By Something happened this week that I need to sit with. Mama called on Wednesday — not her usual Sunday call, which meant something. She said the cottage flooded. Not badly — two inches of water on the first floor from a heavy rain that overwhelmed the drainage on Bayou Lafourche. The water came in through the back door and sat there for three hours before it receded, and by the time Pierre got there to help, the water was gone but the damage was done: warped floorboards in the kitchen, water stains on the walls, the smell.
I drove down Friday after work. The cottage looked the same from outside — yellow paint, screen porch, cypress trees — but inside, you could smell it. That wet-wood, mildew-beginning smell that I know from Katrina, from the 2016 flood, from every time water goes where it doesn't belong. The kitchen floor had buckled in two places. The sheetrock behind the stove was dark with moisture. It wasn't catastrophic. It was the opposite of catastrophic — it was small, manageable, the kind of damage that a few weekends of work can fix. But it was also a warning. The bayou is getting closer. The drainage is getting worse. The rain that wouldn't have flooded this house ten years ago flooded it today. The margin is shrinking.
Pierre and I spent Saturday pulling the damaged floorboards and drying out the walls. Mama watched from her rocking chair on the porch, not hovering the way she usually does, and the fact that she wasn't hovering told me she was more shaken than she let on. "Il fait rien," she said. It's nothing. It was not nothing. But Marie-Claire Beaumont has been telling herself "it's nothing" about the bayou for sixty-one years, because admitting that it's something means admitting that the place your husband lived and died and the place your children grew up and the place you've called home for four decades might not be there forever. And that's a something she's not ready for. I'm not sure any of us are.
I made a simple potato soup that night — potatoes, onion, cream, chicken stock, a handful of cheddar stirred in at the end. Comfort food. Band-aid food. The kind of food you make when the thing that's wrong is too big for food to fix but food is all you've got. Mama ate a bowl and said, "Good." Not "almost." Good. I don't know if the soup was better or if her standards were lower, but I'll take it. I'll take "good" on a night when the kitchen floor is torn up and the bayou is getting closer and the woman who held it all together is sitting in a rocking chair looking smaller than she used to. Good. Good is enough. Good is everything, tonight.
Mama went to bed early that night, and Pierre headed home, and I was left standing in a kitchen with a bowl of soup gone cold and that particular kind of quiet that follows a hard day’s work that wasn’t really about the work at all. I didn’t want to sit with it, so I baked — and what came out of the pantry, almost by accident, were these potato chip cookies, salty and sweet and a little crumbly at the edges, the kind of thing that makes no sense on paper but somehow makes complete sense when the floor is pulled up and the bayou is getting closer and you just need your hands to be doing something.
Potato Chip Cookies
Prep Time: 15 min | Cook Time: 12 min | Total Time: 27 min | Servings: 24 cookies
Ingredients
- 1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, softened
- 1/2 cup granulated sugar
- 1/2 cup powdered sugar, plus extra for dusting
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 2 cups all-purpose flour
- 1 cup crushed potato chips (classic salted variety)
- 1/2 cup chopped pecans (optional)
- 1/4 teaspoon fine sea salt
Instructions
- Preheat oven. Heat your oven to 350°F. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper and set aside.
- Cream butter and sugars. In a large bowl, beat the softened butter with the granulated and powdered sugars until light and fluffy, about 3 minutes. Add the vanilla extract and mix until combined.
- Add dry ingredients. Stir in the flour and salt until a soft dough forms. Fold in the crushed potato chips and pecans, if using — the dough will be slightly crumbly but should hold together when pressed.
- Scoop and shape. Roll heaping tablespoons of dough into balls and place them about 2 inches apart on the prepared baking sheets. Gently flatten each ball with the palm of your hand or the bottom of a glass.
- Bake. Bake for 11—13 minutes, until the edges are just barely golden. The centers will look slightly underdone — that’s correct. Do not overbake.
- Cool and dust. Let cookies cool on the baking sheet for 5 minutes before transferring to a wire rack. Once fully cooled, dust generously with powdered sugar.
Nutrition (per serving)
Calories: 148 | Protein: 1g | Fat: 9g | Carbs: 16g | Fiber: 0g | Sodium: 95mg