STELLA!

For some months, Miss Edith has been vaguely following the sad story of the Stella D'oro bakery in Brooklyn, which was having serious financial problems, and union problems, and today I read in the New York Times that it is finally closing.

To many readers of this blog (I use the term "many" loosely here), this will mean nothing; I grew up not thinking about this at all, but I gather that Stella D'oro cookies were a kind of regional thing. For me, they were an essential party of my childhood. My mother, a born and bred New Yorker, clearly felt that a life without Stella D'oro cookies was not worth living; she often ate their Breakfast Treat cookies all day long. Their Margherita cookies -- long, ridged, sort of shortbready cookies that came in packages showing the vanilla cookies alternating with the chocolate -- were always in our house. (Naturally, the kids preferred the chocolate, but it was fine, because my mother liked the vanilla ones. I think she always had them with coffee.)

But the real showpiece from Stella D'oro was the Swiss Fudge cookies. These were a rich, round vanilla cookie with elegant little ridges, that held in their center a perfectly smooth round blob of dark fudgy chocolate. If you refrigerated the cookies, the chocolate became as stiff as a chocolate bar, but in a warm room they had a slightly chewy feel; these cookies were our idea of heaven. Swiss Fudge cookies were a real treat. When my brother went away to college, my mother would mark his homecoming by buying a package of Swiss Fudge cookies and he was capable of eating an entire package on his own in one sitting. Whenever there was something special to celebrate, my mother bought these cookies. It wasn't that they were really so special; it was just that she knew how much we liked them.

I haven't bought a package of Stella D'oro cookies in a while, a long while. I remember eating a package of them with Notarius, who thought they were ok but no big whoop. That's ok. Things like this, I acknowledge it's all about sentiment and less than we would like about the true objective quality of the cherished thing. (The ice creams of our childhood are somehow infinitely wonderful -- but how many adults really want to eat a Hoodsie cup? Right.) But I am sorry that I won't be able to buy Stella D'oro cookies anymore.