Date:	11-10-95 09:20:14 PM
Subject:	cookies
     			                       
I have finally convinced myself that the quality and attractiveness of 
cookies are the universal guages of a culture's merit and world-class-
ness.  

Let's face it:  cookies are hard to get right, and they are also quite
variable from culture to culture.  I've just come back from a trip that
proves this in spades, and if you'll extend the point of comparison to
muffins and other sweet baked goods the evidence is incontrovertible.

Cookies vary from venue to venue, and the circumstances and context of
cookie cuisine are telling.  Conventions, trade-shows, and conferences
serve cookies in abundance, but the individual cookies are not expected
to be an example of the highest art.  These, and the store-bought kind,
are industrial-strength variety that are meant to be consumed in 
abundance without much thought.  They are meant to be an attractive 
accompaniment to coffee or tea.  But even in this most functional form, 
telling differences are easily noted.

The cookies of Asia, as with the deserts, must be sumptuous indeed to the
locals.  Because I cannot conceive of any earthly reason they'd make 
them the way they do for foreigners.  Japanese cookies, donuts, and 
muffins are usually quite pasty, not sweet, and flavorless if you are 
lucky.  Or, if you are not, they have the faintest hint of industrial 
solvent and subtle calamari flavors.  To quote Dave Barry, I am not 
making this up.  The cookies of China, Taipei, and Hong Kong are 
similarly unimaginative, and they appear to have not heard about chocolate 
yet.  The cookies of Beijing did, quite appropriately, taste like they 
had been left out to cool on the window-ledge all day--dusted with dirt 
blown in from the Gobi desert and the soot of unspeakable smog.

The cookies of Australia are mystifying in their numbing tastelessness.
This is a culture that for generations has lost its teeth to the sumptuous 
sweets of English candymongers, and the cooks obviously know from 
the picture-books that cookies are supposed to have flecks of something 
flavorful in them. But a bite into the husk of their biscuits is as a munch 
on white flour. Even the chocolate ones are only faintly flavorful. 

Oh for the cookies of Italy and France!  These are cultures that brought
stone churches to their highest art, these are the ones who know how to
make a caffe latte machiato that will make your tounge curl in anxious
anticipation of gli biscotti. These are the cuisines that carry you on the 
grandest flights of calorific fantasy (i.e., you-can-eat-this-and-yet-not-
balloon-to-twice-your-size-over-the-years). 

And the cookies of the good old USA--my god, we're not just good for Levi's, 
Rock and Roll, and software--the finest range of cookies by far.  It's not 
just that Peperidge Farm remembers, it's that every street-corner and mall 
has a Mrs. Field's clone.  It's not just that we have cute songs about them
("Animal Crackers in my Soup") or a Boston suburb named after them (Newton,
MA), or even a medicine formulated from them (Oreo-myacin).  It's that
we've converted most of our breakfast cerials into micro-cookies and have
preserved the real cookie as the last bastion of innocent fun.  Nothing else
in our culture has survived the onslaught of sexual permeation, no other
amusement is as unadulterated by political correctness or health consciousness.

So it is that the humble cookie is the true measure of a civilization.
The well-thought-out chewy cookie shows intellectual depth.  The well-executed
crunchy cookie is the hallmark of mass free-dried fun, and business prowess.  
The seductiveness of gooey cookie dough reflects the passion, emotion, and 
power of a people seething with vital hormonal secretions.  

Need I say more about my homeland and its true achievements?