Jack Ruby is the Wolff family's Roman Empire
a recipe for peanut butter butterscotch bars
Holy crap, it’s my first ever newsletter!
But first, the cookbook forward that changed my life
I have a very early memory of cutting out sugar cookies at a kitchen table in an apartment I can’t place. It doesn’t match up with any of the usual ways I remember all the wheres that we lived – by street (Mulberry) or design feature (electric blue carpet) or event (my mom stepping on a nail in the yard and having to get a tetanus shot) – and I don’t know if it’s an apartment I lost track of along the way or if it never really existed, if instead it’s an amalgam of four or five places that left a tiny stamp on my impressionable brain in a way that’s now impossible to pick apart.
But that interlude apartment is not the point. The point is the cookies (the point is always cookies), and the act of baking, which I’ve loved for longer than I can remember in a very literal sense of the phrase.
Last August I finally got Claire Saffitz’s Dessert Person. I asked my partner to get it for me for my birthday, because a cookbook feels too luxurious to purchase for yourself. The size! The weight! The beautiful, glossy, full-page photos! The hardcoverness of it all! I had a Roman art and architecture professor in college who would talk about marble so gorgeous she wanted to lick it and that is the same experience I have with photographs in cookbooks. I have since reformed and started purchasing cookbooks for myself because Dessert Person has brought me so much joy and because why not live like KINGS at the end of the world!
Anyways. On the very first page, Claire writes:
I am a dessert person. I like cakes and cookies and pies and believe that no meal is complete without something sweet at the end. When a server asks me if I saved room for dessert, the answer is always “yes.”
It’s the simplest thing, and yet it has changed my life (this is the SECOND TIME a dessert cookbook forward has had a profound impact on me and by the time you get to it happening a second time you realize okay, this is who I am!). I realized how I have always essentially waited for permission to even WANT something sweet. But I do! I want to look at a list of desserts and I want to imagine what they might taste like and I probably want to order one. And it is okay to be the only person to want dessert, and it is okay to be a person who wants, generally, which is something I sometimes feel embarrassed about despite myself.
I mean what if, where we could, we ended every experience with something sweet? What if we gave thought to making the end of the experiences we share with others sweet? What if I stopped tacitly waiting for permission to want the sweet things in life? What if, just generally, we concerned ourselves with sweetness. Maybe that is saccharine but also maybe is only saccharine because I have been waiting for permission to be sweet?
Since reading that forward, I have not once said no to seeing a dessert menu, and yeah, it fucking rocks.
Speaking of desserts . . .
Jack Ruby is the Wolff family’s Roman Empire (this section includes a recipe)
And this recipe is truly coveted. These peanut butter butterscotch bars are incredible, and I learned the recipe ages ago when my uncle told it to me after he, I think, made it up.
Melt a full bag of butterscotch chips (in the microwave, like a real baking gremlin). Add a small jar of creamy, not-fancy peanut butter and a box of rice krispies (the small box, or like, 6-7 cups?). Mix it all together and press it into a pan. Melt a bag of chocolate chips (I prefer dark chocolate for this) with about a cup of heavy cream, mix, and spread over the top. Freeze the whole thing until the bars hold together, take them somewhere, and be prepared to bathe in the accolades of your peers.
This recipe is incredibly easy (as you have now seen for yourself), but I almost fucked it up this week. I’d gotten some awful news at the start of the day, and six hours later I could not remember what it meant to do things in any kind of meaningful order. It’s fine, they turned out fine, and it reminded me of how my grandmother used to tell people that Jack Ruby ruined a cake she was baking when he shot Lee Harvey Oswald. I think this is maybe something that only makes sense in a very Irish Catholic family.
My grandma had the TV (or maybe the radio) on while she was baking a cake when a news bulletin announced that Ruby had shot Oswald in the basement of the Dallas Police Headquarters. She was so shocked that she forgot to put sugar in the cake and the whole thing was ruined.
A few months ago on the phone my mom told me that she’s just not sure what happened with Jack Ruby because he left his two dachshunds in the car when he went to shoot Oswald, and he just didn’t seem like the kind of dog owner to do that.
To be fair to my mom, I think her Jack Ruby interest is largely related to Ruby’s own dachshund obsession. I texted her about this and got several unsolicited facts about Jack Ruby and dachshunds.
My grandparents lived in Fort Worth and when I was growing up they took me and my sister to the museum that’s on the sixth floor of the book depository from which Oswald shot JFK. You can LOOK OUT THE WINDOW that he shot him from and that is just pretty grim and fucked up! Why is this a place an elementary school can go on a field trip? I think it maybe explains the psyche of the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
Fort Worth does have a sick modern art museum though, and they have a mean cookbook.
Thank you for reading to the end
It should, of course, end with something sweet, so here’s a particular favorite recipe of mine from Dessert Person. If you want to tell me your family’s Roman Empire, I’d love to know it. If you enjoyed any of this, I’d also love if you shared it. See you next time.
Love,
Meghan
That belt is everything :(
I think the recipe came from the back of the Rice Krispies cereal box! I made it all the time when your uncle and I were kids.
Love, Mom
PS Jack Ruby used to let his dachshunds run around in the kitchens of his clubs.