Peanut Butter Cookies
The days when our people could themselves consume the sacred offering-cakes have long passed.
We know1 that long ago, in the distant past, our ancestors must have been able to make and ingest the offering-cake, else why would they have left the manner of its making so clearly writ in their recorded past? Yes, we are forced to assume that long before we came to this world,2 before the pollen of the great zhuu-aa continent-trees changed us and found for us a place here, our bodies could metabolize the strange constituents of the offering-cake.
But that omnipresent tree-dust that pervades everything on our World of Isles severed our ancestral ties even as it allowed us life here.3 Of the many original ingredients in the offering-cake, only one, the Madding-Bean, is still to be found here. Regressive phonological analysis leads us to believe that its ancient name was pronounced “Vahn-ira.”4 Yes, fantastic though it may seem, the frightening substance which has fueled some of our society’s greatest artist-lunatics was once a simple flavoring.
Aside from that, we can only speculate at what the ingredients mean. Some experts hold that “unbleached flour” was a form of tree-pollen from the Birthplace, although others dispute that claim, on the grounds that Pollen is simply too fantastic, too improbable a substance to be found anywhere but the World of Isles. It will be many millenia before the Star-Tree is mature and we can again sail the void between worlds, and it is the hope of this scholar that the sacred voyage will resolve once and for all that debate—that debate among so many!
These are but a few of the issues raised by the original cake manuscript. For the purposes of this translation into the vernacular of the Eastern Zhuu-aa-tyar, I have omitted the bulk of the Peanut-Butter Debate, and the hermeneutical tangle that is the Measures Dispute receives but a chapter.5 I hope the reader will forgive these omissions.
It is with great humility and only a small amount of pride that I present this new translation of one of our ancestors’ greatest masterworks. I hasten to add that the pride is merely vicarious; many times while immersed in the research for this translation I was struck dumb with awe at the beauty and simplicity of the ancient text. The pride, thus, is vicarious pride at being one of a multitude of children of these great star-giants. I hope that they would be proud of us.
I believe that they would be.
Praise be to Zhuu-aa, and to the ones that came Before.
It seems fitting to end this introduction with a reproduction of the original manuscript. A transliteration follows in Chapter 1, but I encourage the reader to admire, at least, the flow and style of the old Site-4 characters.
1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup peanut butter (any kind works – I usually use smooth of whatever brand I have on hand)
1 cup firmly packed brown sugar
1 egg
2 cups sifted all-purpose flour (I use unbleached flour for all my baking and cooking)
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon vanilla
Cream butter and peanut butter with brown sugar, then add egg and vanilla. Sift in flour and salt. Makes a very stiff dough. Form balls on tray and then use a fork to press down and flatten slightly with a crisscross pattern.
The original recipe says to bake 9 to 12 minutes at 375. I find that is too hot for cookies and tend to cook them at a cooler temperature. They will be slightly browned on the bottom when done. It is worth noting that the cookies do not flatten or change shape while baking; they are thicker and slightly more prone to crumbling than some other PB cookies, but all the more delicious for that.
1That is to say, the more religious of us know, and the those of us engaged in more skeptical scholarship suspect, with reservation.
2For the purposes of this text, the foreign-origin theory is presupposed to be true.
3Praise be to Zhuu-aa.
4The exact pronounciation is Disputed. See Chr-iie, 7754, and Yer-ika, 7789.
5Readers desiring an exhaustive treatment of the subject are advised to read Academician Po-Tyi-Arh’s definitive 4-volume treatise.