Well, obviously these Iced Ginger Cookies that sweetly came rolling out of my kitchen are not in fact a painting, Pollock or otherwise. They are a simply a baked good– but they are in some senses, a work of art. For me, eating and preparing food is a multi-modal activity.
Of course there is the act of tasting when one eats. A person detects the feelings of hot or cool, spicy or sweet, mellow or tart, and derives a certain amount of pleasure from these sensations. But for me food is just as much about the visual and the tactile, as it is about the taste. I do not want the food that I am about to consume to be continually toyed with, garnished just so, sauce artfully dribbled about, but I do want a certain level of care to be established.
Take an amorphous dish like beef stew. While the stew could be slopped into a trough, drips and chunks in abundance, isn’t it so much nicer, more civilized, when the stew is placed in a bowl, calmly resting against the smooth surface of porcelain or pottery? This little bit extra, a tiny touch here or there, is what I am talking about when I mention that a food is bourgie. It makes no difference if what I am preparing is Asian and refined, or comforting and American. All of these foods can still be bourgie.
As I was removing these cookies from the oven, the spiciness of the ginger mingling with the warm smell of cinnamon, I was already thinking about what could be done to these morsels to make them a bit bourgie. I remember the Oatmeal Iced Cookies, from Mother’s. The brittle shards of icing stuck in perfect waves to the too-crunchy-to-be-comforting oatmeal cookies, but even with all of the imperfections, I loved those cookies dearly. So why not harken back to my childhood, icing this new, warm and spicy cookie in much the same way.
Dripping, dropping, and swirling smidgens of icing like an action painter on the surface of these cooled cookies was an amusement, and a temptation. Gazing at each intricate design, I could hardly wait to bite into these chewy marvels. They were chewy, bursting with ginger and molasses, and the small doses of white icing (just powdered sugar, water, and a bit of shortening for body) was the ideal sweet foil for the spiciness of the cookie. And, they were a bit bourgie to boot.
