Riffing on Crack

Sometimes it just is too hard to color strictly within the lines of soul food cuisine. Yesterday was one of those days: I decided to play around with Christina Tosi’s infamous “crack pie,” that hails from New York of all places (Momofuko Milk Bar). The journey took me into places much closer to home than I thought.

First of all, I needed to find some type of sweetcorn candy, that when mixed with the powdered milk was supposed to replicate that taste of the sweet milk at the bottom of the sugary cereals we had when we were kids (well, YOU had them. My health food mom had outlawed them. But that’s another story.). My search for the sweetcorn candy took me to the Levinsky market in south Tel Aviv and into some of the most kickass candy stores I have every seen. Holy shit. This was a time warp into a pre-diabetes world, aka, my growing up years in Savannah. There was practically everything a kid and a kid-at-heart could want. Practically. No sweetcorn candy. No problem at all. I spent a happy hour or two contemplating reasonable alternatives, finally coming up with a kind of neutrally-flavored jelly bean that I thought should do nicely.

I got home and started to put the pieces of this deceptively complicated dish together: the oversized oatmeal cooking that serves as the pie base, the filling, etc. I actually had too much filling for 2 20 cm pies, so I went around the corner, bought a package of Pepperidge Farm chocolate macademia nut cookies, came home, laid the cookies in a handful of smaller pie molds, and covered them generously with the filling. I now had 2 crack pies and a handful of what I decided to call my crack cookies. By the way, just licking off the dishes as I did the wash-up gave me a ridiculous sugar high.

While cooking this ridiculous hot mess, I started to think about what a great word “crack” is. There’s the obvious reference Chef Tosi is using, linking the addictive drug to her creation (can’t put the pie down until it is completely finished.). But also, with strong relevance to my cook: 1) A hard nut to crack (the recipe is indeed a bitch); 2) take a crack at (yep, that’s what I was trying to do with this recipe; 3) crack up (you would have to see just how disastrously messy my kitchen was to get to the laughter stage, but it’s there); 4) crack a smile (take a bit of this concoction, you’ll totally understand).

The only saying that didn’t resonate for me, by the way: “It ain’t what it’s cracked up to be.” In this case, the journey to crack pie (and crack cookie) was very much what it was cracked up to be.