The raisin-chocolate chip controversy

After my 6th grade year, I was hospitalized briefly for a stomach virus. We lived at Two Rock Ranch Station Army post in rural Sonoma County CA that year and the year before. TRRS was a secure base enclosing 800 acres of mostly farmland, small forests, creeks and rolling hills, a great place for kids to grow up, as my brothers and I found. At that time, 1962, the post belonged to the Army Security Agency and was a signal intercept station. Dad was an ASA Captain there and we lived on a hill with other officers' families in a housing area of large duplexes.

That summer I was dispatched to spend a week in the nearest Armed Forces hospital. (My whole childhood and young adulthood was spent receiving medical care through this government run system with good results. I think a single-payer system is the answer to our present woes, or at least a public option. But that's another story.) I didn't feel bad once the stomach cramps were gone but tests had to be run to rule out things.

Since I felt lively, this week away was an adventure for me, a vacation from the norm. I spent long hours making up stories for my journal, illustrating everything with drawings. I wrote protracted fanciful letters to my girlfriends back home, Shelly Mathis, Gail Gerwitz, Fie Hay. I pasted on false fingernails and painted them lilac, alarming the nurses who came in to take my pulse morning and evening. I listened to my new transister radio and danced to Four Seasons songs when no one was looking. The hospital staff transferred me out of the children's ward quickly because I was too old, too long and tall for the beds, but they were nervous about my being in the women's ward. There I shared a room with up to four others, and they didn't like my overhearing all the "women troubles," which I, of course, urgently strove to hear and worked on like a detective with mysteries to solve. Miscarriages, ectopia, unwed pregnancies, and uterine tumors became the subject of many of my short stories at this time.

From my time in that hospital, with its steel gray walls, large sunny windows, and billowy curtains between our patient beds, most of all I remember the food. Children always remember food, don't they? Especially desserts and treats, and more especially if they are different and new. Because my family moved to a different place every year or two with my dad's Army transfers, I could tell you all about new food, from tacos and corn chips in Southern California in 1957 to fresh avocado, papaya, and coconuts in Hawaii in 1953 to divinity candy my dad made in 1959 but my Aunt Arlyss perfected the next year.

In this hospital, after my 6th grade year, they had plenty of snacks. It was as if we lived in England and were having elevensies, tea time, and "supper," that is, two between meal snacks and a bedtime one.

I was always excited about these snacks. Chocolate chip cookies! Koolaid! Gooey caramel anything? No? What, fruit? I like fruit, but ... oh, I had a sweet tooth in those days. Whenever a snack was brought, my eye saw what I was used to, or maybe it was only what I wanted, and then my taste buds were alarmed at the startling difference of the reality.

This hospital was determined to serve healthful snacks. What horror. What I thought were gooey coconut cookies were...oatmeal. My eyes saw sugary grape Koolaid, but no, what's this? My mouth wasn't used to it (too expensive for Mom to serve at home) but it had to be-- real grape juice. The final outrage occurred when I saw arriving my ideal, the perfect confection, a buttery brown-sugary, melty-chocolate-chunky, big-as-your-fist Tollhouse Cookie. (That's what chocolate chip cookies were called back then, when Nestle held the copyright on the recipe.)

I savored the look of it, the heft of it, as I slowly arced the cookie toward my mouth, inhaling deeply to anticipate the flavor-- but what's this? No butterscotchy scent of brown sugar and butter? Instead I caught an odd hint of cinnamon, and such a lack of butter as can only be described as a flatness, almost a cardboard smell.

I momentarily stopped the cookie in its ascent, to take a closer look. Yes, it was the proper tan color, richly studded with dark brown dollops. What else could it be? Throwing caution to the winds, disregarding the suspicions of my senses, I bit down. Alert! Alert! Warning! Imposter! Ersatz cookie alert! Ugh, phew. Oh, nooooo. It was a raisin cookie.

Now, I like raisins. I like those little boxes of Sun-Maid Mom packs in my lunches. I like raisin and carrot salad. I like raisin pie. But when one's 6th-grade mouth is set for chocolate chip and instead the cookie you taste is raisin-- there is no measure that can plumb the depths of your disappointment. How could the medical establishment think the nutritional value inherent in these cookies could substitute for the flavor, the mouth-feel, the deliciousness of a true cookie, a chocolate chip cookie? I have not yet, as you might have guessed, recovered from the trauma.