Canthook

"Cindy McCain's been caught with her hand in the cookie jar again. McCain's recipe for oatmeal-butterscotch cookies, published on the Family Circle Web site earlier in the month, appears to be an almost exact replica of a Hershey's recipe. This is not the first time John McCain's wife has been caught up in a cooking controversy."

At least, that's the way the New York Daily News puts it.

But I have 1943 version of the Joy of Cooking. I looked up the recipe for Chocolate Chip Cookies. Mrs. Rombauer suggests using the Sugar Drop Cookies recipe, substituting 1/2 cup of chipped chocolate for 1/2 cup of chopped nut meats.

If you were unaware of it, Mrs. Rombauer didn't know how to cook. She was a society widow in Indianapolis who gathered recipes from her friends' cooks, and put them together as her first cookbook, and got Bobbs-Merrill, an Indianapolis publisher, to put out her cookbook.

In this edition, she invariably recommends bread flour where it calls for flour. She seems to think bread flour is a classier ingredient, but it was not available in most supermarkets - including those in Indianapolis - in the 1940s; it first appeared about 3 decades later. Good bakers know that bread flour has a high gluten content. That results in a tough dough, great for bread because it makes a high-rising loaf, but terrible for cookies, where you want a soft dough. For most cookies, you want cake flour, which has very little gluten, resulting in a tender cookie. Most people use all-purpose flour for everything. It's medium-gluten, but it's handier than keeping both kinds of flour on hand.

If you replace the bread flour in the recipe with just plain flour, though, the recipe looks amazingly like the original Toll House recipe - it's just a smaller batch of cookies. I got out eight local cookbooks, most produced by church circles, and found another eight recipes for chocolate chip cookies. <gomer&rt;Guuuul-eee!</gomer&rt; It turns out that those recipes are almost identical to either one or the other of the original Toll House recipes or the Joy of Cooking recipe (although nobody else species bread flour, thank goodness!)

Our point? You refer to the Ford in the driveway as "your" car, and nobody thinks you are pretending to have assembled it from your own design. You refer to "your" church, and nobody expects you to have your name on the deed. Recipes are shared property.

You got your recipe for escalloped potatoes from your mother, who got it from Debbie at work, who got it from her cousin Steve, who ran across the recipe in a 1966 Redbook at the doctor's office, and it wasn't a new recipe even then - the author isn't sure where she got the recipe, but didn't think it was anything special. It's just a recipe for escalloped potatoes, fer criminey's sake

So if they've caught Cindy sharing recipes that she likes, that doesn't mean she claims to have invented the recipe; it means she got the recipe someplace, and she probably doesn't even know where, by this time.

If that's the worst complaint someone has with Cindy McCain, that's a bigger indictment of the newscritter who found the "plagiarism" than it is of Cindy. As Harry Hogge (Robert Duvall) said in Days of Thunder, "No, no, he didn't slam you, he didn't bump you, he didn't nudge you... he *rubbed* you. And rubbin, son, is racin'." If it takes more than an hour to find a bigger Cindy McCain scandal than that, you're just not looking.

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Cindy McCain - cookies - Hershey - Irma Rombauer - Joy of Cooking - recipe