The Great American Presidential Cookie Contest

EVERY FOUR YEARS, there is not only a presidential election, but also a cookie recipe contest between the spouses of the two major party presidential candidates. Explanations of how this got started vary. Some believe it to have begun when Abigail Adams made an unpleasant comment about Thomas Jefferson's second "wife", his slave Sally Hemings, in 1800, something to do with the superiority of plain old New England cod and clam chowder cooking being far superior to the diet of grits, watermelon, entrails and possum stew common among Virginia's "servant" class. Jefferson, ever sensitive to criticism of his women, informed Sally of the slur, and she went immediately to work proving the haughty dame of Braintree, Mass. full of it. Out came the most delicious oatmeal cookies ever to smell up a servant's quarters, Mrs. Adams, unaccustomed to dessert in any form, being of stern Puritanical disposition, had no choice to throw in the apron. Other historians suggest that Par Nixon got the dough rolling in 1960, when she is alleged to have said: "that aristocratic wench may be hot, but I can out cookie her any day of the week, and my husband may be somewhat of a crook, but, by Joseph McCarthy's ghost, let's get our aprons on, and go at it, assuming little uppity Jackie even has an apron, or knows how to use one". We'll probably never know. Tragically, many of history's most profoundly important events remain shrouded in mists of time and biased opinion. We do know, however, that the presidential candidate spousal cookie recipe contest became an American tradition, that the wives of the candidates take it very seriously, and that the rules stipulate not only that a recipe must be offered, it must also be manifested in cookie cuter reality. Hillary Clinton, when she was twice a contestant, is said to have taken the matter very seriously, and to have assembled a veritable library of recipe books, along with many of her old high school friends from her upper middle Chicago suburban childhood, and to have gone straight into the White House kitchen, with instructions that no one be allowed to depart the premises until the best cookie in the world had been diagrammed, built, cooked, and taste tested by herself, Bill, and Chelsea for verification of satisfactory quality. Both Barbara Bush in 1992 and Elizabeth Dole inn 1996 put up a token fight, but were rumored to have not really had their hearts in it, both thinking the whole affair somewhat frivolous and beneath them. That's what happens when one associates with republicans over a long period of time, and anyway, you can be sure that both Barbara and Elizabeth understood perfectly well where they stood: Hillary did not intend to lose, at anything. So this year its between Bill Clinton and Melania Trump, and the G.O.P. side is saddled with the same old problem; too much pampered, privileged aristocracy. No one knows when Mrs. Trump last set foot inside a kitchen, if ever, but we can be damned sure of one thing: William Jefferson Clinton, though put in the potentially awkward position of being the fist male to ever enter the fray, knows how to wear an apron, and knows his way around a kitchen, because he grew up poor, and because he flat out likes to eat. Then too, if you had Hillary Clinton looming over your shoulder, making it perfectly clear in no uncertain terms that she does not intend to have her legal spouse upstaged by any hot young Eastern European floozy of a trophy wife, wouldn't you do whatever it took to make sure you came out of the kitchen with a very high quality cookie?.........PLEASE TELL SOMEBODY ABOUT THIS SITE. WE NEED MORE READERS, FOR OUR SELF ESTEEM.