Hey, Cookie

My first memories of baking are standing at the side of the table where I would not be in the way, watching. My mother and grandmother were center stage, moving between the counter and the kitchen table: mixing, stirring, moving in the rhythm of creamed butter and granulated sugar.

They made pressed butter cookies. No guillotine could be more ruthless. If the pressed forms were not perfect, it was scraped back into the bowl, to be reloaded into the cookie gun and pressed again. Some sheets held five cookies when the cookie gun tube was empty; the rest had turned into lumps of dough waiting for their chance to be reincarnated. One sheet of spirals sprinkled with multicolored sugar dots, one tray of stars sprinkled with yellow sugar, one sheet of poinsettias sprinkled with red sugar. One recipe of trees, colored green, sprinkled with tiny colored sugar balls and topped with a yellow spoch of sugar. We used silver dragees until grandpa began cracking his fillings. The year my sister was old enough to decorate she created a tray of butterflies with food color painted bodies and matching, color patterned wings (30 minutes to decorate one tray of cookies); that remained the standard by which 40 subsequent years of decorated butter cookies were judged.

They made Beth’s nut chocolate: ground walnuts, German sweet chocolate, powdered sugar, bonded with egg whites and topped with a candied cherry. When times were tight, mom sliced the candied cherries in half, so they went further. They made ginger snaps: soft and spicy, sparkling under their cooked sugar crust. They made refrigerator cookies: Mom’s Refrigerator Cookies came from my paternal grandmother, surviving the Great Depression. Not a fancy cookie: brown sugar, spices, nuts, and nourishing as a mother’s hug. Chocolate refrigerator, with nut chips and the siren call of melted chocolate seasoned overnight before baking.

My mother made checkerboard cookies, gauging the dough’s thickness, slicing strips with a knife, assembling with the slit-eyed concentration of a surgeon. “Mom’s doing the checkerboards,” we would whisper to each other, and stay clear. My grandmother made lebkuchen and anise cookies, set in the pantry overnight for their layers to separate.

We stored them in tins, in the unheated attic. Mother wrote the name of each cookie, in crayon, on the lid of each metal can: Holiday, Chocolate Holiday, Trees, Peanut Butter Blossoms, Mom’s, Chocolate Refrigerator. One year, in mischief and rebellion, I switched all the lids, so anyone hunting for a one-cookie snack found himself cracking the lid from tin after tin, muttering, “Where is it,” and sampling cookies along the way.

Over time we kept the canon and added varieties like turtle cookies: brown sugar base, chopped nuts in caramel, and the dark chocolate crust; M&Ms with gritty graham bits; espresso pretzels, twisted and iced; apricot rollups and cookies raised in bas relief from the carved rolling pin.

Our own mythos twined around the recipes. The year Craig ate a complete pan of unbaked ginger snaps and went on to tuck away a full supper. The year Mom’s dog seizured on baking day; she, Bob, and dog went to the vet while I stayed behind to bake. The job where I was threatened unless I produced a recipe for Beth's Nut cookies. The associate dean who spent a Sunday at my kitchen table, patiently applying colored splotches to cookies. The sibling rivalry over who hid the remaining turtle cookies.

Ten kinds, fifteen kinds, twenty-five kinds in one baking season. Days spent in the kitchen, sliding pans into and out of the oven, working as a team: one forming cookies and taking them off the pans; the other creaming the butter and sugar for the next batch. We started at eight in the morning and finished at midnight. We were back in the kitchen at eight the next day. The family knew better than to expect a hot dinner: they slunk into the kitchen for a cold meat sandwich and ate it quietly in another room. Cookie baking was our tradition. The women baked: the men delivered boxes of cookies to friends and relatives, each box containing 2 or 3 dozen, arranged to show off the variety. Our recipes survived the Great Depression and family economics. We may have scraped the money or time together, but we continued baking, through the deaths of Gran, then Mom, through the next primary baker’s two full time jobs, through happy years and the years that helped us appreciate happy years.

This year I’m getting out the mixer and taking inventory: flour, butter, brown and granulated sugar, chocolate chips, maraschino cherries, candied cherries, little colored sugars in shake jars, nuts and caramels. Cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves and ginger. No exotic ingredients, just the flavors and spices of everyday life.

Yes, we don’t need the calories. But in a world illuminated by terrorist fires and divided by anger, we need the belief that things will turn out all right. We need the love and the continuity. We need the memories.