The Cookie Wolfed Down by Wall Street
A top-secret excerpt from Volume 4: Tough Cookie
Cake friends,
Today’s email has a special ingredient: gossip. It’s a full excerpt from our fourth issue, Tough Cookie, a tell-all tale of what it was like working as the executive chef for a powerful Manhattan bank in the ‘80s. (Scorsese, give us a call!) Both the author and bank are unnamed for fear of pesky NDAs, but everything is true, including the surreal proliferation of warm chocolate chip cookies in those halls of power. We hope you enjoy the read!
Also, a big thank you to everyone who submitted to our pitch call for Volume 5: Candy Land. We are working our way through the many hundreds (!) of emails and hope to get back to everyone in the next couple weeks.
The Cookie Wolfed Down by Wall Street
By AUTHOR REDACTED
The windows sparkling high over the East River offered the kind of view usually seen only in movies. The handmade rugs lining the halls were thick with wool and lineage, the walls seamlessly covered in glowing silk. Everyone and everything was safe here, solid and proud. And why not? We were at the top of it all, here in the Partners Dining Room on the thirtieth floor of this well-known Wall Street investment bank. People came here almost every day to make million-dollar deals at the tables, or to cook and clean for those who dined at them.
The muffled elegance was broken only when a hidden door was pushed open to a busy professional kitchen. I was the executive chef in charge of that kitchen, which meant I planned the menus, wrote the recipes, created the production schedule, maintained the inventory, and managed the staff. Beyond all these very practical things, I also performed the role of Executive Chef for guests, going to their tables when called upon to welcome them in a form of mutual flattery.
It was the 1980s, the decade of decadence on Wall Street. We who worked in the Partners Dining Room were there to serve the Masters of the Universe and whomever they invited to sit beside them. The menus were seasonal, changing daily. We made risotto with wild mushrooms, duck breast with date and port sauce, and raspberry soufflés. We bought the best available ingredients and used them within a fairly conservative style of presentation. Our directive was that the food in these dining rooms should never be too showy: The first thing on my mind every single day was the humble chocolate chip cookie.
The cookies were iconic. It was imperative that they were offered at every table in the nine private dining rooms, which seated from four to twenty-four people; there had to be an enormous pile of chocolate chip cookies at the VP Buffet, which served two lunch seatings of seventy-five people each, and enough cookies for lunch trays delivered to partners who ate at their desks. The cookies even went out into the world in “care packages” sent to politicians and business leaders of the moment—small yet fierce tokens of relationship brokering made adorable for those with access to them. But, the only people who could have the cookies were those with rights to dine in the Partners Dining Rooms. The majority of the employees at the firm knew the cookies only by reputation. Once in a while, a secretary or junior associate would see me in the elevator and say, “I had one of your famous chocolate chip cookies at Celia’s retirement party last week—it was so good!” and I’d smile at them, happy they were happy, but, you know, kind of tired of this neverending cookie schtick.
A chocolate chip cookie can be many things to many people, but its longest established persona speaks of women’s care work, of moms who donate to the school bake sale and fix after-school snacks, of selfless acts carried out under the inescapable weight of obligation, no matter if it’s made from scratch, sliced from a tube of premade dough and baked, or transferred neatly from a store-bought package to a paper plate.
I was raised by a woman who never baked a cookie in her life. There were definitely times when I longed for those mythical home-baked Mom cookies, but as a self-taught chef, I didn’t obsess over it. I loved having food as my career and was thrilled about the opportunity to plan, open, and operate the Partners Dining Rooms in the Bank’s new headquarters. This was going to be a big operation. The older partners involved wanted a limited menu with a conservative expensive sensibility—think 1960s-era James Beard, with standing rib roasts, mashed potatoes, peas, and Cobb salads. The younger partners involved wanted an expansive menu with more choices, one that featured New American cuisine.
One thing all these men agreed on: Though certain foods had to be on the menu each day, the most important was the “famous chocolate chip cookie.” Over the years, the cookie came to represent the firm’s hospitality. The recipe itself was “secret,” and it had been made the exact same way for years by previous chefs.
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Female chefs were unusual then, and the staff of the pre-existing smaller dining rooms had all been men. Some of them weren’t happy about the idea of answering to a woman, much less a young one.
What I think of when I think about being a female chef back then:
I think of the chef’s coats that never fit me right; even the smallest men’s size was way too big.
I think of the VP, gunning for partner, who used to walk into my office and take things, laughing, so that I’d have to go to his desk later to ask for them back.
I think of the day one of the male servers climbed up a ladder behind me as I was checking the thermometer on top of a refrigerator, where he grabbed me around the waist and started acting like a dog in heat.
I think of the partner who sometimes would try to ruffle my short hair as he was walking in to dine, as if I was a cute dog or a four-year-old child, while complimenting me on various things, none of which pertained to food.
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I had taken this job intending to enact some kind of creative culinary artistry, but my life had been reduced to cookies. And even then, cookies made from someone else’s recipe. In my world, food is a value system, and I really didn’t like what these dominating cookies had to say about who I was.
It wasn’t about me, though. It was about the people I was feeding. They would arrive in the hall outside the kitchen each day at lunchtime. The men moved with pompous decorum up the long hall to their private rooms. They were ponderous and heavy, yet no sound was heard.
In the dining rooms, the first and main courses were delicious, perfect, and suitable. The talk during the meal was a chess game, quiet and serious with con- stant angling for status. When the cookies were carried in at the end of the meal, they shifted the level of formality. Here was something that summoned the idea of home in this otherwise sophisticated space filled with starched shirts and perfectly knotted neckties that constantly strained under the taut wool suit jackets, which were never removed. The cookies said, “Let’s be friends.” Suddenly, the men were little boys, ready to play marbles or trade billions, to float an offering to take one company public or to leverage a buyout of another. The cookies sealed the deal after all the other courses had been consumed.
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But the cookies couldn’t make everything nice.
One of our servers contracted AIDS, and though we did everything we could to make the rest of his days comfortable at home, his life ended too soon.
One of the partners was arrested and taken away in handcuffs from the trading floor. There would be one less lunch tray to deliver the next day.
One day, a partner literally pounded his fist on the table during a breakfast meeting, demanding that I appear before him to fix things when told he couldn’t have a dish he wanted at that moment. Yes, he got what he wanted.
One day, a very old man had a heart attack during lunch. He just fell off his chair in the middle of the meal. The server ran up the hall to my off ice, we ran back together and started CPR. The partner who had hosted him and the other three men he dined with—one of whom we learned later was his brother—stood huddled silently together in the far corner of the room while we were bent over him on the floor. EMS finally arrived, and after a bit, took him away. We all left the room and I escorted them out, saying how terribly sorry I was. Then I went into the beautiful bathroom at the end of that long silk hall, checked to see if nobody else was there, locked the door, and scream-cried for a few minutes with my mouth gaping wide. No sound came out. Then I went back to work.
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I still dream about it sometimes. The dreams are half-absolute pleasure, half-night- mare. In the dream, I float through those halls I know so well. My feet are not really touching the ground, yet I’m f illed with strength. This is a place where I know what to do. I belong here, and a sense of firmly belonging anywhere is a rarity for me. I’m floating off to the kitchen. I’m ready to do what I do best. Then the nightmare starts. I’m suddenly invisible. Nobody knows me. I wander for a while through halls and kitchens, trying to feel as if I belong. The dream ends, I wake up with a shock, then I lie awake remembering many things, and always among them, that cookie.
This iconic chocolate chip cookie was mine, but it was also theirs. This was the cookie that moved Heads of State and Leaders of Business to dictate enthusiastic full-page letters professing their love of the cookie to their secretaries, who quickly typed them and sent them along to the Chef, me, with copies to whomever had hosted the meal.
I still wonder: What was it about this chocolate chip cookie that made it so powerful? There was nothing spectacularly different about the bank’s version from the Toll House recipe, apart from one physical movement made during the baking process. What made the cookie so powerful must have been something invisible.
We dream of our pasts, and the dreams may or may not be entirely true. We go to the kitchen and make things, like cookies. Sometimes we’re lucky, and the dreams and the cookies come together in an entirely new way.
AUTHOR REDACTED is a former chef turned writer living in Brooklyn. Once upon a time she signed an NDA that put limits on just how much tea she can spill in the world of cookies and power.
Misc Dessert Content:
Make: This spiced chocolate creme brûlée from Kassie Mendieta is the perfect at-home Valentine’s Day treat.
Buy: New Dolly Parton cake mix just dropped!
Bake: Squishy sweet nian gao 年糕 to ring in Lunar New Year.
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What a powerful, moving piece. Loved reading it again. Thanks for sharing it with us.