THE STORY OF THE COOKIE STORY

A few years ago my mom started telling the cookie story. It is a story of a slightly humorous minor misunderstanding.  After the fourth or fifth time I asked her to stop telling it, because for one thing she remembered it differently from the way I did and every time I heard it I had to decide whether I ought to tell my side of it or just let it go, and for another thing a funny thing I did when I was a kid is kind of embarrassing for a greybearded old coot to have to keep having stuck in his face forty years later.  I record here for digital posterity the story of the cookie story as I remember it, which is probably considerably different from the way it really happened.  What we really need to do is have my mom and sister write up their versions and do a whole Rashomon thing on it.  So here goes:


My mom found a cookie recipe she wanted to try out and they turned out pretty well.  We liked them quite a bit.  The recipe makes a huge batch, about eight dozen cookies, and that can last a family of three a pretty long time.  We liked them enough that when we finished them, Mom made them again right away.  They are good cookies, really good, but weeks and weeks of the same cookie gets kind of wearing on a kid.  I thought once this batch was finished I could get her to make something different.  The problem was getting those cookies eaten up, so when my friend Robert would come over I would give him a whole lot of them, as many as he could carry in both hands, and soon they were gone.  Problem solved.  Except I came home that fine summer afternoon to find Mom had just finished baking another gigantic batch of those same cookies.  "They disappeared so quickly that I knew you really like them so I made you some more," is what I imagine her saying.  That is really all there is to that story except for my shocking confession.  


I made a version of those cookies today and they are really good.  I made minor substitutions, but here is the recipe as I got it from my mom:



Pioneer Home Cookies 
1 cup white sugar

1 cup brown sugar

1 cup margarine (cubes not tub) (1/2 pound)

1 cup salad oil

1 egg

pinch of salt

1/2 teaspoon almond extract

1/2 teaspoon vanilla

1 teaspoon soda dissolved in 1 tablespoon sour milk or cream

1 teaspoon cream of tarter

3-1/2 cups flour

1 cup oatmeal

1 cup cornflakes

1 cup coconut

1/2 cup chopped nuts

Drop by teaspoon on greased cookie sheet then press flat with glass dipped in sugar.
Bake 350 degrees for 10 minutes until light brown.

I made a half recipe, using butter instead of margarine, and baking powder instead of the soda/tartar - it's the same thing. I added another tablespoon of flour to make up for the wetness of a whole egg in a half recipe.  I keep rolled whole barley, rye and oats in the house rather than oatmeal and used more of that instead of the coconut.  I crunched up some Rice Chex in place of the corn flakes, but you could use more oatmeal for that too if you like.  Using both oil and butter makes them very light and crisp, but it also stays in your mouth a bit, which may be why I got tired of them.  It says drop by teaspoon, and that is not a measuring teaspoon but a regular spoon. They are very soft when first out of the oven but they harden up after about a minute and they don't clamp onto the pan, so you can let them sit for a minute before taking them off.  When you try a new recipe for the first time always do one test cookie first just so you can see what they are going to do.  I use a little metal pie pan for that. Here is what four dozen Pioneer Home Cookies look like:

There is the story and there are the cookies.  Now my story is ended.

MAID IN HOLLYWOOD - Daisy Bufford

Meet Daisy Bufford.  She was in 28 movies from 1927 to 1944, including Gone With the Wind and Cabin in the Sky, and played eleven maids.  Here she is in Naughty But Nice (1939), with Ann Sheridan. 

 

 Her main function in the story is to bring heavily spiked drinks to Dick Powell, and express astonishment when he sucks them down like lemonade, which is what he thinks they are.

Extreme astonishment.  To be fair, she is not the only person in the film who displays, through facial expression, extreme astonishment at that character's drinking habits.

Here she is in a non-maid role in Nobody's Baby (1937) a B comedy starring Patsy Kelly.  She is informing Robert Armstrong that she is not the woman in a taxicab that he is looking for.  The fact that she is black was meant to add comic effect to the mistaken identity.

MOVIES

I am probably the only person you know who even knows who Wheeler and Woolsey are.  I never let an opportunity to watch a Wheeler and Woolsey movie escape me.  They just crack me up.  Peach-O-Reno (1931) is as good as any of them.  Their usual girl foil, squeaky cute jazz-baby Dorothy Lee, is joined by Zelma O'Neal who can be seen at the end of the I Want to be Bad clip from Follow Thru, posted below.  Peach-O-Reno is a divorce farce, a popular subject for many years, until the code clamped down, and Bert Wheeler has an extended sequence, including a musical number, in drag.  Looks pretty good too.  That's all, I just like to post these drag shots when I get a chance.

OLD GARDEN CART

Goodbye to the old garden cart.  I got this for five dollars when I was just starting to work in the garden.  It had been patched, repaired and rebuilt.  It was extremely heavy, and when fully loaded with compost it was topheavy too.  The old plywood addition finally started rotting away and it had been a couple of years since I had used it.  Then I saw a simple cart design that inspired me to finally tear it apart.  I had to break a couple of bolts with a cold chisel, and saw through a couple of things, but mostly it was pretty easy.  I'm going to see what I can put together using only the lumber I have on hand, mostly scrap and leftovers, re-using the old wheels to make a long narrow cart with solid bottom and sides that I can shovel stuff into and tip it out of.

So that is what I did this morning, took apart the old cart.  And made cookies.  Not very good ones though, kind of bland, dry and cakey from a 1940s recipe.

MAID IN HOLLYWOOD - Libby Taylor

For decades if there was a woman of color in a Hollywood movie, there was only one, and she was the maid.  It was a common and necessary role but often required the actresses to play dumb, and be confused or frightened, for comic effect.  The actresses who played maids rarely had a chance at a decent role, and I think they deserve a bit more recognition for what little they were allowed to contribute.

Meet Elizabeth A. "Libby" Taylor. Libby Taylor appeared in 60 movies, features and shorts, from 1932 to 1953. She played 35 maids, and was rarely credited onscreen. Here she is in Hollywood Hotel (1937).

Conspiring with Allyn Joslyn.

Her function in the story is mainly to take a couple of telephone calls.

"He can't come up here, we ain't home!"

Here she is with Bette Davis in the closing scenes of  Satan Met A Lady (1936), uncredited even in the Internet Movie Database, although she has a couple of lines.

HATE VIRUS

TITANIC SECRET ORIGINS

This is a shot of a hallway set from Forbidden World (1982), Roger Corman's Alien ripoff.  Note that the walls are lined with takeout boxes below, and bulk egg cartons above.  According to Beverly Gray's biography of Corman this technique was developed by the art director for the 1980 Star Wars ripoff Battle Beyond the Stars (still one of my favorite SF movies - I used to watch it once a year).  "He had everyone collecting styrofoam containers from McDonald's hamburgers - when spraypainted silver, these looked impressive lining the walls of a spacecraft.  ...if the actor should turn around quickly and slam into the wall, the whole thing would crumble.  Then you had to go back and get more boxes."  That art director was 26 year old James Cameron, and thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of people are watching his movie Titanic at the moment I am writing this.  That's how he got his start, gluing McDonald's boxes to the wall of a spaceship set.  Or so the story goes.