Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
A fond farewell — with cookies
The first recipe I published was a fail. I was writing a weekly column for the Chicago Tribune Sunday magazine — not a food column, more of a ruminative ramble — and, after the World Trade Center crumbled, I tacked on a recipe for calm: chocolate-chip cookies. I made cookies regularly, ritually, obsessively, so I set down the steps in a snap.
In those anxious days, the newsroom was alert to letters laced with anthrax. No toxic dust dropped from mine, but a few were scorched with scorn. The cookies — 2 tablespoons short on flour — baked up flat. My editor clicked her sharp heels to my desk and asked if I’d submitted the recipe for testing. I gave her a dumbfounded stare.
Since then I’ve learned about recipe testing, recipe development and writing a food column, which became my job in 2004. I’ve learned to rely on a timer and a measuring tape. I’ve learned to keep notes. I’ve learned that no one wants to track down membrillo or churn ice cream.
I took the job — terrified. I’d read about a recipe in another magazine that had combusted “like Napalm.” Most writing, I realized, is captured by the eyes and settles in the mind; food writing slides down the throat and settles in the stomach. Best if it doesn’t explode. I opened a fresh document and titled it “A Year of Sundays.” Now 116 pages, it details 15 years of Sundays — first-dance dumplings, summer-camp shrimp, emptynest noodles.
Along the way, newspapers changed. The column moved from a glossy magazine spread to a compressed newsprint layout. My work changed, paring down to plainer prose and simpler recipes. Even my cookies changed — now they’re warmed by browned butter and bristle bittersweet.
Readers still correspond, more often online than on paper, sending recipes, reminiscences and, once, a contraption that sticks a bowl to the countertop. I appreciate them all — except the death threat that followed a story about stone soup.
This is my final “Home on the Range,” but not goodbye. You can find my work in other publications, online at leaheskin.com and in my book “Slices of Life: A Food Writer Cooks Through Many a Conundrum.”
Thank you. I’ll miss writing, and cooking, for you.