batches & cookies

I like cookies. Come on.... who doesn't like cookies? They are the all-time favorite afterschool, watching TV, ruin your dinner snack. They are easy to bake at home. They are easier to buy and bring home. I remember my mom would bake cookies from a recipe... until she started buying those ready-made tubes of Toll House cookie dough. Eventually, she abandoned the whole "baking" idea and just bought cookies in a package. My brother and I were just as satisfied. We didn't care where our cookies came from. As long as there were cookies in the house.

I was always partial to a brand of cookies called Mr. Chips from a small commercial bakery called Burry. Burry supplied the Girls Scouts with their wares for their annual cookie drive until the company's Girl Scout cookie division was purchased by ABC Bakers in 1989. The remainder of the company's operations were bought by Sunshine Baking. In their heyday, Burry's made some great cookies — Fudge Town, Mr. Chips and Gauchos. They also made Scooter Pies — a large, single serving concoction comprised of two graham cookies sandwiching marshmallow filling and covered with chocolate. They were good, but we didn't have them often, Mr. Chips, however — those were always present in the Pincus household. Every so often, other cookies would make an appearance in our kitchen. My mom liked Nabisco's Oreos. She also like Fig Newtons, which I always questioned their inclusion in the cookie category. They were — as far as little Josh Pincus was concerned — fruit cakes. And they were filled with a fruit that old people ate. I would sometimes eat the cake outside and toss the innards when the cake was completely consumed. Fig Newtons had a pretty funny and memorable commercial in the 70s, featuring character actor James Harder singing and dancing dressed as a giant fig. I loved the commercial, but not enough to get me to eat a fig. As an adult, I have changed my mind.

Cookies that made it to my house were sometimes purchased by the pound at a local bakery. They were dry, crispy things covered with jimmies ("sprinkles" to those of you outside of the Philadelphia area), chocolate chips (with the chips just applied to the surface of the cookie, not integrated into the cookie itself, unlike normal cookies). Some were filled with some sort of viscous jelly made from an unidentifiable fruit. I avoided those until the more colorful ones were gone. Then, if I really wanted a cookie, I'd choke a jelly-filled one down with an extra large glass of milk.

Sometime in the 90s, places like Mrs. Field's and The Original Cookie Company started popping up in malls. Cookies — once purchased in a package containing several dozen or by the pound at a local mom-and-pop bakery — were now brazenly being offered for sale by the each. One cookie! You could buy one cookie! It was certainly larger than the cookies bought in packages at the supermarket, but it was just a cookie. Soon, these places offered large cookie sandwiches, somewhat along the lines of the Scooter Pie. Two three-inch chocolate chip cookies were stuck together with a generous mound of frosting between them. These sold for a dollar or more which, frankly at the time, was unheard of! A cookie for a dollar? Ridiculous!

Last Saturday evening, Mrs. Pincus and I had dinner with my brother and my sister-in-law (His wife. Don't think anything weird is going on). The restaurant was in a shopping center filled with upscale, somewhat pretentious shops. One of those shops was a place called Dirty Dough, an unusual choice of name for a place that sells food. Dirty Dough offers a variety of "stuffed gourmet cookies." After a dinner that kept us late (we were talking about all sorts of things), we strolled over to Dirty Dough about fifteen minutes before they locked up for the night. The young lady behind the counter was informing the customer ahead of us of their limited offerings due to the late hour. We sort-of eavesdropped as she ran down the short list of available cookies, deciding that none of the flavor combinations appealed to us. We left, half-heartedly hoping to return in the future.

We headed to a Crumbl location we passed on our way to the restaurant. Crumbl is a trendy new chain of cookie bakeries with nearly a thousand locations across the United States and Canada. Crumbl is also open until midnight and we spotted a few folks we had just seen earlier at Dirty Dough. The Crumbl experience is an interesting one. Upon entry, no employee greets you. Instead, the front counter sports several iPads displaying an intuitive, interactive menu. One can scroll though the available cookies and make selection without a single word spoken to another human being. A team of employees can be seen busily working, scurrying around ovens, mixing dough, forming cookies — but not speaking to any customers until their pre-paid order is ready to be delivered across the counter. Mrs. P and I perused the evening's cookie selections. I settled on a traditional chocolate chip cookie and my wife opted for a frosted cookie of the sugar variety. We clicked our choices, sending little digital representations of the cookies into our virtual shopping cart. Our total was revealed and payment options were displayed. Our total, by the way, was ten dollars. TEN BUCKS! For two cookies! Cookies! Baked flour, water, sugar and such. I was paying ten dollars for two cookies. Granted they were above average-sized examples, but (and I'll do the math for you) they were five dollars apiece. FOR A COOKIE!

I swiped my credit card. Not happily, but I swiped it. A few minutes later, a young lady, handed us two small pink boxes emblazoned with the Crumbl logo. I was reminded of a scene from Quentin Tarantino's 1994 sprawling neo-noir crime epic Pulp Fiction. In the scene, dimwitted hitman Vincent Vega (as played by dimwitted actor John Travolta) is questioning his boss's wife's drink choice in a themed restaurant called Jack Rabbit Slim's. Mia (played to mysterious allure by Uma Thurman) had ordered a "five dollar milkshake." Vincent, cocked his head and asks for clarification on the beverage's contents and price.

"Did you just order a five-dollar shake?," he asks, "That's a shake? That's milk and ice cream?"

"Last I heard," Mia assures him

"That's five dollars?," he presses, "You don't put bourbon in it or nothin'?"

"No." she replies.

"Just checking.," Vincent adds.

When the drinks arrive, Vincent asks to sample the "five dollar shake" in question. Mia obliges, offering her straw and assuring her tablemate that she is free of "cooties." Vincent takes a healthy sip and then another. 

"Goddamn," a surprised Vincent reports, "that’s a pretty fucking good milkshake!"

"Told ya’.," Mia replies with a knowing confidence.

"Don’t know if it’s worth five dollars," Vincent concedes, "but it’s pretty fucking good."

I wish I could have had a similar exchange with the young lady behind the counter at Crumbl. However, I don't think she would have had the same appreciation and situational relevance from a quote from a thirty year-old movie as I did.

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