February 14, 2014
The card for My Man Cookies harkens back to a pre-Feminine Mystique era when a woman might have proudly referred to her spouse as My Man. These are cookies Daisy Mae might announce to all the males in hollering distance with a hog call and a stomp of her work boots. These are not the cookies Hillary Clinton would bake for Bill.
These cookies remind me of how my sister and I used to bother boys, when we weren’t annoying each other, with crazed outbursts of “It’s a MAAAYAAAHHHNNN!” “I’ve found me a MAAAAAYAAAAHHHHNNN!” we’d holler, waving our arms and cackling like demented chickens as we tackled any brother or boy who strayed onto our property, to the ground, where we proceeded to swish our long hair in their faces and tickle them silly.
At the time it was a joke, but it wasn’t a joke. Little girls in the late 1950s and early 1960s still believed women were supposed to find themselves a MAAAAAYAAAAHHHHNNN, or else. Like far too many marriages from that era, the cookies sounded dull: oatmeal, nuts, coconut, sugar, and Crisco dropped onto a baking sheet. Coming out of the oven they looked as boring as I feared they would: browned lumps all in a row.
Then I bit into one.
Despite the list of exceedingly modest ingredients, they were surprisingly good: rough on the outside, tender on the inside. They were solid, substantial, and nutritious, a cookie for a hard day’s work. Not too sweet and far from pretty, any cookie connoisseur might easily overlook them. They didn’t evoke rich and delicate realms of buttery wealth, like a financier cookie. They weren’t playful, like a pinwheel cookie, or seductive like a chocolate dipped Florentine, or charming like a jam daubed, nut encrusted thumbprint cookie. These are not cookies to dress up a cookie tray, or dream about, or crave. These are humble, plain cookies, which I approached with lowered expectations, but since trying, have placed permanently in my cookie repertoire.
My Man Cookies remind me of the solid, straightforward men of my family, rough exteriors with unexpectedly soft sides. By rough, I mean the varying degrees of crankiness enjoyed by the long line of grumps on both sides of my family tree. That tree, right over there, high on that western ridge, with leaves rustling explosively, curses and shouts coming forth, the occasional sound of fisticuffs, and a few barbed jokes flung for good measure: Those are My Men.
They might be your men as well. Men throughout the ages have been notoriously cranky. Indeed, all creatures are cranky sometimes. Consider bees, or wasps, or Tasmanian devils. But Homo sapiens made cranky work for them. Just ask the Neanderthals.
My maternal grandfather, may his stoic soul rest in peace, was a notorious crank, a hot-tempered Kansas farmer–turned–civil engineer capable of verbal, if not physical abuse. According to family legend, he had such a hard time getting along with others, he retired in his forties from civil engineering, where he specialized in reinforced concrete. In his fifties, and right after he’d raised and married off both a son and a daughter in Northern California, he and my grandmother moved to Southern California, in Santa Ana, to live in a bungalow and tend a few acres of orange groves he’d inherited from his parents.
According to my late uncle, who battled with his father when he was a young man, during one particularly bad year for oranges, my grandfather received a bill rather than a payment from the orange processing plant. Enraged, he jumped onto his tractor and tore out every one of his fruit trees. I call that a cranky man. Today, he might be diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome or borderline personality disorder, and treated with therapy and medication. If he hadn’t been a good Methodist, he might have been a drunk. But he wasn’t: he was a crank.
My grandmother looks like a jolly woman in all the photos of them together. Maybe when grandpa’s temper rose, she popped him a My Man Cookie to calm him the heck down. Maybe these are medicinal and conciliatory cookies.
my man cookies
½ cup white sugar
½ cup brown sugar
½ cup shortening
1 egg
1 cup fl our
½ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon baking soda
1 cup quick cooking oats
½ cup coconut
½ cup nuts
1 teaspoon vanilla
Yields 25 cookies teaspoon size or size of a walnut in shell.
Cream sugars and shortening. Beat in egg. Add flour, salt, baking powder, and baking soda. Blend in oats, coconut, nuts, and vanilla. Bake in 350° oven for 15 minutes.
Note: Recipe originally called for H-O Quick Cooking Oats, a name brand from the 1950s. I have successfully substituted coconut oil for the “shortening,” which back then meant Crisco.
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