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Monday, January 18, 2021

Ted Odell dies without revealing his legendary 'Guerrilla cookie' recipe - Madison.com

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Guerrilla cookies

"Rare was the UW-Madison student backpack in 1969 that did not have a pocket lined with the crumbs of a guerrilla cookie," George Hesselberg wrote in 2004.

Ted Odell, the innovator behind Madison's legendary Guerrilla cookies, popular in the late 1960s to early 1980s, once told a fellow baker there were no copies of the recipe and that it would die with him.

True to his word, Odell took the recipe with him when he died of cancer Jan. 2. He was 81.

"Like anything, it's over," said his younger sister, Mary Odell. "People can have the memories, but they can't have the cookies."

Odell

Odell

While the recipe remains a mystery, Wisconsin State Journal reporter George Hesselberg got close in a 2004 story that listed the closely guarded ingredients: rolled oats, cane sugar, turbinado sugar, raisins, dry milk, wheat bran, egg whites, butter, almonds, egg yolks, soy nuts, sunflower seeds, canola oil, cracked wheat, almond butter, peanut butter, soy grits, brewer's yeast, vanilla, molasses, cinnamon, baking soda, salt.

"Rare was the UW-Madison student backpack in 1969 that did not have a pocket lined with the crumbs of a Guerrilla cookie," Hesselberg wrote.

Mary Odell said her brother's career was devoted to the cookies, which were sold at the former Mifflin Street Co-op and a few other outlets.

Ted Odell graduated from West High School and UW-Madison. His family's property along the Sugar River in Brodhead, 35 miles south of Madison, "was his first and only love," according to his obituary, which said that he "invented" the Guerrilla cookie at a cabin on the property surrounded by white oaks.

Odell named his bakery Quercus Alba, which means "white oak" in Latin. The obituary said the name reflected his interest in Latin and the fact that white oaks are sturdy and hardy. 

"They were good. They were a hearty cookie and very tasty and very popular," said Mary Odell, a school teacher in Monroe, who worked for her brother making the cookies for a short time. "I knew I wasn't as good at it, but I tried."

Mary Odell, who lives in Madison, said after her brother retired from baking he lived full time in the "woods" until health problems forced him into an assisted living center in Janesville.

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While there was some dispute over whether Odell invented the recipe or modified someone else's, he would never reveal his secrets and could be difficult when challenged.

"You could describe him in all kinds of ways," Mary Odell said, "but the most polite way to say it is that he was a private person."

Hesselberg wrote that in 1967, Mary MacDowell, a graduate student living in a small apartment on West Washington Avenue, noted a cookie recipe on the back of a box of a powdered milk drink called Tiger's Milk, and modified it.

Her husband came up with the name Guerrilla cookie, she said, "because we were anti-war activists and it was a good name for struggling against authority."

One day, MacDowell said, a neighbor — Odell — was visiting and asked about the cookies. She gave him a couple, as well as the recipe. "He made some alterations," MacDowell said. "I know he put cracked wheat in his. And he started baking them and selling them."

A co-op employee, Glen Chism, told Hesselberg the cookies were sold until the 1980s, when "Ted took his recipe into retirement."

Ted Odell once wrote to the UW alumni magazine "On Wisconsin" that "as their true and only creator (popular journalism to the contrary notwithstanding), I testify under oath: they came into existence and were made in the service of certain principles. To release them into the public domain advantages those who exploit them contrary to principles. (Consumerism is an example of what these principles are not)."

In 2010, a blogger who goes by Karen M, wrote that Chism's attempts to get the recipe from Odell failed, and that when he tried to communicate with Odell he got a series of bizarre letters, "complete with interesting pieces of sheet music and sort of disturbing drawings."

Odell told Chism, according to the blog, that "he stopped selling the cookie because it had become a symbol of what is most wrong with our world."

Mary Odell didn't want to make public her brother's political views late in his life.

"He hung out with different people," she said. "His political views turned around, around, around from 180 to 180 to 45 to 90, to whatever."

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January 19, 2021 at 05:32AM
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Ted Odell dies without revealing his legendary 'Guerrilla cookie' recipe - Madison.com

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