Cooking as Remembrance: Sasha

Everyone who cooks has at least one recipe that has some memory attached to it. We make "mom's pot roast," or "Nana's tomato sauce," "Aunt Jill's latkes," and so on and so forth. Even if the final product is not that good, we make them because the invoke spirits for us: spirits of the past, spirits of memories, spirits of feeling "at home" with whomever the recipe reminds us of.

I have many of those. Nana's tomato sauce is one of them. Then there are things I made years ago with Richard Sax. Or dishes that I made FOR someone, or some party , that stand out in my mind. As the holiday rush is upon us, and I am fully committed to the craziness that is cookies (35 varieites down, and counting!!!), I recall "Sasha's cookies."

Sasha was one of my first cats. Back in 1982, after I had moved into my first apartment (a studio apartment, on the Upper East Side), I decided I needed a cat. Knowing that I'm a softie when it comes to animals, I called my friend Mary McClain, to ask her to come with me to the shelter because, in my words "if I go alone, I will come back with a litter of kittens. I want ONE CAT Mary. Not six kittens. ONE CAT."

We went to the shelter and I looked around, and finally, I found "the one." It wasn't Sasha. It was a gorgeous, golden haired tabby kitten, three months old, who just stole my heart. He was in a cage with another, sort of nondescript, black and white cat who didn't really do anything for me. But the identifying card for that other cat had written on it "go down" followed by the next day's date. I asked the volunteer if that meant what I thought it did, and it did: the kitty would be put to sleep the next day.

OK, so what would you do? I looked at Mary, and she looked away. I looked at the volunteer, and SHE looked away. So in typical smart ass NY fashion I said "do I get a volume discount?" In fact I did, so I said "alright, wrap them up, I'll take them both." On the way home, Mary was rubbing my arm, reminding me that it was Yom Kippur and I had just done a mitzvah, a good deed.

The kitties and I got home. The tabbly, whom I named Nijinsky, ran under the sofa and I almost never saw him for three months, except at dinner time. The other one, on the other hand, followed me to the kitchen. I was making sauce and I spilled some on the floor. He came over and ate it. And looked at me for more. So I put some on Italian bread and fed him. And he ate that.

This, like in the Bogart movie "was the start of a beautiful friendship." Sasha, as I called him, came as close to being a best friend as any cat can. If I were sick and had to stay in bed, Sasha stayed in bed with me. He always seemed to know when I was lonely, and would just park himself in my lap and purr. When he was thinner, he used to sit on my shoulder, like a parrot, and meow , as if he knew he was supposed to make bird noises. My less kind friends would refer to him as my "familiar." Maybe they were right.

Well, Sasha was never a very healthy cat, but he possessed an incredible will to live. I've never had another cat with that fighting spirit. After 16 years, he gave up the ghost, and it is STILL hard. I DO feel that he's still with me.

He died in December, 1998, as I was making cookies. Before the end came, he had to have some emergency, risky surgery, and I was doing what I always do when I'm nervous: I was cooking. I was baking cookies. And I had a recipe on my counter, that was a cookie that needed to be baked while the dough was cold. As I was prepping the cookies, the phone rang. It was the vet calling to tell me that the surgery was a success, and Sasha was in recovery. I was on the phone for a while, and when I got back to the kitchen, the dough had gotten to room temperature. I was too exhausted to chill it, and start, so I baked it warm. And if it wasn't the "right cookie," it was a good cookie.

Unfortunately, there were complications, and Sasha died a few days later. But the cookie remains. Interestingly enough, when it's finished baking, it has a brown and white pattern on it, not unlike Sasha's coat did. So I called these cookies "Sasha's."

Full disclosure too. I was so overwrought the night that I first made these, that I had forgotten how I had worked the dough. And since that first batch, I have never been able to get them completely right. I think I have now. The original recipe calls for ground nuts, but also says that you could leave these out, because kids don't like nuts. What I must have realized at the time, and then forgot, was that if you take out the nuts, you have to add something to replace it to give the cookie body. That's what I did this time, and the cookies worked better than they ever did.

I did not let the dough sit, but there were several batches. It seemed to both me and my partner, that the later batches were lighter than the first ones. So keep that in mind. It might be a good idea to leave the dough to sit for an hour or so before baking it. The cookies bake up really fast, so they're a good "last minute" cookie. Try them, and think of my baby Sasha, as I do whenever I make them.

This makes a Lot of cookies. You'll need 3-4 cups of flour (less for lighter, more for heavier cookies), 2 teaspoons of baking powder, and 1/2 a teaspoon of salt, mixed together and put aside.

Then in a saucepan, combine a stick and a half of unsalted butter, melted, with 3/4 cup of cocoa, 2 cups of sugar, and a tablespoon of vanilla. Stir this until it's combined. Then add four eggs, one at a time.

Stir in your flour, probably in thirds or fourths. This makes a very heavy dough, so you can use a mixer if you like (I eventually did, it was getting too tiring). When the color is uniform, you're done.

Roll up one inch balls and put them on parchment lined baking sheets. Preheat your oven to 350, and when the oven is heating up, dunk each ball of dough into confectioner's sugar. Cover it completely. Then bake the trays for eight minutes, and let them cool.

As the cookies bake and cool, they will "crackle." The sugar will melt in a non-uniform way, and you'll see why they were oringally called "cocoa snowflakes," because no two of them look alike.

I got about 70 cookies out of this. If you make them smaller, of course, you'll get more. I wouldn't try making them bigger. The cookies don't expand much when they bake, so you won't have "in the oven colllisions" but the size that you get with the one inch is just fine. And the flavor is very strong, and very rich, and it's better to eat a whole, smaller cookie, than to be confronted with the half that you can't eat.

I hope you try them. And I hope you have your own recipes that remind you of people, places or things, and that you'll share them with me, or anyone else. It's a way of keeping connected to people and things that aren't right "there" anymore