JOY ALONG THE WAY: COOKIE SUPPLY TIME COMING UP

I'm coming down with cookie fever. I caught it in the grocery store while watching assorted sized and aged women putting things into their grocery carts. Here in one cart was a box of brown sugar, a package of coconut, an assortment of spices. I wheeled my cart, dangerously, around a corner. I had to have those things too. In another cart I saw chocolate chips and nuts. How could I make holiday cookies without them? Another swift flight to the proper aisles.

At the check-out lane I saw the lady ahead of me plop down some candied fruit including a carton of citron. Now I was beginning to feel hot and light-headed. How could I have forgotten the citron? How could I make my lebkuchens without citron? Why hadn't I made a list? Now I had to lose my place in line. Oh dear, cookie fever slows a person's progress through the already crowded stores.

I have a sometimes tiresome compulsion of wondering where and when cookies started. There are hundreds of cookie recipe books, but does any of them give a history of cookies? None of my cookbooks did, nor encyclopedias. I didn't have the nerve to call my always-on-the-ball research librarian and say I wanted a book on the history of cookies, especially when the first one was made.

There are the old tales about how the ocean got salty. I guess that errant machine is still grinding away somewhere in Neptune's watery regions. And, of course, the story of the pig that got roasted in an accidental fire tells us about the first pork roast. Why aren't there any fairy tales anymore? (Pardon me, Dr. Seuss). I bet if the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen were alive they could tell about the first cookie. Teachers, why not have your young pupils give their written version about it this year?

Being bereft of such history, I turned to the cookie section of Rombauer's "Joy of Cooking" to see what I could glean. In speaking of tough, tight, honey and molasses doughs (that's my lebkuchens), Rombauer says a good leavening is carbonate of ammonia. Ammonia? Isn't that what I have a bottle of down in a lower cabinet among my cleaning supplies? And didn't it, combined with a fertilizer, help blow up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City? I didn't want my cookies to rise that high.

There was that word, carbonate, in front of ammonia as Rombauer used it, and if I were a chemistry student the hair on my arms wouldn't have stood so erect. Still, I'm going to use good old Arm and Hammer and Clabber Girl for my leavening agents.

This year my new snowflake cookie cutter will join those of the gingerbread family, the heart, the clover leaf, the butterfly, etc. They're already resting in the old blue crock atop a kitchen counter, reminding me daily of the pleasant days ahead.

The lebkuchens come first, for they just get better with age. Rombauer says you can bake the strings for hanging right into the cookies. I may do a few this year, suspend them from the porch ceiling to see what the birds think of them and see how they can get at them. Last year I hung a string of gumdrops for them and they didn't even make a cursory inspection. Maybe I'll stick a toothpick through a lebkuchen for a landing place.

My fever has abated and I'm gaining strength for the first bake-off, scheduled tentatively for December 1st.

REJOICE!

~Jean Bell Mosley is an author and longtime columnist of the Southeast Missourian.