Many writers have demonstrated the evocative power of food to bring up associations from the past–most famously Proust and his madeleines. I think also of MFK Fisher making blackberry jam with her grandmother, the taste of jam evoking sweaty summer days in the kitchen. I wrote recently about Thanksgiving pies (and made one). Now Advent is here, and making Christmas cookies conjures up my youth.
We lived in Ithaca, New York to the time I was 12. My dad was a lowly associate professor at Cornell and with four kids crowded into a little house there was not a lot extra to go around. My parents argued about money a lot–we always had enough, but never too much, and part of the struggle of their two powerful personalities was figuring out how it got spent.
My mom grew up in the wealth and comfort of Buffalo high society. Her family had servants. She was sent to an elite boarding school, then Smith College. She told me once she never made a bed until she was 18. Then she married my father, from a suburban middle class family, gravitated to Socialist thinking, and had a three children in thee years. No more servants, to say the least. She had to learn how to keep house and cook. With her intelligence and creativity she became a good cook, as was expected of young faculty wives in the days.
So she decided for Christmas, since money was short, to make cookies for the neighbors. This became a family tradition which continued to her death. Mom lost interest in cooking in her later years: having to grind out three meals a day for so long (probably plus more than three decades of heavy smoking) dulled her interest. She would rather read or work in her studio than cook. Her last Christmas she dutifully made cookies, and not very well. “I made them with hate in my heart,” she said, “but I made them!”
In the little kitchen at the little house on Hanshaw Road she would mix up the cookie dough and wrap it in wax paper to chill. When the dough was cold (and the kids had snitched a fingerful of it every now and again when they passed through the kitchen–the taste of raw cookie dough is powerful, probably boosted by the surreptitious snitching involved–no wonder Ben & Jerry sell so much cookie dough ice cream!) we would roll it out and cut it with tin holiday cookie cutters–hearts, stars, Christmas trees, turkeys. (There was even a hatchet for George Washington’s birthday.)
The house didn’t seem too small to me then–it was just our house–though it must have felt awfully crowded for Mom and Da. Nick, Emily and me would sit around a little yellow table Nana had painted for us with our names on it (Tony hadn’t been born when she made it). By the time we got home from school it was already dark and cold. Part of the warmth of the memory for me probably has to do with being out in the snowy cold and then coming into the light of the kitchen to make cookies. And once I was in the house it got even darker outside.
Mom baked the cookies, including the traditional big letter cookie each of us got to cut out–a big D for me, which then would be loaded up with all the frosting and decorations that would fit. Then we would mix up frosting (confectioners sugar and milk) and color the frosting with food coloring. Then came the decorations–colored sprinkles, chocolate jimmies, and little silver sugar balls. And plates of cookies would go to the neighbors–and plenty for us too! The brightly colored cookies were fun to carry through the white, snowy yards to our neighbors.
Mom and I did not talk about recipes much when she was alive but I have the kitchen classic, The Joy of Cooking, which Mom also used (and gave me a copy of when I got my first apartment in Chapel Hill). Joy has a recipe for refrigerator cookies which must be the one Mom used. Mix the dough, chill it, then roll and bake. Pretty easy stuff. The cookies we made were not fancy or especially aesthetically pleasing–they were good heartland home baking, plain and simple. I started making the same kind of Christmas cookies with my own kids back when they were little. The same dough snitching, big letter cookies, and kitchen conviviality. The tradition lives on.
One kind of cookies Mom liked to make was pinwheel cookies. Basically make a bunch of vanilla cookie dough, then separate into two parts and mix chocolate into one half. Roll the dough out as thin as you can, then lay one sheet on top of the other and roll them up. Once the logs of dough are rolled, wrap them in wax paper and then plastic (wrap well so it doesn’t get too dry) and put them back into the fridge to chill. Slice and bake (what’s left after the kids have discovered the wax paper logs and sliced off big hunks!).
And now the dough has been rolled up and is ready to chill. Cookie dough rolled up in wax paper. 1959 is calling me!
So the pinwheels have been rolled out and made. Tradition lives on. Food calls me home to my youth. Again.
