A guilty pleasure

When I was growing up, one of the carrots my mother would use to get us to help when she was baking was the opportunity to lick the beaters or spatulas.
Or sometimes when she was baking cookies, my mom would roll some dough into a small ball and offer it to us to taste the cookies before they were baked.
Chocolate cake batter always was my favourite, although a lemon cake was equally good.
My mother would make chocolate chip oatmeal cookies or raisin oatmeal cookies and if she was not looking, we might try to steal a sample from the bowl—hooking a finger into the stiff dough and pulling out a sample that quickly was transferred to our mouths.
I can’t ever remember having a bad sample. Perhaps the only bad thing that may have happened was getting our hands tapped with her wooden spoon on the second attempt.
It was a game that was played out between my mother and her children.
When my sons were growing up, they also sampled the raw dough. They, too, licked the beaters and spatulas from mixing cake. And I still try and steal a raw dough sample when my wife is baking.
Sometimes I think the raw cool cookie dough is much tastier than the finished product.
However, eating all that raw dough will have to come to an end. The U.S. Federal Department of Agriculture now has put out warnings about the hazards to your health from eating raw dough.
We know there are risks in eating uncooked eggs. Recipes for steak tartare still include serving the raw eggs mixed with the raw scraped beef tenderloin. And traditional Caesar salad dressing recipes used in the finest restaurants still require the use of raw egg yolks whisked to a creamy consistency.
In neither recipe does one find that you cook the yolk.
But the FDA has discovered a new concern. General Mills has had to recall 10 million pounds of flour that was found to have a specific type of E. coli bacteria. That particular strain has caused illness in 38 U.S. residents in 20 states beginning last December.
Children under five are most vulnerable to the strain. They also are the most likely to be tempted by an adult to lick a beater or snack on raw cookie dough.
We don’t really think of flour as being a carrier of E. coli but researchers in the U.S. have been able to connect the dots. Apparently, manure spread on fields to make wheat grow better contains the strain and as the sprouts of wheat grow up out of the ground, they may become contaminated—and then infect the wheat heads.
The soil can be contaminated for years with the strain. However, when flour is baked as bread, or in cake or in cookies or pies, the heat of the baking kills the bacteria, making those products safe to eat.
Who knew that my mother, in letting me lick the beaters or the spatula, was putting my health at risk. Neither did I think that offering some raw cookie dough to my sons would put them at risk.
It was just fun—and the sneaking of those raw dough samples remains a guilty pleasure.