Home Pie

Brand: Fujiya

Cost: Free from the break room

Found At: Next to the kettle

You cannot find a more classic cookie than a home pie. It’s the kind of crunchy, sweet, flaky cookie that is weak enough to disintegrate into a pile of crumbs the moment it is broken, and also sturdy enough outlast the human race in the event of nuclear war. Sprinkled in sugar and infinitely flakey, it’s the kind of butter cookie classic of Christmas cookie tins, AA meetings, and grandma’s top pantry shelf. It’s one of those flavors that comes tied up with a whole host of sense memories – the smell of cigarettes, the papery-softness of a seasonal paper napkin, and the avocado green and marigold yellow of a couch straight off the set of Mad Men. Somewhere, a casserole is cooking as you desperately fail to keep the crumbs off yourself and the horrible couch but it’s no use. The home pie is not meant to be eaten, but scattered across the living room, adding to the crumbs of decades and slowly accumulating in the horrible cream shag carpeting as an archeological record of the generational demise of a single tin of cookies.