Cooky vs. Cookie

As a kid, I loved to flip through my family’s cookbooks, especially the ones made just for children, dreaming about what it would be like to make the exotic-sounding dishes inside. I was always quite shy about asking my parents to buy the ingredients for fancy cakes or elaborate main dishes, but I’d find myself scouring the cupboards to scrounge up most of the ingredients for a side here, a snack there, or my interpretation thereof.

My scavengeresque style and reluctance to try the most complicated recipes certainly carry on today — you’ll see that most of my cooking involves only a few main ingredients and few elements, other than seasonings, that are unfamiliar even to the most basic of American meat-centric home cooks. I love to read about foreign and fabulous eating and preparation, but I’m still a little bit scared to put my money, and my skills, where my imagination and, well, my mouth are.

I loved that this book provided me with my very own set of measuring spoons. What a geek!

Today I was reminded of one of the classics of my, and my mother’s, childhood, the “Betty Crocker’s Cook Book for Boys and Girls”/ “Betty Crocker New Boys and Girls Cook Book.” In addition to the literary-oriented “Wond’rous Fare,” which grabbed recipes straight from the pages of children’s classics (and from which I never made a single dish), and Klutz Press’ silly “Kids Cooking: A Very Slightly Messy Manual,” among about a dozen others, I read every single recipe, top to bottom, imagining the dishes and the cooking process as though it held the mystery a scene straight out of a witch’s den.

None of my classmates looked like these kids.

One of the great elements of the Betty Crocker manual was that it included a panel of uppity-looking kid testers whose comments guided you throughout the book, when mom’s recollection of the time she made that castle cake  just wasn’t enough for me.

Well, it turns out a writer for Gourmet had some of the same questions little me did about this book. A true child of the ’90s, quite a bit younger than the writer of this piece, I didn’t trust a boy with such an uppity crew cut to tell me the merits of things like milk with maple syrup in it (perfect for lumberjacks) or a loaf of canned ham with pineapple on top. Read Missy Ketchum’s tale of the kid testers for more information.

Look, a cake shaped like something! A "salad" made of canned fruit and raisins! Something, anything covered in heavy cream!

Curious about the title? It was a question that plagued me for some time. Older cookbooks seem divided on whether the singular of everybody’s favorite hand-held chocolate chip snack was “cooky” or “cookie.” In the days when our family’s copy of the Betty Crocker children’s book was printed, it was “cooky” for one, “cookies” for more. Just goes to show you can’t always trust an artificial homemaker to be grammatically infallible, I guess.

Oh my goodness. Please don't look in the upper-right corner.

See, I told you there were bunnies made of canned pears. Would YOU eat that crap? No. But it sounded so nifty and quaint and unusual to me, I still kind of wondered what it’d be like to make it.