We tend to associate chocolate with Valentine’s Day. Americans will spend billions of dollars for that holiday this Friday, much of that money on chocolate. It seems like the perfect romantic gift.

Since the ancient Aztecs, chocolate has been viewed as an aphrodisiac. And many of us (this author included) have turned to a bite (or two! or three!) of this seeming elixir to lift our spirits when we feel low.

According to Sheryl Barringer, a taste scientist at Ohio State University, the taste of chocolate doesn’t literally affect our brains, hearts, or reproductive systems.

“Eating chocolate may make you feel happier, but that’s because it tastes so good, not because it is chemically changing your brain,” writes Barringer. In my analysis, Barringer is correct only in part. What goes on in our hearts and our brains is indeed a matter of chemistry. It’s also a matter of social conditioning, however.

I began to think of chocolate as romantic when I was about 4 years old and my father gave my mother a heart-shaped box of chocolates for Valentine’s Day. She wasn’t actually a big fan of chocolate, but she loved my father. She was therefore delighted with his gift and expressed appropriate thanks and warmth.

Ever since then, I have tried to give loved ones something chocolatey each Feb. 14. People appreciate the effort I put into their treats. And the gooey chocolate seems to strengthen the social glue between us.

This year my treat of choice is a cookie that represents love to me, the Neiman Marcus chocolate chip cookie. My friend Janice presented several of these cookies to me when I successfully defended my Ph.D. dissertation.

Finishing the dissertation had been a fairly arduous process. As my friends who emerged from graduate school “ABD” (all but dissertation) can attest, the doctoral process is unexpected.

Your Daily Puzzles

Cross|Word

Flipart

Typeshift

SpellTower

Really Bad Chess

I went into my doctoral program as I do most things in life, a bit impulsively. I loved going to school: thinking big thoughts; writing short but (in my opinion) brilliant papers; and discussing life, literature, and the movies in class. Moreover, I was offered a fellowship, so I didn’t have to lay out any money.

It didn’t dawn on me for the first couple of years that I was supposed to emerge from the doctoral program having done something I had never done before. I needed to write a dissertation, basically a book that posed and documented an original argument.

I finally got my dissertation finished — mostly because I’m so stubborn that I refused to leave school without it — but the trial-and-error process of creating the document wore me down.

Happily, actually defending my dissertation ended up being great fun, and it allowed me to share with those present my Spam theory of culture (Spam the food, not spam as in junk mail), which I should probably write about on National Spam Day in the summer.

My friend Jim served cocktails at the defense to enhance the sense of fun — and to put my professors in a good mood. As soon as I passed the defense and became Dr. Tinky, dear Janice presented me with her wonderful cookies. I was touched and delighted. If you are unfamiliar with Neiman Marcus chocolate chip cookies, picture regular cookies with added zing.

The name comes from an urban legend that has been around since at least the mid-20th century, according to snopes.com, although it was associated with other retail establishments before it became attached to the upscale department store Neiman Marcus in the 1990s.

The story, shared first in chain letters and more recently on social media, is told by a woman who writes that she was served delicious chocolate-chip cookies in the café at Neiman Marcus in Dallas.

She says (the story is always told in the first person) that she asked whether she could be given the recipe. The waitress replied that she couldn’t give it out but could sell it for “two-fifty.”

When the woman’s credit-card bill came, that figure turned out to be $250 instead of the $2.50 the purchaser had assumed. She took her revenge by vowing to share the recipe with everyone she knew. After that, it just spread.

Snopes and others have listed several reasons why the story can’t be true, including the fact that Neiman Marcus didn’t have chocolate-chip cookies on its restaurant menus when the story was first told.

My own suspicions were raised by the fact that the woman apparently didn’t look at her restaurant receipt. I always do that, if only to calculate the tip I should leave.

Still, the story is fun. More importantly, the cookies are delicious. The oat flour makes their texture and flavor stand out from those of other chocolate-chip cookies. The two types of chocolate up the chocolate ante.

The recipe below differs a bit from the one generally found on the internet — and from the cookies my friend Janice gave me. In the years since her original gift, I seem to have added the espresso powder … and decided to grind the pecans instead of just chopping them. Recipes tend to be adapted in my kitchen.

You may omit those elements, and you’ll still have a great cookie for your Valentine gifts. On other hand, I maintain that my additions make a complex cookie even more complex.

This recipe may be halved or doubled.

Ingredients:

1 cup (2 sticks) sweet butter at room temperature

1 cup sugar

1 cup brown sugar, firmly packed

2 eggs

1 teaspoon baking powder

1 teaspoon salt

1 tablespoon espresso powder

a splash of vanilla extract

2 cups flour

2 1/2 cups oat flour (oatmeal pulverized to a powder in your blender)

12 ounces semisweet chocolate chips

4 ounces milk chocolate, chopped into chunks

1 cup chopped pecans, pulverized in a blender or mini-food processor (optional)

Instructions:

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Line cookie sheets with silicone or parchment paper. Cream together the butter and the sugars. Beat in the eggs, followed by the baking powder, the salt, the espresso powder, and the vanilla.

Slowly add the flour and the oat flour (the batter will be stiff!), followed by the chocolate and the nuts (if desired).

Use your hands to shape the batter into mounds on the cookie sheets in the size you desire. I was originally given these as huge cookies but now prefer them reasonably sized. Bake for 10 to 12 minutes (up to 15 minutes for larger cookies).

Makes 12 to 48 cookies, depending on size.

Tinky Weisblat is an award-winning cookbook author and singer known as the Diva of Deliciousness. Visit her website, TinkyCooks.com.