Toward My Own Theory of Description: Cookie Smell

Paul Cézanne, Pines and Rocks (c.1897)

Ian Frazier’s superb “Out of the Bronx” (The New Yorker, February 6, 2012) is about the closing of Bronx cookie factory Stella D’oro. It comprehends, among other things, a private-equity takeover, a labour strike, and several protest rallies. Frazier brilliantly covers it all. But, for me, the most memorable aspect of this piece isn’t the labour battles; it’s the cookie smell. Frazier writes,

According to a noted aromachologist, “Bakeries are great community assets, like churches or museums.” In that regard—aromachologically speaking—the Stella D’oro factory was the Notre-Dame and National Gallery of 237th and Broadway. I once saw a schoolboy get off a city bus at 238th and take a breath and shout, “Brownies!” Though Stella D’oro did not make brownies, that was often the smell. Other times, it was “almondy, like when you make the mandelbread,” as an old lady walking down Broadway described it to me once. Many days or nights (the factory usually ran three eight-hour shifts daily), when the anisette toast was baking, the smell became licorice. About a month before Christmas, when the bakery began turning out its seasonal cookies, neighborhood breezes effloresced with cinnamon and nutmeg and ginger.

The baking-cookie smell entered check-cashing places and barbershops and bodegas, it crossed the razor wire into the M.T.A. yards and maintenance sheds west of Broadway, it occupied the loud channel of the Major Deegan Expressway, just to the east; kids dozing in the back seats of their parents’ cars sniffed the air and knew they were almost home. The smell competed with the acridity of hot wax and detergent chemicals at Nice Guys Car Wash, just across the street from the factory, and domesticated the beer fumes and late-night atmosphere at Stack’s Tavern, a shamrock-bedecked bar between 234th and 236th Streets, where a bartender told me, “Sure, I remember the smell—fresh-baked cookies. Nuttin’ wrong with that!”

That “kids dozing in the back seats of their parents’ cars sniffed the air and knew they were almost home” is inspired! The rhythm of the second paragraph is similar to the rhythm of the famous “snow” scene at the end of James Joyce’s “The Dead”:

Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain; on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Frazier’s piece contains another wonderful description of the Stella D’oro cookie smell. This one is near the end. Frazier travels to Ashland, Ohio, following the Stella D’oro product line, which is now in the hands of an Ashland cookie factory called Archway. Frazier drives all around Ashland, searching for the cookie smell. He writes,

I headed out Claremont Avenue with the car windows down. Going by the Archway-Stella D’oro factory, I noticed that the flag in the parking lot was flapping in the breeze and pointing straight away from the road. I turned and went in that direction, and suddenly the smell that used to be all around 237th and Broadway enclosed me. I got out of the car. The access road I was on adjoined a field of thistles, timothy grass, wild roses, and joe-pye weed. Across from the field was a scrubby forest of honey-locust trees and pin oaks. I went back into it, stepping around the poison ivy. At a point where I could no longer be seen from the road, I stopped and inhaled. The warm, gingerbready smell was still strong here. To find that old Kingsbridge aroma adrift in an Ohio woods seemed strange. At the far edge of the woods was the lawn of a low-slung office building. The lawn had just been mowed, and there the cookie smell mingled suburbanly with the fragrances of wet earth and cut grass.

Mmm, that “cookie smell mingled suburbanly with the fragrances of wet earth and cut grass” rises off the page. That's how smell is described.

In my next post in this series, I’ll look at a marvelous description of sound.