almost grandma's: chocolate chip cookies
May 20, 2008
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My Grandmother ONLY made chocolate chip cookies with Toll House morsels. I am a purist like she was: I frown upon people licking the batter (although I must have devoured at least 5 cookies in the raw last night) and I don' t like nuts or oatmeal added to the dough, though I love those ingredients independently, and in virtually everything else.
Grandma (Virginia Otilia Baranski) was a kitchen taskmaster, especially at Christmas. If there were no Toll House chips, “forget it,”she' d say, pouring herself another whiskey and lighting up another Winston. RIP, VOB.
Almost five years after she died, I discovered a cookie better than Toll House. Ghirardelli. It happened completely by mistake—or by my best intentions. The story begins here: two days before Christmas the Toll House batches my mother, sister and I whipped up were gobbled by unidentified cookie monsters.
On December 23, 2006, I had to make a couple of new batches to get us through Christmas. With the rest of the Wigilia meal (our Polish tradition) still dormant, there was little time for gallivanting around the grocery aisles. I had to “make it snappy,”as Grandma would have hissed, through a denture-induced sibilant-“S.â€�
I was off to the store, dreaming of doing the cookies fast so that I could get to the dried Porcinis, which would need to be softened, rinsed and boiled all day for our mushroom soup. 
Shock and horror. There were no little yellow bags in the baking aisle. Apparently everyone in the world makes Toll House cookies at Christmas. “Go figure,”Grandma' s voice echoed defeat in my head.
There would be no Christmas without chocolate chip cookies. I bought the Ghirardelli chips (two bags!) and prayed that Virginia' s heavenly eyes were not set upon me. When I got home, I emptied the chips, jotted down the Ghirardelli cookie recipe on a note card and threw the bags away in an attempt to trick the thereafter. Maybe no one would notice.
But notice they did. These were the best chocolate chip cookies ever served up in our home. They were perfect: chewy in the middle, but still thin and very crisp around the edges. The chocolate was better—smoother, richer. I would have laughed at the “designer”implications of this “fancy”chocolate the year before. But these chips were better: stunning, even.
Yesterday I took to missing my Grandmother. I decided to make cookies my way, but with a little bit of her mixed in: I stirred by hand though the recipe called for an electric mixer, and kept out the fancy pecans.
They also reminded me of my very close friend, a happy baker named Louisa. As I stirred in the chips, I thought of her frozen cookie dough rolls. I hope she devours log upon log for her birthday.
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- Jun 13, 2008: perfect chocolate chip cookies « TASTE
I’m one of Chris’ (Isabelle’s boyfriend) colleagues and just ate one of these cookies. Let me tell you, that is one heck of a chocolate chip cookie. Chris should be fatter than he is.