This afternoon I am making a batch of my Aunt Betty’s famous oatmeal cookies. They’re the best.
They are the only cookie she baked, as I recall. She was a childless woman with great love for her nieces and nephews, of which she had many. I believe she baked these cookies for us with great affection. She would bring a neatly wrapped box of them our house during the Christmas season. And other times too.
Today, we reserve the word “artisan” to things that are made with great affection: affection for the thing being made; affection for the things it is made from; and affection for the person(s) for whom it is made. Contemporary logic tells us affection is subjective, outside the realm of material economic, industrial and technological relevance. It is a romantic attribute, far beyond the reach of statistical analysis. It is something which certainly has no place at table of serious economic discussion.
Mr. Wendell Berry of Kentucky tells me that’s not true. Closer to home, Aunt Betty’s famous oatmeal cookies tell me the same. With Aunt Betty’s cookies the proof is in the eating.
Affection and imagination are in fact the glue that holds the human economy together – affection for place; affection for family and household; affection for neighbors and community; and affection for work. Place, household, community and work are the fundamentally real and materially concrete cornerstones of the human economy. Affection is the glue and mortar.
The other economic things – markets, finance and technology – are useful abstractions. They are luxuries and artifacts, three or four generations removed from their source, a source which the modern industrial economy has all but smothered.
Wendell Barry recently addressed the subject, upon which Christopher Orlet observed: “After 2012 Jefferson Lecturer Wendell Berry, of Port Royal, Kentucky, received a standing ovation, the chairman of the National Endowment for Humanities Jim Leach rose to remind the audience that Mr. Berry's words did not reflect the official policy of the U.S. government. -- Like we needed to be reminded.” (Full Text)
In part here is what Mr Berry had to say:
“The term “imagination” in what I take to be its truest sense refers to a mental faculty that some people have used and thought about with the utmost seriousness. The sense of the verb “to imagine” contains the full richness of the verb “to see.” To imagine is to see most clearly, familiarly, and understandingly with the eyes, but also to see inwardly, with “the mind’s eye.” It is to see, not passively, but with a force of vision and even with visionary force. To take it seriously we must give up at once any notion that imagination is disconnected from reality or truth or knowledge. It has nothing to do either with clever imitation of appearances or with “dreaming up.” It does not depend upon one’s attitude or point of view, but grasps securely the qualities of things seen or envisioned.
I will say, from my own belief and experience, that imagination thrives on contact, on tangible connection. For humans to have a responsible relationship to the world, they must imagine their places in it. To have a place, to live and belong in a place, to live from a place without destroying it, we must imagine it. By imagination we see it illuminated by its own unique character and by our love for it. By imagination we recognize with sympathy the fellow members, human and nonhuman, with whom we share our place. By that local experience we see the need to grant a sort of preemptive sympathy to all the fellow members, the neighbors, with whom we share the world. As imagination enables sympathy, sympathy enables affection. And it is in affection that we find the possibility of a neighborly, kind, and conserving economy.
... The word “affection” and the terms of value that cluster around it—love, care, sympathy, mercy, forbearance, respect, reverence—have histories and meanings that raise the issue of worth. We should, as our culture has warned us over and over again, give our affection to things that are true, just, and beautiful. When we give affection to things that are destructive, we are wrong. A large machine in a large, toxic, eroded cornfield is not, properly speaking, an object or a sign of affection.” (Full Text)
With that, here’s the recipe for Aunt Betty’s oatmeal cookies. All the ingredients are listed, but affection. It can neither be measured nor mixed, but in the making of them it’s implicit. That’s why they’re so good. For these beauties you will need:
½ cup butter
½ cup margarine*
1 cup white sugar
1 cup brown sugar
1 ½ teaspoons vanilla
1 tablespoon molasses
2 eggs
1 ½ cups flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
3 cups oatmeal
1 cup finely chopped walnuts
Cream butter and margarine, gradually add the sugars and blend well. Add the vanilla, molasses and eggs one at a time. Mix well. Sift together the flour, baking soda and salt. Gradually add into the mixture. Fold in the oatmeal and nuts. Divide dough into 3 parts. Shape each into 2” rolls. Refrigerate overnight.*
Cut the rolls into ½” thick slices and bake in a 350o oven for 12 minutes.
*Notes: I use all butter & rather than rolling the dough into logs, I simply drop tablespoon size dollops of dough directly on the cookie sheets.
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