The great Bush-Kerry bake-off

PERHAPS THE LAST TIME anyone heard Hillary Rodham Clinton utter a spontaneous remark in public was the famous moment during the 1992 presidential campaign when she declared to a shocked -- shocked -- nation that she liked her job. Or, as she fatally put it, "I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was fulfill my profession." Pandemonium ensued, and Clinton was pounded nearly to dust for seeming to disparage domestic life and its coziest symbol, the cookie.

She never made such a mistake again; and thanks to Family Circle magazine, neither has any other prospective First Lady. Taking advantage of a rare national spotlight on home baking, the magazine promptly instituted a "cookie cook-off" between the wives of the major-party presidential candidates. Clinton and Barbara Bush submitted cookie recipes -- both chose versions of chocolate chip -- and readers voted for their favorites. Since then the magazine has staged a cook-off during each presidential campaign, and every time the victorious cookie has reflected the outcome of the election. This year Laura Bush's Oatmeal-Chocolate Chunk Cookies are pitted against Teresa Heinz Kerry's Pumpkin Spice Cookies, and the recipes can be found in the July 13 issue.

Sure, it's an insulting exercise -- no decent cookie should be subjected to the cynical demands of contemporary politics -- but it also tells us something about the requirements for a job more accurately described as First Wife. Clinton had every reason to believe her resume for this post was in good shape: She had the Mom credential and the adoring-helpmeet credential. But she made a bad mistake -- she forgot to apologize for working. She forgot to pretend that her one true home was home. In that sweet, simple America tended so lovingly by politicians and other bards of an imaginary past, the dream of separate spheres dies hard.

Hence the new rule for First Lady contenders: By their cookies ye shall know them. It's not such a bad idea. Food can tell us a great deal about those who prepare it as well as those who eat it; and compared with most forms of political speech, a cookie is likely to be quite articulate. Take the Oatmeal-Chocolate Chunk recipe submitted this year by Bush (or maybe by a staff member, thrilled to be assigned to domestic policy until she realized she was supposed to take it literally). On the surface, the recipe shows a lot of competitive savvy: The cookies are loaded with chocolate, which was a key ingredient in all three of the previous winners; they're also packed with nuts, dried cherries, and oatmeal, giving them plenty of heft, and the recipe makes a whopping eight dozen cookies.

Start baking, however, and pretty soon you feel like the sorcerer's apprentice. Three sticks of butter, mountains of sugar, flour, and oatmeal, seven cups of nuts, chunks, and cherries -- with every new ingredient the unwieldy dough thickens and expands until it threatens to overwhelm its bowl. Then come the cookies, batch after batch until they're cooling all over the kitchen on every available surface. Finally, grim and sweaty, you bite into one -- and taste nothing but the chocolate chunks. Blowsy, overburdened, trying desperately to make an impression, these cookies are victims of their own monumental ambition.

Heinz Kerry took an entirely different approach. Her first decision, and a wise one, was to put a firm distance between herself and the Heinz family, at least for culinary purposes. ("Why not use tomato ketchup in desserts?" inquired a 1957 Heinz recipe booklet, which then proceeded to offer directions for a Tropicana Sundae -- ice cream topped with warm ketchup and apple jelly.) Nothing in Heinz Kerry's recipe harkens to such a past. Instead she heads straight for her husband's New England and its plain-spoken virtues. Her Pumpkin Spice Cookies call for cinnamon and allspice, walnuts and raisins, pumpkin puree -- ingredients that bespeak autumn, foliage, Thanksgiving, and the election season. They certainly don't bespeak July, which is when voters have to do their baking in order to meet Family Circle's August 1 deadline. With similar naivete, or maybe sheer guts, Heinz Kerry ignores the aforementioned law of chocolate: Her recipe has none, not even a dusting of cocoa powder.

But the dough comes together easily, and the cookies taste great -- spicy, and just sweet enough, with the pumpkin providing a gently assertive background. They're cakey, not crisp, which may put some people off. And compared to Bush's cookies, with their huge chunks of chocolate, these are a bit reserved -- this isn't a cookie that clamors for attention. But the honest flavors give this cookie a homespun dignity not often associated with campaign endeavors. It's hard to believe that a nation committed to pineapple pizza will embrace such a modest cookie, but we'll find out in November. And if these two smart career women manage to focus public attention even briefly on the glorious possibilities lurking in flour, sugar, butter, and cinnamon, they will not have baked in vain.

Laura Shapiro is a food historian in New York. Her latest book is "Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America."