My Grandma Bernadette made the best Christmas cookies. They arrived every December without fail, just like Santa, and I looked forward to them as much as I looked forward to Christmas morning. She made only one kind, rolled sugar cookies, and she made zillions of them. She stored them with great care between layers of wax paper in every Tupperware container and every soup pot she had. It was an amazing sight to behold, that tiny kitchen overflowing with these lovely, sparkly cookies. The most remarkable thing about them was that they were gorgeously thin and crisp. Even as a child, I remember wondering how she got them so thin. Every year, my Mom and I discuss this feat of cookie engineering, trying to figure out how she did it. I was so intimidated by her skills at cookie rolling, that I have never tried to make them myself. These cookies had to be the thickness of dollar bills. They had to live up to my memory of them and my memory of her. Oh, the pressure! But I wanted to try. I got out the recipe that my Mom wrote out for me many years ago. The title said, "Grandma Bernadette's Famous, Thin Sugar Cookies." She underlined "thin!" Already I was re-thinking this. At the bottom of the recipe, my Mom put a big asterisk and wrote, "I think only Grandma can make these. I try but it's so hard. She was known for her beautiful handwriting and unusually wonderful, thin, thin sugar cookies!" She wrote "thin" twice! Also, I will tell you right now, my handwriting is not very good.
My Grandma made cookies like she did everything in her life; deliberately, carefully and with precision. I, on the other hand, do things with more of a reckless enthusiasm. She worked for the school principal, I got called to the principal. She was very quiet and conservative and I'm...well...not. We did have one thing in common, we both liked baking. Reading through the recipe, I was surprised to see that it called for shortening. I haven't used shortening for years. Seemed strange, but I wanted to try and re-create her cookies, so I used it. Another crazy thing was the baking temperature for this recipe was 425 degrees. I thought for sure this was a mistake - I cook my pizza at that temperature but never my cookies. And the baking time was 4-5 minutes. That couldn't be right, either. Most of the cookies I make bake for 12-15 minutes - at least. I immediately called my Mom to see if she made a mistake when writing down the recipe. Recipe confirmed. I was really curious to see how this was going to go.
As far as decoration, my Grandma would put some sugar in several glass ramekins and put a drop of different food coloring in each one and stir it with a fork until it turned the sugar the desired color. The sugar on the final cookies were always so pale, you could barely tell they were different colors, but I always loved the way they looked - very delicate and fragile. The only way you knew they were Christmas cookies was because they were rolled into holiday shapes. There were no bright reds and greens, no royal icing. I resisted the urge to use more fancy decorations. When I called my Mom about the oven temp, she had said, "Are you making the colored sugar?" My sister Kim asked the same when I told her I was making the cookies. It was clear tradition meant as much to them as it did to me and that the cookies were more than just holiday treats. Baking these cookies brought them close to my Grandma's memory too.
I cut out my cookies using only the cookie cutters that had belonged to my Grandma. I listened to Andy Williams and Gene Autry and Nat King Cole sing Christmas songs as I rolled those suckers out so thin that I could see the recipe for pie crust printed on my pastry board underneath. I was in the groove. I sprinkled my pastel sugar on the cookies and in that crazy-hot oven they went. Exactly 5 minutes later they emerged slightly brown around the edges, and triumphantly crisp. So far, so good. The smell of the kitchen was exactly as I remember - buttery, sugary and very much like Christmas. I hadn't had these cookies since she passed away over 20 years ago. I was nervous to taste them but they were perfect. Buttery, but the shortening gave them a sort of pie crust taste and texture. They were ultra crisp and the sugar gave them a gentle crunch. I packed them in Tupperware containers and in my soup pot between layers of wax paper. I felt silly that I waited all these years to make them. I was happy to feel a connection to my Grandma, and glad that my Mom and sister could share in it too. Between bites of cookie, I'm sure my Grandma would have told me that I did a good job, but that I need to keep working on my handwriting,
No comments:
Post a Comment