be my great-grandmother's recipes. Even if I found it in some random person's notebook that ended up at an antique store with a $1.50 price tag, someone cut this out and saved it. This was not in some slapped-together advertising pamphlet with a title like Gourmet Baking with Schwenk's Lard. People don't keep dud recipes... right?
The recipe starts out with half shortening and half butter. Even though shortening creeps me out with its utter defiance of nature, it was nice to know that these cookies would not fall victim to the ongoing butter moisture crisis. Also, as some helpful commenters noted in a previous recipe, shortening has a higher melting point than butter. So in theory, these cookies wouldn't become a runny mess. Or at least, they were less likely to.
Even after detouring to actually sift the flour instead of dumping it in like all those lesser people (I am those lesser people), these cookies came together really quickly. After I had finished mixing everything, I remembered to add the baking soda. I had dissolved it in--- hang on a minute. This recipe has us adding a lot of water to the dough here. Two tablespoons may sound like a forgettable amount when you're reading the directions, but it's a lot when you dump it into the bowl.
For our metric friends, we're adding 3 centiliters (give or take a few numbers on the right-hand side of the decimal point). I told myself this recipe must have worked for someone at some point. I didn't want to think that my great-grandmother made terrible chocolate chip cookies and no one ever told her.
The finished cookie dough seemed a little too floppy to come out right. But if we go back to our recipe, it says to "add sifted dry ingredients, mix to a smooth batter." Well, the recipe writers call this a batter, and it looked like one. But I still put a single test cookie into the oven before risking an entire panful of dough. Great-grandmothers or authoritative-sounding directions are favorable signs but not guarantees.
The cookie came out just as bad as every other chocolate chip cookie I have ever made.
I know it looks partially incinerated, but I took out when slightly underbaked just like the recipe says.
I didn't bother waiting to see if the cookie improved as it cooled off. Instead, I stirred more flour into the remaining dough, put another test plop onto a pan, and got a cookie that was... well... slightly better.
As glad as I was to avoid wasting the dough, I was not exactly wild about running a hot oven for nearly half an hour only to throw three failed cookies into the trash one at a time.
And so, I decided these were good enough. The air conditioning had already endured enough. I baked the rest of the dough and hoped the cookies would seem better the next day. And... well, I didn't throw them away, but I wasn't happy that I made them.
I was going to throw these out, but someone else in the house put a hand over the plate and said "No no. Don't take these away." So despite all my grousing about faulty recipes (and I'm not done yet), these may have been exactly right. Maybe I just don't have good taste in chocolate chip cookies. But I could not convince myself that chocolate chip cookies are supposed to be slightly greasy dough splats.
A long time ago I found a book called Twinkie, Deconstructed. Each chapter is about an ingredient in Twinkies, where it comes from, and how it is produced. The table of contents is basically the ingredient list you'll find on the nutrition label. The author even visited the mines that yield the minerals involved in producing baking soda. But the biggest revelation for me wasn't that food production is a complex and delicate operation. It was that you can't always obey the measurements in a recipe.
The people in charge of Twinkie factories have to change the recipe every day (if not multiple times a day) to compensate for variations in humidity, inconsistent ingredients, and so on. (Does today's flour have more protein in it than yesterday's? Are the eggs firmer than the last batch? Has the humidity changed?) I hardly need to point out that a Twinkie factory is one of the most regimented food production sites on Earth. If the people who have literally reduced baking to a mathematical operation still have to tweak their recipe, the rest of us baking at home do too.
And sometimes, you just have a bad recipe, even if it's from an otherwise trustworthy source. If you watch a lot of older cooking shows, you'll often see them say "I saw a recipe for ________ in a magazine that was almost correct, but they forgot a very important step that would ruin everything!" (Fanny Cradock did this a lot.) Julia Child noted in interviews that she took so long to learn to cook partly because she kept trying to make recipes that absolutely could not work as written, and she was too inexperienced to know it wasn't her fault. Even serious, professional food historians sometimes struggle with recipes that made it to the printing press instead of merely being scribbled in someone's notes. And of course, even recipes in modern-day books do not always work as printed.
Having said all that, I hadn't expected this recipe to fail so hard. You don't usually find duds carefully pasted into someone's notes. (Although you sometimes do!) I started to wonder if my great-grandmother made a mental corrective note instead of writing it on the page.
Or, maybe people were better at preemptively fixing recipes back then. After all, most people today still know that you should check the oven a little early instead of setting a timer and never checking the oven. I really hope my great-grandmother didn't follow this recipe and make several years of really bad chocolate chip cookies.
A few days later, I decided to try and get this recipe to work correctly. I know there are plenty of reliable chocolate chip cookie recipes out there, but this one had offended me. First, I axed the water that I was supposed to dissolve the baking soda in. Our runny dough did not need any more water in it. Next, I thought that perhaps the dough needed to refrigerate overnight so the flour could soak up some of the water. (Or, if you prefer, the flour "absorbed additional moisture content" or "more thoroughly hydrated.")
The dough was a lot firmer when I got it out of the refrigerator the next day. It almost bent the spoon when I scooped it onto the baking sheet. In a moment of extravagant daring, I baked an entire pan of cookies instead of baking just one of them to make sure. Here's how that went:
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| "Refrigerate your dough to let the flour hydrate overnight!" they said. |
So, the recipe said they will become crisp as they cool. And I suppose they hardened up a little bit.
All right, I know that there are a lot of cookies that are supposed to spread out until they're practically melted. And I know that a lot of people like crispy, thin chocolate chip cookies. But I cannot accept that today's recipe is supposed to look like this. You could squeeze the grease out of them with your fist.
I yanked the flour down from the shelf and shook a lot of it into the dough. As you can see, we aren't carefully tweaking it one spoonful at a time.
When you practically double one of the main ingredients in a recipe, you usually ruin it. But I forced the flour into the dough with my angry bare hands, and the cookies came out perfect.
I have to say, having made some substantial revisions to the recipe, these cookies were really, really amazing. These were the best chocolate chip cookies I've ever made. I'm going to charitably assume that my great-grandmother made cookies like this instead of blindly baking several years of pan-splats.
Or who knows, maybe wheat has changed a lot. Perhaps the recipe would work if I somehow got my hands on some cryogenically-stored 1930s flour.
After making them again (because we always want to re-test recipes when they're delicious ), I wanted to have just the cookie without the chocolate chips. And so, I baked about half of the dough before adding chocolate to the rest. These were some of the best drop cookies I've ever made.
So, the chocolate chips in this recipe aren't disguising lousy cookies. They are improving what's already so good. They're soft without being doughy, firm without being hard, and all-around swell. I'm definitely going to make these again.
