In the Woods

CHOCOLATE-COVERED DIGESTIVE BISCUITS

On the Friday after the Boston Marathon bombing in April 2013, I was into my fourth hour of watching the news when I suddenly felt the desperate need to bake. It wasn’t the desire to eat something sweet that drove me to it but the calm that measuring, weighing, sifting, creaming, whisking, and waiting always bring me. The sadness and anxiety that I had been feeling since that Monday seemed bottomless, and I baked until I was out of flour, trying to hit bottom so that I could start to come back up.

When you follow news coverage of a major event throughout the day, you sense a language emerging for talking about the story. In the hours before the suspect was taken into custody, news anchors uttered “manhunt” and “shootout” so many times that the words started to sound like nonsense. Others talked of “reading the tea leaves” (code, I learned, for gleaning information by watching the movement of groups of police officers), and emphasized that Boston was a “ghost town,” under “virtual lockdown.” There was talk of a white hat and a black hat, pressure cookers and IEDs, and the words “Boston Strong” filled my news feeds.

One reporter clung to the word “digest,” saying it in one context or another almost twenty times in four hours—“we’re still digesting,” “hard to digest”—an odd word to grab onto, which is probably why it stood out for me. Funny things happen with appetites and digestion when tragedy and grief are involved. We can’t eat, or we overeat, or we crave things we’ve never craved before or things that we haven’t eaten since we were children.

That morning, when all of my butter and flour and sugar had been baked into cakes and bars, I muted the TV and hid under a blanket with my book—Tana French’s In the Woods. It was exactly what I needed at that very moment—the well-written murder mystery of my comfort-craving dreams—and I read it for hours, eating nearly an entire grapefruit cake in the meantime, until I finally felt more like myself.

As homicide detectives, Cassie Maddox and Rob Ryan are engulfed by disaster and tragedy, forever grappling with ways to manage their grief. They drink too much, they sleep with the wrong people, they make each other greasy dinners, they pop handfuls of anxiety medication and stay up all night. When all else fails, Cassie eats chocolate digestive biscuits, lots of them. She buys them at the market and hides them in her desk drawer. People bring them to her as bribes and peace offerings and, in an odd twist that I’m not quite sure how to interpret, they are also the last meal of the twelve-year-old girl whose murder is at the heart of the book.

You could certainly argue that the ubiquity of chocolate biscuits in In the Woods is due to the fact that the novel is set in Ireland and that Tana French is an Irish writer. According to a Washington Post article by Monica Hesse, digestives have been part of daily life in the UK since their invention in the nineteenth century, and today an estimated fifty-two biscuits are consumed every second. As the name suggests, digestive biscuits were originally created to aid in digestion, the idea being that the coarse bran and heavy amounts of baking soda would settle the stomach and help move things along. This was of particular interest to the Victorians, who were preoccupied with their finicky insides. But, as with the graham cracker, clearly their appeal is far broader than medicinal use.

There is immense comfort in the ritual and the history that is present in every bite of a digestive. During World War II, British soldiers were given two different kinds of biscuits in their rations—two plain and two chocolate—tucked away in their rucksacks with tins of industrial-grade beans and chipped beef. I think about them, scared and young and far from home, and the comfort that these familiar little disks might have brought them in the face of tragedy and disaster and violence.

After hours of being held captive by news that was becoming increasingly repetitive (without much in the way of new information), the comfort that reading and baking had brought me began to wear thin, and I forced myself to leave the house and seek solace elsewhere. I took the train into Union Square and visited my friend Joe at work, and he made me a cocktail with burned rosemary and good gin and it tasted like Christmas and damp earth and made my chest warm. I walked to Chelsea and smelled new books in a tiny bookstore and ate chicken liver so good it immediately brought the color back to my cheeks. I walked from Herald Square to the Battery and then home across the Williamsburg Bridge, and I ate a green tomato like an apple, and it was good and musky and tart. I thought about the city that I’m in, but mostly I thought about the city that I’m from, with its bruised history and mixed-up roads and good, good people. The Shabbat sirens wailed in the neighborhoods below me and I cried a little into my tomato as a throng of Hasidic boys rushed past me to make it home before sundown, and I thought about the eighteen Boston Marathons I’d attended, feeling safe and happy and proud, and I took some time to digest it, all of it, everything.

IN THE WOODS

Chocolate-Covered Digestive Biscuits

Makes 1 dozen (3-inch) biscuits

¾ cup whole-wheat flour

¼ cup all-purpose flour

¼ cup wheat bran

¼ cup plus 1 tablespoon firmly packed dark brown sugar

½ teaspoon baking powder

¼ teaspoon baking soda

¼ teaspoon cream of tartar

¼ teaspoon kosher salt

4 tablespoons (½ stick) unsalted butter, browned and chilled to solid

1 tablespoon vegetable shortening, chilled

3 tablespoons heavy cream

½ teaspoon pure vanilla extract

Chocolate Glaze

1 cup semisweet chocolate, chopped

2 teaspoons vegetable shortening

Coarse sea salt, for sprinkling

Preheat the oven to 350°F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.

Combine the whole-wheat flour, all-purpose flour, wheat bran, brown sugar, baking powder, baking soda, cream of tartar, and salt in the bowl of a food processor and pulse a few times to get everything evenly mixed. Add the chilled brown butter and vegetable shortening and pulse until the fats are evenly distributed throughout.

With the processor running, slowly add the cream and vanilla.

Turn out the dough onto a clean surface and form it into a ball. The dough will be very crumbly, but don’t worry—it will come together. Place the dough between two pieces of parchment paper and roll it to ⅛ inch thick. Cut with a 3-inch circle cutter and place the cookies on the lined baking sheet.

Bake until golden brown and firm, 15 to 20 minutes. Transfer to a wire rack to cool.

To make the glaze, set up a double boiler: Fill a medium saucepan with 2 inches of water and bring it to a simmer over medium heat. Place a heat-safe glass bowl over the pot and add the chocolate and shortening, whisking until smooth. Spread the melted chocolate over the cooled cookies and sprinkle with coarse salt.