Day 45: Today's Pick — A Regional Cookie From My Abuela's Town

Day 45 of this year of daily picks, and the last review is the one I have been holding back since I started.

The cookie is called galleta de polvo de mar, and it is made by exactly one panadería in a town of about 4,000 people in southeastern Yucatán, Mexico. The bakery is not on Google Maps. The cookie is not sold online. There is no Instagram. The recipe has, by oral tradition, been the same since 1942.

What it is

A small, dry, very crumbly cookie made from masa harina (corn flour), powdered sugar, and "polvo de mar" — a regional powdered seasoning made from sun-dried sea salt and toasted coconut. Each cookie is about the size of a quarter and weighs almost nothing. The texture is between a polvorón and a corn shortbread; the flavor is sweet and slightly briny and faintly coconut.

The cookies are baked twice a week. They sell out within an hour. They cost 3 pesos each (about 15 cents).

Why I am writing about a cookie you can't buy

This is a daily picks newsletter. The premise is: here's a thing you should buy. Most days, the answer is a clear actionable recommendation: order online, drive across town, search this brand.

This last pick of the year breaks the format on purpose, because not every great thing in the world has a website.

The cookie is irreplaceable in two senses: (1) there is no comparable cookie made anywhere else, and (2) the cultural practice of making it — the specific bakery, the specific family, the specific oral recipe — is irreplaceable in itself. If the bakery closes, the cookie ceases to exist in the world.

My grandmother

Was born in this town in 1932. Left in 1955. Returned every few years to visit her sister. Brought back a paper bag of these cookies, every time, and rationed them out to the grandchildren over weeks. I remember being seven years old, eating a single one of these cookies, not knowing what it was, knowing only that it was important.

She passed in 2014. The first time I went back to the town was 2018. I went to the bakery. I bought a dozen. I ate one standing in the street. I cried. I bought a dozen more.

I have been back four more times.

Why I waited until day 365

Because the year was, in a way, building toward this. The previous 364 picks have all been things you can buy, things you can have, things that solve small specific problems or improve small specific moments. This one is different. This one is about the limits of recommending things.

Some things are local. Some things are made by one family in one town. Some things require travel, or relationship, or patience, or simply being in the right place at the right time. The internet has made a lot of things globally available, and that is mostly good. But it has also created the illusion that everything is globally available, which is not true and which obscures the value of the things that aren't.

The cookie is one of those things.

What I want you to do with this

Not buy the cookie. You can't.

What I want is for you to think about your version of this cookie. The one specific thing — a food, an object, a place, an experience — that exists in your life because you happened to be born to particular people in a particular place. The one thing that, if you don't preserve it or pass it on, will quietly disappear when the people who know about it pass on.

Go visit it. Eat it. Take notes. Write about it. Bring a friend. Make sure it stays in the world.

That's the entire point.

A note on this newsletter

This is, in a sense, the close of a year of writing. We started 365 days ago with a $7 cassette adapter, a recommendation about preparedness for a future you might not need. We end with a 15-cent cookie you can't buy unless you go to a particular town in Mexico, a recommendation about preserving a past that won't preserve itself.

Both are picks of the day. The newsletter contains multitudes.

Thank you for reading. Tomorrow we start day 1 again. The cycle continues.