A Sense of Home

Everyone, it seems, has a favorite childhood cookie memory. Aunt Josie’s Raisin Smiles, Mom’s date bars, Grandma’s Oatmeal Walnut Dollops. Mine is of my grandmother, hovering over a bowl as she mixed ginger cookie dough, which was then rolled out on waxed paper and shaped with a cookie cutter. As the wonderful scent of ginger bloomed from the oven, she would tell me how the recipe had been handed down along the descending links of a matriarchal chain predating the Civil War, allowing herself to digress into family tales of matrimonial fortune and happily-ever-afters.

The problem is that my “memory” is a complete fabrication. I made cookies with my grandmother, but they were sliced from a roll of Pillsbury chocolate-chip dough. She probably had a pre-Civil War recipe lying around somewhere, but she was “country.” Sadly, country people of that generation considered industrial products superior to their own hand-crafted creations. It was the early 1960s, and the industrial cookie had already triumphed. These days we’ve got Mrs. Fields, which is certainly a long way from Chips Ahoy, but still.

I recently was pondering the subject of cookies with Carol Doumani. Last September she started a cottage business called Zazu Cookies You Crave, and already word has spread like small-town gossip, with Zazu acquiring a ravenous cult following that seems on the verge of growing exponentially. We had asked ourselves a question so Zen-like in its simplicity that it bordered on the ridiculous: “What is special about cookies?” Doumani thought for a few moments, then said, “They give you a sense of home.”

I think she nailed it. Eating cookies is different from eating a French pastry in a cafe and sipping espresso. Pastries give you a feeling of urban leisure. Cookies take you home. And while the sweets we give our loved ones on Valentine’s Day usually lean toward the erotic whisper of dark chocolate, I’ve got a feeling that this year nothing could be more romantic than sending someone a sense of home.

Doumani may be emerging as the reigning cookie maven of Southern California. She is the author of a cookbook of family and personal recipes and has her own publishing company. She often would seek refuge from the pressure of publishing in baking, especially cookies. She then began making them on a larger scale out of her spacious home in Marina del Rey. In doing so, she seems to have created a Cookie Monster. “I wrote four novels,” she says, “but what makes me happiest is when somebody tells me they love my baking.” She knew she’d struck a nerve when she got a call from Steve Wallace of Wally’s Wines & Spirits, who called to tell her a customer had raved for 30 minutes about the cookies. He had to find out what was going on.

Miniature almond tarts, “Jaspers” teeming with chunks of white chocolate and Heath Bar chips, espresso brownies, cashew-almond Dandies and lusciously chewy chocolate chip--in all she produces 12 varieties, all as fresh as youth and full of amazingly transparent flavors. My favorite is the brownie-like Jasper, named for Doumani’s beloved Saluki hound (the business itself is named for Jasper’s late predecessor, Zazu).

The cookies, available through special order from Saks Fifth Avenue, also have the slightly imperfect shapes that announce them as anything other than machine-made. “In the rug business, which my family was in, there’s a word called ‘abrash,’ ” Doumani says. “It’s an imperfection, and it actually makes the rug more valuable. I don’t want my cookies to be perfect. They’re more beautiful if they’re a little misshapen.”

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Zazu’s Jaspers

Makes 4 dozen

1/2 pound unsalted butter

1 2/3 cup brown sugar, packed

2 cups white flour

1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

3 eggs, lightly beaten

2 teaspoons almond extract

1/2 cup white chocolate chips

3/4 cup crumbled Heath Bars

In a large saucepan, melt the butter and bring to a boil over medium heat. Simmer for 5 minutes, stirring occasionally ad adjusting heat so the butter bubbles gently and turns slightly golden but does not burn.

Remove the saucepan from the heat and add the brown sugar. Stir until the sugar is incorporated, then let the mixture stand until it cools to lukewarm. Don’t worry if the butter and sugar separate. Sift together flour, baking powder and salt, and set aside.

When the butter and sugar mixture is lukewarm, add the eggs one at a time, stirring until incorporated. Then add the almond extract. Stir in the dry ingredients, then gently fold in the crumbled Heath Bars. Spoon the batter into greased 9-by-13-inch pan and sprinkle with white chocolate chips. Bake for 35 minutes at 350 degrees. Cool and cut into 1 1/2-inch squares.

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Martin Booe last wrote for the magazine about spoon bread.