CHOLESTERA: Life of the Patron Saint of Cookies

St. Cholestera, born Jane Lesser, was the youngest of three children of Malcolm and Elizabeth Lesser, nee Randolph, of Cos Cob, Connecticut. The Lesser family fortune had been made years earlier in the palm oil trade to the British colonies, a sordid business about which no one spoke.

The family sporting interests were divided among crew, equestrianism, and squash racquets. Each evening, they sat down to a meal (served by a humble Swedish servant girl) featuring elegantly prepared fresh vegetables (no sauces) and lean meats or fish, topped off by a dessert of fresh raspberries (in and out of season), with the occasional fruit ice when on holiday. (The cook, it goes without saying, was not Swedish.) Each Saturday morning, the family started off the day with a dip in the family immersion tank to measure their body fat percentages. Despite their devotion to good food and exercise, the Lesser family was, sadly, a sickly bunch, plagued constantly with ailments of one unpleasant sort and another.

When the little Lesser was only three, the family fortunes dwindled, as the result of a national decline in the consumption of tropical oils. Malcolm was forced back into the world of gainful employment, as a precaution against touching his principle. As luck would have it, his prep school roommate, Brooks Emerson, was scrounging for a president for his bank in Scarsdale, New York, and he offered Malcolm the post. Despite the shame of having a husband who had a day job, Elizabeth consoled herself with the fact that her husband's bank was near the home of Dr. Tarnower, the famous dietary pundit. (Needless to say, years later she was devastated by his death. She was never able to forgive Jean Harris, even though they had been on the Daisy Chain committee together at Vassar.)

Jane led an exemplary life throughout high school. She was a fine equestrienne, and excelled in field hockey and lacrosse, where her lithe, limber frame and her daring made her an ideal goaltender. However, Jane scandalized the family by moving to the Midwest for college, where the opportunities for female athletes were limited to the plebeian sports of softball, basketball or volleyball. Under the influence of the demure Swedish maid, Olga, she chose a small Lutheran college in a sleepy little hamlet in one of those Midwestern states one can never locate correctly on a map. The rebellious streak in Jane that had peeked out during her career as a goaltender took full flower, when she purchased for herself a used red Chevy Chevette in which to make the twice-yearly trip between the East Coast and the Midwest.

During her first year at college, the combination of starchy foods and the lack of a decent riding stable resulted in the dreaded "freshman fifteen." But, under Mummy Elizabeth's strict supervision, and a lovely new Arabian from Daddy Malcolm, Jane went back for her sophomore year as trim and lithe as ever, firmly committed to her eating heritage. This necessitated that Jane live off campus in an apartment, so she could cook her own low-fat, low cholesterol meals. It was also during this time, however, that Jane was plagued by inexplicable hallucinations of a grinning Holstein, saying "MOOOO, Jane, MOOOO," which Jane, again inexplicably, knew she was to understand as "come to me, Jane, come to me."

When travelling back to Cos Cob at the end of her sophomore year, the meaning of these visions (as she would come to describe them) was revealed to Jane when her Chevette took a turn that changed her life forever. After lunching at a village park, on watercress sandwiches she'd packed for her trip, Jane missed the entrance to the interstate, and ended up on a road not marked on her map. Truth be told, it was not marked on any earthly map. Jane found herself in a wrinkle in the time-space continuum, a place inhabited by faeries who gathered the mammary secretions of a large land mammal (which looked remarkably like her vision), and whipped them into a solid, yellowish substance, which they sold to supermarkets under the name of "butter." Other inhabitants of the wrinkle, elves and gnomes, used the substance to bake small sweet biscuits known as "cookies," which they also marketed. Jane tasted these substances, and was instantly transfigured. Her face took on a radiant sheen of happiness, and from her emanated the glow of abundant health. (She was never to suffer another cold.)

Jane reluctantly left the charmed world of the wrinkle to continue her journey homeward, but now her life had meaning and purpose. Before she left, the faeries charged her with the mission of spreading butter--or, more accurately, the truth about butter--across the eastern seaboard, where it had not been seen for the last twenty-five years. The elves and gnomes gave her gift boxes of cookies to distribute to the unbelieving masses, as testimony to the deliciousness and wholesomeness of this divine substance.

Jane's family of course immediately disowned and disinherited her. Undeterred, Jane spent the summer giving out free samples of butter cookies at racquet clubs, riding stables, and regattas--her old haunts, now become foreign to her. Publicly shunned, Jane nevertheless received many nightly phone calls in her small efficiency apartment (where she churned butter and baked cookies in its cramped kitchen), in which muffled-voiced souls begged for recipes for "those marvelous sweet cakes." Though penniless, Jane was happy broadcasting the message of butter.

That fall, she drove her now-rusty Chevette back to college, where she completed her junior and senior years in a single year, due to her financial constraints. Even with this cost-cutting measure, Jane was forced to work in the school cafeteria baking cookies, a job that would have been wonderful, had it not been for the fact that they baked with a substance known as Flav-r Fry (shades of Jane's palm-oil background).

At the graduation ceremony (which Jane's bitter and sickly parents did not attend), the Holstein appeared to her once more, handing her her diploma as she made her way across the stage. This time, the cow said "Jane, MOO, MOO," which she understood to mean "Jane, stay here in the Midwest, learn the names of all the states, get your own little dairy herd, churn butter, bake cookies, have a little lunch every night before bed, and help others to stop counting fat grams. If you do, we will canonize you. Your name shall be St. Cholestera, and you will be worshipped by true believers the world over." (Jane, in the interim, had become fluent in Holstein.) Flushed with the power of this vision, Jane (now St. Cholestera) dedicated her life to butter on the pat. It is unclear if she ever died; rumors of her being sighted (and her recipes cited) still circulate in kitchens throughout the Midwest.

Evidence of the power of this seemingly-little-known saint can be found in the cooptation of her symbol, the cookie, by the idolatrous elves of the Keebler Baking Company. However, she has never become popular in the East, her own home, although in recent years, Nieman Marcus has introduced its own cookie label.