Memories of Cookies Past

When I was little, Thanksgiving was a holiday unto itself, not just a precursor to Christmas, as it seems to be now. But the flow of Christmas Cookies from my grandmother started before Thanksgiving. She’d send loads of them and they were all tidily, immediately devoured by my many siblings and me. Inevitably, they were spritz—small, dainty, meticulously decorated, and having a melt-in-your-mouth lightness to them. And with a distinctive, elusive flavor that had no name and no obvious origin. All I knew was that no other spritz ever tasted like Nana’s, not even the ones from the Viennese bakery around the corner from our house.

My grandmother was an Irish immigrant and a woman whose life story was punctuated with hard times. She was a good cook, but not a great cook and definitely not the type to harbor secret ingredients. In my twenties, I became a caterer and, in the process, a pretty good cook and baker, but no matter how many hundreds of dozens of holiday cookies I made over the years, I could never recapture that flavor. When I left that career behind, I morphed into what’s now called a Foodie. My horizons expanded—thankfully at a faster pace than my waistline—as I became familiar with foods from many other cultures.  For years I tried to recreate those cookies—was it mace, cardamom, white pepper?—but the flavor was never the same as the ones I loved as a child. (I did come up with some fabulous variations, though!)

Grasping at straws to find an explanation, I thought maybe it had something to do with traveling half-way across the country or being layered so carefully between sheets of waxed paper for the days it took them to travel from New York to the Midwest. About a decade ago, my mother found my grandmother’s hand-written recipe stuck in an old cookbook and sent it to me. By then, I’d located on eBay the identical type of cookie press that she used, just in case that might have some weird inexplicable magic associated with it. I recreated the recipe faithfully, scrupulously. Still no luck. They just didn’t taste the same.

It wasn’t until last year when I was wondering aloud to my mother about this odd disparity between my childhood memories of what Nana’s spritz tasted like and what was clearly the reality that it struck me. It did have something to do with the long trip—and the packing. My grandmother packed the cookies very carefully for the trip….in large, two-pound coffee cans. And that was the secret: the mystery taste in her cookies was the faintest hint of that familiar, warmly bitter smell-taste of ground coffee. Some remnants of the original occupant of the can clung to the interior despite the rigorous washing my grandmother would surely have done.

While I miss the flavor, I’m not about to start buying big tins of coffee to recreate it….I think.
Warm wishes for a happy Thanksgiving.
Marianna
Photos: Flickr: Cocoa Dream, Linsey T., foodchronicles, and missbeckyfay's photostreams.