I used to bake Christmas cookies with my mother and aunt.
There is nothing unusual about this. The preparation of special holiday foods is a long-standing and very common tradition throughout the world, whether it’s hot cross buns for Easter or seven kinds of fish for Christmas Eve. That Mum, proud German-American that she was, might spend the run-up to an important holiday like Christmas baking batch after batch of cookies, fruitcakes, pies, etc., is not particularly noteworthy. She was an excellent baker, her skills honed by wartime summers cooking for the laborers and harvest teams at the Farm, and if I hadn’t personally seen her poring over her carefully preserved recipes I might thought that preparing all the deliciousness of December was as instinctive to her as breathing.
Nor is particularly odd that she might wish me, her only daughter, to know that the best way to mix a pie crust is lightly, with clean hands, ice water, and Crisco instead of lard, or that cookie dough handles best if chilled. Her mother had taught her, after all, and now it was her turn to train the next generation.
The odd woman out was, of course, my aunt Betty.
Betty’s kitchen skills would have been dignified by the phrase “desperately mediocre;” not only had been much too busy practicing the piano and training herself to be the Queen of All She Surveyed to bother with cooking, her baby sister was clearly so much better that there was no point. Betty could put together a meal if pressed, but during the time her baby sister was turning out twenty to thirty pies and cakes per week to fuel the farm boys, Betty had waltzed off to Pittsburgh, gotten a job in an office to replace a draftee, and was eating either at luncheonettes or out of cans. She never really bothered to work on her cooking, even after Mum had married and was no longer available to prepare a dainty dish, and decades later her brother Lou still winced at the memory of the time Betty had tried to prepare baked apples using Red Delicious.
No, you really don’t want to know. Trust me. You just don’t.
Betty's general incompetence in the kitchen was bad enough that poor Lou, whose basic culinary skills had been acquired warming up K-rats on the exhaust manifold of a Jeep somewhere near Monte Cassino, ended up cooking a lot of the family meals. He also took over the shopping, both at the grocery and at a butcher shop on his way home after the early shift at the steel mill. He never learned to bake — that’s why God invented Dudt’s and Kreibel’s — but he could broil a steak and throw together a salad, and that was enough to keep him and his siblings alive until Mum, Dad, and I moved back to Pittsburgh and Mum began cooking for everyone again.
Just why Betty, Queen of Inappropriate Baking Fruits, was included during what should have been a lovely mother-daughter bonding experience is not entirely clear. Possibilities include Mum’s love for her sister overcoming her good sense, a wish to avoid being rude by flaunting holiday fun in Betty’s face, or the realization that life was short and inclusion better than exclusion. Mum had a kind heart, after all, and deliberately keeping Betty from such an important family activity might have qualified as Not Nice. That she might have loved her long suffering brothers enough to take Betty off their hands on Saturday morning before she got bored and demanded a trip downtown to buy yet more clothes did not occur to me till much, much later.
Including Betty didn’t mean Mum actually let her bake, thank God and the angels. Mum may not have been present for the Great Baked Apple Disaster, but she’d gotten an earful from Lou during subsequent phone calls. No, Betty and I were relegated to decorating the cookies once Mum had mixed, chilled, and rolled out the dough. We might have been allowed to roll the peanut butter cookie dough into neat little balls, then squish them into attractive patterns with a flour-dipped fork, but otherwise our job was to keep Mum company, sprinkle colored sugar, nuts, and maraschino cherries on the embryonic treats, and avoid slinging confectioner’s glaze onto the Cairn terrier.
Not that Toto Barbarossa particularly minded. Dropped nuts, cherries, whole cookies, and the occasional flick of unnaturally colored sweet stuff onto his back was almost enough to make up for me not practicing Bach’s French Suites for his dining and dancing pleasure. If the humans were going to deny him of his daily dose of Johann Sebastian, the least they could do was feed him.
And so we’d spend a weekend, sometimes two, sitting ‘round the kitchen table chatting, mixing, sampling the finished cookies, and otherwise making the foods that made the holidays so memorable. There would always be at least half a dozen kinds of cookies, but Mum also made fruitcakes, pies, and sometimes other treats.We’d order a pizza around lunchtime, take a quick break, and then go back to the mixing, chopping, decorating, and boxing the finished product. Some were eaten fresh, some frozen to be enjoyed later, but regardless of what Mum decided to make each year, the results were always well worth the time and effort.
And what results! Bon bons glossy with icing and plump with pecans or chocolate chips or shredded coconut...sugar cookies in red and green and sometimes blue...peanut butter cookies crisscrossed and sprinkled with sugar...golden fruitcakes heavy with nuts and pineapple and cherries...Scotch raisin-apple tarts that would be served with flaming brandy sauce...raisin squares…tiny nut balls rolled in confectioner’s sugar….
Mum’s cookies were so good, and so popular with family and friends, that I think half the neighborhood went into mourning when illness finally forced her to stop baking in the early 90’s. I tried to pick up the slack, but I was living in Massachusetts by then and it simply wasn’t the same. I did manage to make an acceptable fruitcake for my uncle Oscar in 1994, the last Christmas we were able to celebrate as a family, and seeing him enjoy and ask for seconds made the ten hour drive down from Springfield seem like nothing at all.
I don’t bake much anymore — I have other priorities, plus I yet to figure out how to teach a cat how to mix dough without getting fur all over everything — but those days of baking, gossiping, and dripping sugar all over the family pet are some of my most treasured memories. That’s why tonight, instead of lousy books, I bring you one of my mother’s favorite volumes, plus a couple of special surprises at the very end of the diary:
The Settlement Cook Book, by Mrs. Simon Kander and Mrs. Henry Schoenfeld — the type of cooking in this most basic of cookbooks may be out of fashion today, but it’s still an invaluable source for what used to be called “good plain cooking.” Written by social worker Lizzie Black Kander and her friend Mrs. Henry Schoenfeld, the book began as a fundraiser intended to support their efforts working with Eastern European immigrants in Milwaukee. The recipes, which were taught to eager young women hoping to shed their ethnic ways and help their families assimilate, still have a distinctly Central/Eastern European feel to them, but by and large this is ordinary Midwestern cookery. The meal plans are simple — meat, vegetable, starch, bread, and dessert — the sauces and condiments equally so, but if Mum’s menus are any guide, simplicity is no vice.
Later editions, such as the 1958 version Mum owned, were updated to include “ethnic” treats like a basic (and bland) recipe for “chili con carne,” sticky suburban treats like toffee bars and coconut cakes, and of course molded gelatin salads both sweet and savory. Mum didn’t cook those — I’m not sure she even owned a Jell-O mold — but the influence of the Settlement House Cook Book was clear with every dinner she set. If I’d ever been lucky enough to have a family, I have no doubt the same would have applied to me, even though my own favorite cookbook is the late 70’s edition of Betty Crocker.
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Now...just because Mum swore by the Settlement House (and an equally good basic volume put out by the good people who made Magic Chef appliances) doesn’t mean that she relied completely on either book for her recipes. Like everyone else, she clipped recipes from the local newspapers or got them from friends. Some of what became family favorites originated here, and below are two that I found tucked into her cookbooks after her death:
MARTHA EVANS’ SUGAR COOKIES
½ cup shortening
1 cup sugar
2 eggs, well beaten
2 tablespoons cream
1 tablespoon vanilla
3 ½ cups sifted cake flour
2 teaspoons baking powed
½ teaspoon salt
Preheat oven to 375 degrees.
Beat shortening until creamy. Add sugar gradually, beating until light. Add eggs, cream, and vanilla, beating well.
Mix and sift flour, baking powder and salt. Stir into the egg mixture, blending well. Shape into a ball, cover with waxed paper, and chill for an hour.
Roll out dough to ½ inch pastry cloth sprinkled with confectioner's sugar (not flour, the dough should be as tender as possible). Cut into shapes as desired and decorate with whole pecans, maraschino cherries, or colored sugar, then bake for 8 minutes.
Makes about 18 cookies.
Note: dough should be handled as little as possible to avoid tough cookies. This is why Mum rolled out on confectioner's sugar and used caked flour, preferably Softasilk or Swansdown.
BON BONS
Cookies
1 cup shortening (part butter or margarine), softened
¾ cup granulated sugar
1 egg
2 ½ cups flour
½ teaspoon baking powder
1/8 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon vanilla
Various fillings (Brazil nuts, pecans, maraschino cherries, shredded coconut, chocolate chips, raisins, etc.)
Sugar glaze
Preheat oven to 375 degrees.
Blend shortening, sugar, egg, flour, baking powder, salt and vanilla on low speed. Add 2-3 tablespoons milk if the dough is stiff. You may wish to chill the dough so it's easier to handle.
Shape 1 level teaspoon dough around fillings.* Bake 10-12 minutes, and cool completely. Dip into the glaze, sprinkle with sugar or nonpareils, and let dry before handled. Makes 7-8 dozen.
Sugar Glaze
2 cups confectioner's sugar
3 tablespoons water
Food coloring as necessary
Mix sugar and water until smooth. Colorings are up to you, but we always used to color code the finished bon bons so we'd know what we were about to eat. Our color code, which always broke down by the end of the day, was as follows:
Pink – cherries
Green – pecans
Blue – coconut
Orange – chocolate chips
Yellow – Brazil nuts or walnuts
*Coconut may need to be shaped with milk so it holds together long enough to be encased in dough.
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What are your favorite holiday recipes? Did your mother have any baking rituals she passed along to you? Did you have a relative who sat around and gossiped rather than cooking? There’s just enough time left to bake, so have fun!
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