Early ovens didn’t have thermostats, hence the cookie. Back in 7th Century Persia, cakes were all the rage and cooking them required just the right oven temperature. With no needles, dials or digits as indicators, cooks would place “little cakes” in the oven as testers. Eventually, these sweet oven gauges became a prize on their own.

It goes on to add that the word cookie is actually a derivative of the Dutch koekje (-je being the singular diminuitive).   All of this is, by the way, particularly entertaining because I only recently (in the last year or so) discovered (courtesy of M.) the concept of test cookies:

Cue shot of infinite mirrors?  Though, I have to say, I’ve also made little test cakes recently as well, but being that I am in possession of  such kitchen paraphernalia as needles, dials and digits, they turn out fine and end up not as cookies but simply as itty bitty cakes. (Which then spawned the succession of itty bitty triple-layer cakes…)

Anyways, the Compendium:

Aside from the gorgeousness of the day and hungry people being fed, two things really struck me in their delicate sweetness.  One was the quiet way a few men and women would dress things up in just the smallest, simplest of ways: they would come to the counter and ask, “Well, what do you all have today?”–not unlike the way one would ask for the day’s specials at a favorite cafe.  Today was lemon chicken with noodles.  They’d ponder it for a moment before saying, with a smile, “Well, that sounds good to me!”

The other was this little girl, Lani. She couldn’t have been more than eight or nine years old. She snuck in at around four, and the regulars knew her and, after re-familiarizing her with the tally system, put her to work tallying how many meals we gave out.  She was quiet, earnest, wide-eyed and so far beyond her years in how she would make herself useful as much as she could.  Midway through serving, one of the women made a plate up for her and sat outside with her amongst some of the other guests to eat it.  Later on, she even tried to vacuum, using a machine that was nearly her height.  When we were just about done cleaning up and I was serving some of the last stragglers, she very quietly asked me if she could please also have some food for her daddy.  I packed two plates and watched her take them outside to a man who was waiting to pick her up, before she came back in and kept volunteering for more work until we were ready to leave.   She was amazing.

SEA GRAPES
by Derek Walcott

That sail which leans on light,
tired of islands,
a schooner beating up the Caribbean
for home, could be Odysseus,
home-bound on the Aegean;
that father and husband’s
longing, under gnarled sour grapes, is like
the adulterer hearing Nausicaa’s name in
every gull’s outcry.
This brings nobody peace.  The ancient war
between obsession and responsibility will
never finish and has been the same
for the sea-wanderer or the one on shore now
wriggling on his sandals to walk home, since
Troy sighed its last flame,
and the blind giant’s boulder heaved the trough from
whose groundswell the great hexameters come to the
conclusions of exhausted surf.
The classics can console.  But not enough.

THE MORE LOVING ONE
by W.H. Auden 

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

Found this lovely bit while searching my archives for some other snippet — it echoes the same sentiments as the example with artists and colors, which I once worked into a statement d’artiste for Sam Witt.

The great city, then, could not be understood as an artifact of human choice. It was much closer to a natural, organic process — less like a building that has been deliberately constructed and more like a garden erupting into full bloom with the arrival of spring — a mix of human planning and the natural developmental patterns that emerge with increasing energy supplies. — Steven Johnson

THE GIFT OUTRIGHT
Robert Frost

The land was ours before we were the land’s.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massachusetts, in Virginia,
But we were England’s, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Something we were withholding made us weak
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.
Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
To the land vaguely realizing westward,
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
Such as she was, such as she would become.

Happy new year indeed. I recently started using the glass quill and petit inkwell that the lovely Y.S. and A.L. brought me from Italy awhile back. The quill is utter brilliance — small fissures spiral around to converge at the tip, so that no matter how energetically you dunk it in, the ink flows in steady rivulets for a smooth, decidedly non-blotty line. The design also leaves you having to dip less frequenly, since the aforementioned fissures also hold some ink in reserve.

In any case, I was writing on night and upset the little inkwell, making a big black puddle on the coffee table. Fortunately, it was only a small fraction, and I was able to salvage some more using a straw (probably, if I recall correctly, because plastic and ink are slightly attractive chemically?), though I was still able to write from the remaining puddle the rest of the night. Regardless, the running-out-of-ink concept dawned, and I scrounged around for any and all places that might carry inkwells (not exactly popular nowadays, it seems), and gathered this lovely collection from a musty dusty box that the Paper Source clerks on Fillmore unearthed from some forgotten corner.

Oh, and the title comes from Lord Byron: “Words are things, and a small drop of ink, falling like dew upon a thought, produces that which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.”

Last week two of my loveliest colleagues celebrated their birthdays, and the confluence pushed me over into bake mode.  Not that that’s very difficult.  This latest concoction (another modification of the pistachio cake recipe) was three layers of macadamia nut cake, separated by layers of dark chocolate ganache and toasted coconut flakes, then frosted with the ganache all round.

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Meanwhile, a few weeks earlier, I made this one for my best friend’s surprise-but-not-quite birthday dinner: a lemon-blueberry macadamia nut cake.  The three layers here were also macadamia nut cakes (as construable from the sentence prior), but with lemon glaze and blueberry preserves in the space between, and topped with a lemon buttercream frosting (that needs to be, well, improved) and fresh blueberries.