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10/20/2016 12:01 AMDorie Greenspan’s first job in a professional kitchen was at the Soho Charcuterie in New York many, many years ago. She was charged with making the restaurant’s signature chocolate cake and hundreds of the restaurant’s signature cookies—and so she made cake after cake after cake and cookie after cookie after cookie.
“And I got bored,” she says.
So she swapped raisins for prunes and used Armagnac instead of whiskey and swapped in pecans for...what were the nuts she was supposed to use? She can’t even remember anymore, it was so long ago. But she does remember what happened next.
“At the end of the service, the owner called me up and said, ‘That cake.’ And I said, ‘Yes, did you like it?’ She said, ‘Yes, you’re fired.’ I was fired for creative insubordination.”
While her creativity might have gotten her fired from that job, it served her well over the course of her subsequent career as a cookbook author, during which she’s created one book after another full of recipes from the classic to the ingeniously original, all liberally seasoned with her joyful love for food and all things cooking.
Her latest volume, entitled simply Dorie’s Cookies, is a particularly playful example of Greenspan at her best. The recipes range from classic brownies to Hot-and-Spicy Togarashi Meringues, seasoned with seven-spice blend, “a remarkable blend of chili pepper and spices that manages to be hot, sweet, salty, bitter, nutty, and packed with umami.” Yet even something as basic as that brownie has a section devoted to “playing around,” that includes add-ins such as rum-raisin brownies, or ginger, or orange zest.
“I’ve tried hard to make sweets one of the major food groups. You can’t. I’ve tried,” says Greenspan, who works from kitchens in her homes in France, New York City, and Westbrook. “There’s no reason for baking, other than pleasure, other than the pleasure we get from working with basic, good ingredients, and the pleasure we get from sharing. You rarely bake for yourself. You usually bake to share with other people, and with cookies, cookies are the definition of bake and share.”
She says for all the years she’s been cooking, she’s never gotten over the excitement of seeing something come out of the oven.
Greenspan will be the featured speaker at R. J. Julia Booksellers at 768 Boston Post Road, Madison, her new cookbook in hand, on Thursday, Oct. 27 at 7 p.m. To find out more or sign up, visit www.rjjulia.com. She also will be visiting The Griswold Inn, 36 Main Street, Essex, on Saturday, Dec. 10.
Something Lovely
“Baking to me feels even more handmade than savory cooking, which I love. And so there is something really lovely about making something with your hands and then sharing that with others. I’m not really good at math, but there is one equation I do get, which is give a cookie, you get joy,” she says.
While baking cookies is something that most anyone can master, Greenspan says, it also provides the kind of pleasure that baking provides. At the same time, most cookie recipes are a little bit more forgiving than, say, a five-layer Marjolaine.
“If you have a good recipe, baking is actually easier than cooking,” Greenspan insists. “Follow the recipe and you will be successful. You don’t have to make any judgment calls. There is a certain kind of Zen quiet about baking. And the ingredients are just so lovely, even raw. There is something magical about baking with butter, flour, sugar, eggs, and transforming them.
“We bake to give pleasure to others, but we also bake for the pleasure of working with these ingredients,” she says. “And we don’t want to do it in a hurry. We might whip up a quick stir-fry, but we don’t whip up something baked. You say, ‘This afternoon I’m going to bake cookies,’ and you set aside a time so that you can enjoy the process. It’s the Zen of it. The realization of it.”
Greenspan has included cookie recipes in some of her past cookbooks, and she decided to embark upon writing an entire cookbook on cookies when somebody asked her for a collection of her favorite cookie recipes.
“It was an opportunity for me to see what I could do with cookies, how I could stretch, and I found the more I baked, the more ideas I had for cookies,” she says.
Something to Share
With all the joy that cookies—and writing a cookbook about cookies—brought to Greenspan, she decided it was time to share it.
“So I had this idea. I’m thinking every time I look at the news, it’s so bad. Right? The world is kind of wobbly right now. And here I am at home, baking these wonderful cookies. It makes me so much happier, and it makes my world seem better when I’m baking and sharing what I’m baking,” she says.
That gave her an idea to start a campaign of her very own.
“I’m asking people to bake cookies, and share them, and then post that on any form of social media, with the hashtag cookiesandkindness,” she says. “And I have been so touched by what people have done so far. Share them at home, share them at work! Take them to meetings, and make meetings better and sweeter! Cookies are kindness and I just want to encourage people to bake, bake, bake and share, share, share.”
Want to bake, bake, bake and share, share, share? Visit doriegreenspan.com/catching-up-with-cookiesandkindness-bakers to find out more about her social media campaign, and from there, you can find out more about Greenspan, her cookies, her new cookbook, and her recipes.