Sunday Procrasti-baking: How Cookies are My Love Language
On Sundays, I bake, flipping through the shelf full of cookbooks in the kitchen, most given to me as gifts, looking for something new to try. I could just search for recipes online, but for some reason, cracking open a cookbook, hearing the spine creak, reading the inscription on the fly leaf, and flipping through the pages, some slightly sticky, some dusted in flour, some dog-eared, just feels better. It’s a ritual, and Sundays are for rituals and repetition and rites.
Sundays are also for grading papers, answering emails, prepping for the week’s classes, setting times for committee meetings, reviewing notes, and making sure the machinery of the week can run smoothly in the face of the many crises, some small, some big, that will inevitably get in the way of doing grading or class prep during actual the work week. I picture my colleagues doing this on Sundays, too, the prep, the slight panics, the pulling together of the self to be fully present for students, for peers, for administrators. This, too, is a ritual, a mental walk through the week to make sure all the necessary pieces are in place.
On Sundays, I bake. This Sunday, I try something different from Tartine: A Classic Revisited, that my brother-in-law sent for my birthday last week. He’s a champion of my baking, putting up with photo after photo of my quest to make the perfect chocolate chip cookie, making all the right appreciative comments, and, now, throwing this new challenge in front of me. I flip through the book; it’s fancy, with its matte photos of gorgeous baked goods: tartes, brioche, pies, several things that I know I can’t even pronounce, much less recreate. I settle on Tartine Francoises, which are like Pepperidge Farm Milano cookies, my absolute favorite as a kid (okay, totally my favorite now, too). The recipe is blessedly simple, and I get started.
Butter. Sugar. Rice Flour. Salt. Cornstarch. Chocolate. More butter. All of these separate pieces coming together. I check the recipe multiple times, running through the mise en place. This is my Sunday ritual, a mental walk through the recipe to make sure all the pieces are in place.
For me, as a child, ritual was found in going to Mass for our Sunday obligation, observing the rites, the speaking of prayers, the breaking of bread, the symbolic sharing of a meal with a congregation. I often thought of the red leather bound book that the priest laid on the altar table during the consecration as a cookbook: here is a recipe for the Sunday mass, here is the recipe for All Soul’s Day, here is how to forgive sins.
I’ve often wanted every aspect of my life laid out with the ease of a cookbook or the divine organization that I imagined must rest in that leather bound holy book. I think of these things as I bake, measuring out the proper volume of the various flours in the cookie dough, quick tempering the chocolate in a bain marie.
There is no inherent holiness in this cookie, its component pieces being enthusiastically beaten through the whirring of the mixer. I check the recipe again; the book tells me I will have 44 cookies, plenty to take to work to banish the Monday-blues. I glance at the book again, following the recipe exactly, but also knowing that sometimes, even when I do follow it exactly, it just doesn’t work.
The book tells me to switch off the mixer for the final few steps, carefully folding in the last ingredients by hand, trying to be as delicate as possible while imagining 44 beautiful cookies headed into work with me tomorrow.
On Sundays, I bake, partly because focusing on defined steps is freeing amid the chaos of teaching and of life, and partly because if we can buy into love languages, mine is baked goods. I like emailing my colleagues on Monday morning offering them something other than a meeting request, another initiative, another thing to add to the To-Do list, another Reply-all nightmare, another student in crisis.
On Sundays, I bake because baking is my ritual and, for me, rituals are shared.
I pull the last tray of cookies out of the oven. I’m terrible at math and find myself with 87 little cookies to be made into chocolate sandwiches instead of the promised 44, but they are delicate and crumbly, and, although not beautiful, acceptable enough to share at work.
On Sundays, I bake to remind myself that even when I do follow the book to the letter, it never turns out quite like the picture, but that’s okay.
On Sundays, I bake because baking is a bringing together of pieces, a validation, a blessing.
On Sundays, I bake because we all deserve something sweet.
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