"Oh," I said. "I'd love to visit."
"You can't," he said. I asked why.
"The machine we use to make pinwheels, it's proprietary. We wouldn't want our competitors to find out how it works."
"How about this," I suggested. "I'll come visit. You don't show me the machine, and I'll promise not to describe it in any way, and between my not seeing it, and not writing anything about it, your secret will be safe."
That worked, and I got to visit, and taste a pinwheel warm off the line, surely a highlight of my career. The story, which came to mind earlier in the week, when Carl Swede wrote complaining that I'd dissed his native land, hasn't been posted before today. But with Lenell out of business since 2008, and everyone trapped in an eternal present, I figure we could all use a visit to a cookie factory.
You know their names: Pinwheel. Jelly Star. Almonettes. And those are just the most popular of some two dozen varieties of cookies baked each day, two shifts a day, at Harlem and Montrose in Norridge, at the Maurice Lenell Cooky Co. plant.
Yes, that's "cooky" with a "y," for reasons obscure. "That's the way they spelled it on the incorporation papers," says Wayne Cohen, Maurice Lenell president, whose father, Sonny, bought the company in 1987.
Like many cookies, the distinctive small, hard, sugary Maurice Lenell cookies originated in Scandinavia.
Many of the recipes used at Maurice Lenell today were brought to Chicago by a trio of Swedish bakers—Gunnar Lenell, his brother Eric Maurice Lenell and their partner, Agaard Billing—who started the company at 3352 N. Milwaukee in 1937. The company moved to West Belmont Avenue in 1940 and built the current Harlem Avenue plant in 1956.
A big moment for Maurice Lenell came in 1954, when its advertising firm, Isker & Adajian, designed the company's distinctive logo of a boy in a cookie jar. The cost was $150.
Maurice Lenell doesn't advertise much anymore, though the company was featured in a local Chevrolet commercial in 1996. It advertised more in the 1950s and 1960s, sponsoring early TV shows from Chicago, and its radio ads, with folk singer Win Stracke, were familiar to many Chicagoans.
By the 1980s, however, the company was sagging. The Stracke jingle was gone. Sales were flat, and the third generation of Maurice Lenell owners was shopping for a buyer.
"They weren't too interested in running the company," says Cohen, who was raised in Skokie and went to Niles High School. "We grew up in the bakery business. I grew up with these cookies; there are a lot of positive memories. It is our responsibility to carry on the line the way we remember them so other people can enjoy it."
The cookies are made in 1,500-pound batches, in massive Peerless mixers with rotating paddles. Bulk ingredients such as flour and sugar are piped automatically into the mixers; other ingredients—baking soda, salt—that kitchen cooks add by the pinch are added at Maurice Lenell with big scoops.
After mixing for 10 minutes, the three-quarter-ton clump of dough is forced through strips of die cutters—outlined like stars or circles or crescents—and onto a conveyer belt. Adornments— sprinkles of sugar, the red jelly center of the stars—are added just before the cookies roll through the 100-foot-long ovens.
The jelly sits in a long, rectangular trough that rocks above the conveyer line as the raw cookies pass underneath. The jelly-application process is surprisingly loud; BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! the device goes, the gallons of jelly jiggling and undulating as neat gobs of crimson are placed at the center of each star-shaped cookie.
The raw dough takes about 20 minutes to become a finished cookie. The conveyor belt has occasional gaps to let crumbs fall through.
A stroll through the factory plunges visitors into and out of wonderful smells: zones of almond, areas of hot sugariness, whiffs of vanilla and complex aromas that defy description.
Cohen has owned the company with his older brother, Terry, since their father died in June. The Cohen brothers—and there is no way to say this politely—both have prominent bellies, a fact not entirely unrelated to their business. Asked about quality control, Terry Cohen merely pats his stomach and smiles.
"Everybody is involved in quality control," says Wayne, who adds that the cookie that really catches people's interest is the Pinwheel. Unlike most mass-produced cookies, the Pinwheels differ from cookie to cookie. In some, the chocolate and vanilla doughs are loosely swirled, much like a yin-yang sign. In others, they are tightly swirled like, well, a pinwheel.
"Making them is very labor-intensive," says Wayne, who stopped a photographer from taking pictures of the Pinwheel manufacturing. "It's a secret process. We had to have the machinery custom-made."
About 200 people work at the company, many of them hand-packing the cookies in little corrugated paper cups. "It keeps the cookies from breaking and makes a nice presentation," Wayne says.
"Our job is to make sure products are the same today as yesterday and past generations," Wayne says.
The only innovation on the horizon is a 2-ounce pack of cookies, which will be introduced early this year.
A decade after going through hard times, business is booming.
"In the last six years we've gone from predominantly a Chicago company to shipping all over the United States to now shipping all over the world," Terry says. "We're one of the largest family-owned bakeries in the U.S."
Spread of Maurice Lenell cookies over the globe might someday end one of the more distinctive Chicago traditions.
"People stop by to pick up cookies on their way to the airport to visit relatives," says Terry, referring to the popular Maurice Lenell factory store where prices are rock-bottom. "When you leave home, it's like getting a piece of Chicago brought to you."