Two weeks before things fell apart, I decided to make cookies. It was almost Christmas – the first Christmas in 30 years I would be spending away from home. I hadn’t lived in Louisville for a decade (not counting my postcollege internship at Actors Theatre of Louisville), but each year I had managed to make it back to Kentucky for the holidays, except this year. This year I was in a one-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles with my boyfriend Steve and our Netflix subscription. We had been in LA for three months and my quarter-life crisis was in full swing: the uncertainty about my future, the conviction that all prior success had been a fluke, the Facebook-fueled jealousy binges. Also, we were underemployed and broke.
The apartment itself wasn’t bad. We loved the faux wood floors and the sturdy table-cum-desk we rescued from the street outside our building. We had even tried our best to decorate. Steve hung up his faded Orioles pennants and I stuck a Kentucky Wildcats T-shirt on the wall with thumbtacks. I kept talking about going to the 99 cents store to buy a tabletop Christmas tree, but I never did. It seemed like a monumental task. It turns out the Zoloft commercials are right. Everything seems like a monumental task when you’re depressed. All there is to do is think. And think I did. I asked myself over and over: “What will save me? What will save me? What will save me?” And the answer kept coming back: “Home.”
* * *
Whenever I get carded in Louisville, the carder always asks: “Grisanti – like the restaurant Grisantis?” The answer is, “Yes.” “Yes, my grandfather was Ferd.” “Yes, one of my cousins went to high school with you.” “Yes, my parents grow garlic in the backyard and keep industrial-sized tins of olive oil in the house.” My first favorite food was veal Parmesan and every Christmas one or another of my uncles makes Befana cookies – hard, anise-laced sugar cookies which are good for dunking in coffee or tea. La Befana, the legend goes, is a nice witch who comes around on January 5, the night before the Feast of the Epiphany. She brings good children gifts of toys and sweets. Bad children, of course, receive lumps of coal.
Four days before Christmas, I emailed my dad for the recipe. He sent it, along with a postscript.
“Originally, this recipe called for baking soda or baking powder to allow the cookies to rise,” wrote my dad. “But Dorina [Mattei, Ferd’s cousin, co-owner of Casa Grisanti] forgot it once, and her dad liked them this way. We have been making them this way ever since.”
Family mythology is enormously comforting, especially when you don’t know what you’re doing with your life. I loved that the recipe wasn’t just a list of ingredients. It was a narrative, a narrative with a mandate. I will bake our story, I thought. I will leave out the baking soda or baking powder like Dorina did. And our story will make me happy.
The final product was not attractive. On our trip to get every single needed ingredient (The cupboard was embarrassingly bare.), Steve and I forgot cookie cutters. We settled for an assemblage of misshapen polygons, but we had fun making them. Plus, they tasted good – not too sweet and just licorice-y enough. We ate and smiled and took pictures of ourselves looking blissful. My plan had worked. I was re-creating home and I was turning into myself again.
But soon the Befanas started to feel like a burden. Even though we had halved the recipe, there was still an obscene amount of baked goods. The cookies became a fixture of our lives. Every trip to the kitchen involved a requisite snack. I started putting peanut butter or jam on them to keep things interesting. It would not be an exaggeration to say that, for the next 14 days, 50 percent of my calorie intake was in cookie form. They went from a sweet symbol of home to an omnipresent reminder that I was 2,000 miles from where I wanted to be.
As it turned out, on the Feast of the Epiphany, La Befana brought me neither sweets nor coal. Instead, I was the recipient of insomnia – five full nights of no sleep, none, not a wink. Sugar, butter, flour, and eggs, sadly, is not a cure for unhappiness.
* * *
I returned to Louisville in the middle of January. During my first few weeks back, I did a lot of collapsing into people’s arms. I had exactly enough energy to play dominoes with my brothers and cousins and listen to family stories I had already heard. The mixture of fatigue and relief made me feel drunk. I had no filter. I asked questions that were too personal: “How do you stay happy?” “How much money do you make?” “Is it enough to live in the world?” “Do you ever feel like the artist’s drive is a genetic curse and that you should’ve gone to law school or something?” “But isn’t the LSAT super hard and isn’t the law market bad anyway and do I really want to go into crazy debt for something I’m not particularly passionate about?” But passion is what got me into this mess in the first place. Could I just remove it from my person, like a splinter or a tick?
The answer to that last question is, maddeningly, “No.” The urge to create will always be there. But so will the chores of everyday life: making coffee, making the bed, making rent. And then there are the big, global chores: comprehensive immigration reform, affordable health care, violence prevention. It is just way too much!
To confront depression is an exercise in separating this exact moment in time from the collective gravity of every single future moment in time. Right now, I am happy. Right now, I am well. Right now, I have a staggering number of things to be grateful for.
Right now, I am making pesto risotto with my dad. We are standing in the kitchen. We are chopping garlic. We are stirring and stirring, waiting for the onions to go see-through and the chicken stock to get soaked up. We are waiting for food chemistry to happen.
Then it will be time to eat.
And here’s the recipe:
- 1 stick of unsalted butter, softened (or slightly melted)
- 1 cup of sugar
- 1 teaspoon anise seed (or ground anise)
- 3 eggs, beaten
- 3 cups of all purpose flour, more or less (use 1 cup at a time and add as needed)
In a large mixing bowl, add the very soft butter, sugar, and anise. Mix together with wooden spoon or mixer. Then add the eggs and mix well. Add the flour and continue to mix until mixture is stiff enough to put out on cutting board or clean table. Roll out the cookie dough until about 1/8 to 1/4 inch thick. (Some like thicker cookies and some like thinner cookies.) Use enough flour to keep the mixture from sticking to the rolling pin or the board. Put on cookie sheet lined with paper bags (Cut paper bags to make them flat.) or parchment paper. Bake at 375 degrees about 20 minutes or until lightly browned.
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