Katherine Reback

The thing I remember most about baking oatmeal cookies when I was 8 years old was that the bottoms always burned.  Even if you faithfully followed the recipe on the back of the Quaker Oats box to a tee, which I absolutely did, when you pulled the sheet out of the oven, slid your spatula under that first lightly browned mound and peered hopefully at its underside, all you got was burned.

Over the years, I tried greasing the pan and not greasing the pan. I used the milk, I didn’t use the milk, I sifted and then I didn’t.  I lowered the oven temperature, baked them on the bottom rack, the upper rack, a shorter time, a longer time.   But no matter what I did or didn’t do, the outcome was the same: rear ends black as coal.  There was just no justice.  And you know what they say:  No justice, no oatmeal cookie. 

So I moved on:  to sublime Viennese Butter Crescents, (butter, finely chopped walnuts, more butter, a relatively small amount of sugar, and flour, mixed together with your fingers very gently til the dough forms tiny, pea-sized balls which you shape into crescents, bake in a slow oven and roll, still warm, in powdered sugar in which you had previously soaked a pulverized vanilla bean); to perfecting my calling-card Chocolate Chip Cookies; to tender, flaky Rugalach, and to learning the secret of making the greatest Brownies ever (remove pan from oven and immediately place into an ice bath til absolutely cool).  I was happy.  Life was sweet.  You couldn’t pay me to bake an oatmeal cookie.

“Ouch,” my husband groaned miserably as something metal jabbed him in the side.  “It’s like sleeping on a motorcycle.” It is 1:30 in the morning and we are still wide awake.   

You have to admit the intention was admirable:  Joan, my father’s girlfriend, had insisted they buy this pull-out couch specifically for us, specifically for visits like this one.

The week before, my father had been diagnosed with early Alzheimer’s.  When I got the call, a chill snaked through my bones, so powerful that for a moment I couldn’t breathe. “It could go slow,” I was told, “it could go fast, or it could stay the same for the rest of his life.  No one knows.”  I was not comforted.

“You know I’m losing my memory,” my father said over dinner the December night we arrived in Palm Beach.

I nodded.  It was hard to know what to say.  “How old are you now?” I asked him, “89 1/2?”

“No.  I’ll be 89 1/2 in February,” he responded, clear as a bell and sublimely accurate.

“89 1/2 in February,” I repeated.  “And in all those years, the only thing that’s ever been wrong with you is that occasionally your back goes out?”

“That would be about right,” said my father.

“I’m sorry you’re losing your memory, Dad.  But we would all kill to be you.” 

He beamed.  He nodded.  He knew he’d been damn lucky.

The day after Governor Clinton announced his candidacy for President outside The Old State House in Little Rock, Arkansas, Mickey Kantor, a friend of my then-boyfriend, called and asked if I would advance the Governor at 7:00 the next morning.  The Clintons, Bruce Lindsay, and a friend of theirs from Colorado, who pretty much made up the entire campaign, were coming to Los Angeles where Governor Clinton was to be a guest on Michael Jackson’s radio show. All I knew about him was that he could not stop talking when he delivered the keynote address at the Democratic convention in 1988 and I wasn’t at all sure that he would be my candidate.  I said no.  No.  No.  No.  Absolutely not.

At 6:30 the following morning, I found myself driving down La Cienega to KABC Talk Radio.  In what would become the norm, The Governor arrived forty minutes late.  I rushed him into Michael Jackson’s studio, hustled the others to the green room, got a Styrofoam cup of tea out of a machine (elegantly appointed KABC was not,) and set it down in front of the Governor.

I closed the door behind me and listened to the call–ins.  Every one of the Governor’s responses was clear, empathic, and incredibly smart.

I began writing openers for him almost immediately and in September 1991, I was sent to Little Rock to work out of Clinton Campaign Headquarters.  I was excited. I was a Northern girl who’d dreamed of the South ever since I saw “Gone With the Wind.”

This recipe, which originally appeared in the NY Times in 1973 in an article by Jean Hewitt, was featured by Amanda Hessler in her ‘Recipe Redux’ piece in the November 4, 2007 Times Magazine.  It looked scrumptious and easy so I tore it out, as I do with many NY Times recipes, and put it aside.  “Aside” is also where I put the card the secretary in my Dentist’s office handed me to remind me of my next appointment.  It’s where the little yellow rectangular stub the shoemaker gave me without which I can’t get my shoes back went.  And it is also where the Gelson’s receipt, on the back of which I had illegibly scrawled the title of a song I heard on the car radio that would be perfection playing over a scene in the screenplay I was working on before we went on strike, was moved.  You can pretty much take it to the bank that whatever is put there will never see the light of day again.   Aside, as it turns out, is my own personal Bermuda Triangle.

But, as luck would have it, a week or two after this recipe ran, I came across a Letter To The Editor in the NY Times Magazine from a woman whose name I can’t remember. (I can almost promise you I put it aside.)  In it, she says she’s been making Teddie’s Apple Cake consistently since her sorority days (apparently some time ago, she indicated) but with certain changes.  To cut the sweetness, she replaced some of the white sugar with brown, she added more vanilla, more and different kinds of raisins and 2 times the amount of apples.