I mentioned someplace here — I forget where — that my taste for sugar and all things sweet has declined since my big weight loss. (And by the way, for those of you who have money riding on this: I am within ounces — ounces! — of being 100 pounds below my highest-ever weight.) Recently, I told you that I'd tried a few of my favorite cookies and found the sensation pleasing but nowhere near as wonderful as it once was.
This prompted several of you to write and ask, "So what is your favorite kind of cookie, Mark?" Well, one of you asked but I decided to seize the opportunity to, at long last, discuss something substantive on this weblog. Above is a photo I just took of an example of my favorite cookie. I have been eating these — not continually, despite what my need for Gastric Bypass Surgery might indicate — since I was about four years old. And you know something? I have no idea what they're called. I've never known.
They're sold in practically every delicatessen in the galaxy. The above specimen — which met its happy demise only seconds after the above photo was taken — was purchased at Canter's Delicatessen on Fairfax and maybe even baked there. For more than fifty years — half a freaking century — I've been buying these all over, mainly by pointing into a display case and saying, "The ones with the colored balls on top." There must be a better name for them than that…and yes, I've tried asking the employees of the various delicatessens. No one has ever given me a genuine answer. They usually say something like, "Oh, those are the ones with the colored balls on them."
Big help, lady. Tell me something I don't already know.
Once, in a deli that didn't look like it did any baking, I asked the woman who waited on me (who turned out to be the owner) if they made them on the premises. She said no. I said, "Great. Now, when you order them from your supplier, what is it you order? What is the name you give them that results in them delivering those cookies to you?" I was excited because I thought I was on the verge of a breakthrough…a revelation for the ages…the best-kept secret of one or more centuries…
She said, "I don't know…I ask them to send more of those cookies with the colored balls on top."
I'm not even sure what the colored balls are called. They aren't "jimmies." Those are long, not round. Some people seem to call the colored balls "nonpareils" or, in this case, "rainbow nonpareils." However, "nonpareil" is also the name of a cookie that is usually chocolate with white balls all over it so I'm guessing that isn't a popular name for the colored balls themselves. I've seen the colored balls sold in the cake decorating section of the market as "rainbow sprinkles" or "confetti" or even just "cake decorations," the last of these suggesting that even the people making them didn't know what to call them. But I've also seen all those terms applied to pastry adornments of other shapes and sizes.
There must be a word that denotes just the round variety. And there must be a name that you could use if you wanted to call a baker and tell him to whip up a batch of cookies like the one in the picture above. Someone…please…tell me what it is and don't toy with me. Not about this. If you write me that it's "the cookies with the colored balls on top," so help me, I'm going to add you to my Spam list and bounce all your e-mails from now on.