Pepper-Cumin Cookies by Molly O'Neill

Sugar and Spice
By Molly O'Neill
Published: December 1, 1996 NYT

THERE IS SOMETHING SUBSTANTIAL, ENDURING and perhaps a little frightening about the dark side of sweetness. In a dessert, the interplay of sweet and savory delivers something a lot more satisfying than what mere sugar can provide.

Savory sweets seem to occupy an ancient place in our collective memory. They taste of bloodier, grittier times. Maybe it's the bittersweet chocolate the Aztecs once sipped or the pounded fruit-and-nut cakes that the Romans brought along on long journeys that make the savory sweet so evocative. Or maybe their associative power is merely a physiological one.

If, as Jews do on Rosh ha-Shanah, you dip a slice of apple in honey, the apple will taste tart. A slice of the same apple eaten with tart cheese, in the Yankee fashion, will taste sweet. Just as good needs evil to seem really, really good, and as darkness seems possible only when contrasted with light, discrete taste sensations require their opposites in order to be more fully realized.

And so, as black-pepper ice cream, cumin-scented cookies, gingered custards and herb-flecked fruit tarts appear on artful restaurant menus, it is possible to conclude that the nation's palate has grown a tad more sophisticated. Otherwise, how would we be able to appreciate such paradoxical flavors? You also might wonder if the national love-hate relationship with sugar and the fear of fat with which sugar is inextricably linked play a part in the current clamor for savory sweets. In the end, of course, the savory is no more virtuous than the purely sweet. It is just slightly more deceptive.

Savory sweets are also an antidote to the kind of one-dimensional desserts that have dominated the dessert cart since the turn of the century, when white sugar began its ascendance. A savory dessert, after all, requires balance. Which can be interpreted as a volatile interaction between two opposites, whose end result is surprise.

Indeed, the most intriguing concoctions are those in which you can distinguish the sweet and the savory and sense their symbiosis, as in the recipes below. The pepper-cumin cookies, for instance, combine the banality of white sugar with the intensity of black pepper, the tartness of lemon zest and the pungency of cumin. When served with fruit -- fresh, roasted or stewed -- the cookie will emphasize the fruit's natural sugariness. But when accompanied by a strong cheese like Roquefort or Stilton, the cookie turns indisputably sweet.

Black Peppercorn, Cumin Seed
Ingredients

2 cups all-purpose flour
6 tablespoons sugar
1 teaspoon kosher salt
2 teaspoons grated lemon zest
1 teaspoon black peppercorns, cracked
1 teaspoon cumin seeds, cracked
1 cup unsalted butter, softened slightly and cut into pieces
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Preparation

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Put the flour, sugar, salt, lemon zest, cracked peppercorns and cumin in a food processor and pulse to combine. Add the butter and vanilla and pulse until mixture just forms a dough.
Place the dough on a work surface and shape into 1-inch balls. Place them 2 inches apart on parchment-lined baking sheets and flatten each cookie with the palm of your hand. Bake until lightly browned, rotating the trays every 15 minutes. Remove from the tray and place them on a rack to cool.

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