Food52
For a long time, I always went to the bodega on West 9th Street, a few feet off of Avenue of the Americas. It’s Korean-owned, and a prim, unsmiling woman ruled the roost. I saw her give a few customers the business, especially the louder, rowdy types. The day I said I’d like to purchase a lighter, she looked at me disdainfully; surely I was up to no good. She’d often burst into song—Christian hymns, always—while I was browsing the aisles in search of Fig Newtons, which I get a particular hankering for twice a year, or standing on tiptoes to reach the paper towel NO ONE COULD POSSIBLY REACH but how could you interrupt the religious moment? Every once in a while, I’d get her to crack a smile—just barely. One day, she disappeared. Seems she retired. Her colleague who ran the bodega a few blocks away and would stop by to visit sometimes for a chat took her place at the counter. I stopped going to that bodega—there’s a larger one closer to my apartment that consistently has things I realize I’m missing in the middle of recipe-testing, so it’s become my go-to (it has a better selection of bodega flowers too). But I decided to return to my first West Village bodega for these scones. I thought I’d use ground Nillas in the dough—until I discovered that they don’t have vanilla in them, or butter. Then I remembered the overlooked Lorna Doone—but there wasn’t a box to be found, and subsequent online research has revealed that despite its being called shortbread, NO BUTTER in there either. What the bodega did have was Walkers Pure Butter Shortbread, even better. So we’ve got those cookies, and then, of course, the defining “cookies ‘n cream” sandwiches, Oreos! In the cream department, there’s the usual heavy whipping stuff you splash into the dough for—ahem—cream scones, and cream cheese. There’s also butter. You gotta have butter. What there isn’t much of is sugar. I don’t like my scones real sweet, and you’ve already got enough from the cookies.
