When I was newly married—at 19, no less— my then-husband and I moved to a farm between Binghamton and Ithaca, New York. His job was being a farmhand. Mine was reading twenty books a week, watching the one television station available, and gaining weight.

The cookies below helped wildly in that last endeavor.

We lived far from any neighbors. I was ecstatic when the farmer’s son’s wife invited me for breakfast one morning. Upon arrival, she offered me a Seven and Seven (I had no idea what that was—had it been a joint, I might have understood better,) a Pop-Tart, and a cup of depression to share.

This was my introduction to farm life.

But still, I persevered.

My life was a farmhand wife’s void. (My then-husband worked 16-hour days and became buff. I slowly morphed into the top candidate for Weight Watchers—if only one existed in Center Lisle, New York.)

At Christmas, the farmer’s wife invited me to a cookie party—where each guest brought packages of a dozen cookies to exchange with all the guests. I was excited enough to spend my weekly library visits foraging for the most exciting and exotic cookie recipes on the Binghamton library’s shelves.

The cookies I made (below) were everything I’d hoped for. They were complicated, sophisticated, and delicious and were greeted with faces of horror by the Christmas Cookie party-goers.

What were these lumpy brown things brought in by the Brooklyn Jew? I handed out my Plain Jane bags of cookies.

My library cookies might have been wearing little yarmulkes and speaking Yiddish. Every other bag of cookies was variations on the Christmas butter cookie theme, cut in the shapes of stars and Santa and decorated (Sparkles! Red and Green Sugar! Glittering Gold Balls!) with the skill of holiday-possessed Rembrandts.

Mine were minus ribbons curling down the sides of the bag, lacking color of any hue and most decidedly naked of decorative gold balls.)

My cookies looked like the homely third cousin your mother forced you to invite to the Bar Mitzvah. But, I told myself, they were the tastiest.

Thus, I entered the pantheon of family and friend recipes and attitudes, from my Aunt Irene’s casual yelling of “It’s a loser” when dinner was barely dog-worthy to my Found On The Street Brownies (the recipe, not the confection) to a grandmother’s recipe for Grandma’s Knishes that was so complicated and arcane (use top of Crisco container to measure??) that I only made them once. But boy, were they good.

Baking for Book Events

I made loaves and loaves of banana bread for my book launch party at Belmont Books.

I didn’t have an oven in my hotel room (for my out-of-town event at Forbes Library in Northampton), but my sister schlepped to an apple farm for freshly made cider donuts.

I baked dozens of Chocolate Chip Elephant ears for my Brookline Books event, and I’ll make them again for Newtonville Books this coming Tuesday (in conversation with fellow balabusta Jennifer S. Brown). She’s bringing homemade cinnamon rugelach.

I bake for the wonderful readers, friends, and family who are kind enough to come to my book events, hoping I can make memories as so many have for me.

For my neighborhood event in the Jamaica Plain library, I might attempt my French Lace cookies—the ones that began my cookie insanity and my belief that cooking is stories, cooking is a way to bring the past alive, and food is love—all of which I tried to include in my cookbook, The Comfort of Food. I wrote Comfort first for my family and then for book clubs. All the recipes, including French lace Cookies, chocolate chip elephant ears, and my tattered banana bread recipe, come with a short story, reference to how and where I found it, or the friend or relative from whom I borrowed it.