Cookie Dough and Other Delights

When I was little, there were a number of things I swore I would do when I became an adult. I would dip my fingers in the melted candle wax (I don’t know why, but I desperately wanted to do that as a child). I would watch scary movies. And I would make cookie dough just to eat, not to bake, even if knew the eggs in it were raw, even if my mom said that the uncooked flour would give me worms.

In my mother’s defense, I will say that I realize that it is possible to get worms from whatever has laid its eggs in the flour(and we don’t want to think too much about what that would be); but I’ve not seen any yet. Come to think of it, I don’t personally know anyone who’s gotten worms from eating raw dough.

My mother may have believed – or so she said – that we would get worms from the uncooked dough, but she still gave us the beaters and the bowl to lick. Unfortunately, Mom had a way of getting the bowl almost entirely clean, so while she may have handed it to you after plopping down the last of the cookies, it was meager pickings indeed. My desire for all the uncooked dough I could eat lasted until I moved out of my parents’ house.

I still recall that night. Nineteen years old, my first apartment, a little beer (the legal drinking age at the time was 19) and a boyfriend? You got yourself a party. We made up a batch of chocolate chip cookie dough and sat on the linoleum floor in the kitchen, eating it with a spoon.

Have you ever done that? We ate more of the dough than we ate of the cooked product that night; and I’m here to tell you that, despite my mother’s warnings, I was – and remain – worm-free.

The strange thing, though, was that after eating, oh, half of it, it lost its appeal. I had unlimited access to the dough of my dreams, and the magic was gone. I finally had what I wanted – and I no longer wanted it. Unfortunately, the same logic applied to the boyfriend as well.

And ain’t that the way it is?

Nowadays, of course, we have things that come with lumps of raw cookie dough in them. It’s as if they (the big They) polled a group of children and asked them what they wanted to see in junk food. Cookie dough, gummy worms, colored sprinkles.

Kind of takes the fun out of it.