No one makes Christmas cookies like we do.
My mother baked a lot of cookies when I was growing up: Toll House chocolate chip cookies with walnuts, oatmeal cookies with raisins or coconut, peanut butter cookies marked by the criss-cross tines of a fork, snickerdoodles, butterscotch refrigerator cookies, brownies. She had a cookie press and I remember a few experiments with spritz.
When November came each year she chopped pounds of dried and candied fruit and nuts for homemade fruitcake, soaking the baked loaves in brandy. And in December she began holiday cookie production. Her specialty was thin, crisp cookies, rolled, cut and decorated with colored sugar. She made Moravian ginger cookies. She made butter cookies flavored with lemon and vanilla. She rolled her cookies out on flour-sack dishtowels on a wooden cutting board with a wooden rolling pin. The recipes made at least six dozen each.
I don’t know how she did it. I began apprenticing with her as a Christmas cookie baker when I was perhaps twelve years old. The floured cloth would wrinkle. The dough would stick to the rolling pin and tear. Some of the cookie cutters would not pick up the cut cookies and if I forgot to flour a cutter between each use the dough would crumple. The thin cookies had to be watched in the oven, pulled at the first sign of browning. Moravians burned really fast.
My first efforts were lackluster. I would use too much flour to try to control the sticky dough. The room would be too warm. I would not roll the dough thinly enough — usually Mom would take another pass or two with the rolling pin, or even take over, stretching the dough further than I could.
When I was in my thirties, I bought Mom a marble slab and a marble rolling pin to make cookie-making easier. I had read somewhere that working on chilled marble helped keep cookie dough at the correct temperature. She didn’t use the marble much, not liking to pick up the heavy slab. I used it at her house, clearing a shelf in the refrigerator to hold it, putting the metal bowls of cookie dough on top of it. I found it easier to roll cookie dough on marble than on cloth and when a construction crew was demolishing the old Cogswell College building in San Francisco I carted home a piece of marble from the walls. My boyfriend at the time cut it into a baking slab for me.
By the time Mom was eighty, she had ceded thin, crisp Christmas cookies to me. She still made dream bars and Russian teacakes, Rice Krispie candy, poppy seed bread baked in old coffee cans, and fudge. I spent long hours in the breakfast room rolling, cutting, decorating with colored sugar, ferrying finished trays to the oven and then to cooling racks.
One Christmas a friend gave me a silicone baking mat, a tool which made it possible for me to master Mom’s thin, crisp pie crust (Mine had always been too thick). A floured silicone mat will not stick, allowing you to roll thin sheets of pie dough, cookie dough, noodles. I acquired a bench scraper, which I had seen on some cooking show, and a microplane zester. My baking life got easier, although Christmas cookies still required long hours of work.
Somewhere along the line, I invented a third rolled and cut cookie: cocoa shortbread. I had the thought to swap one half cup of cocoa powder for one half cup of flour in a classic shortbread cookie. Those joined the roll and cut Christmas cookie line-up, but did not have to be rolled as thinly as butter cookies and Moravians. Then I read about Deb Perelman’s butter cookies made with maple syrup and nutmeg. I made them one year instead of our traditional butter cookies. My brother and I preferred them, so I swapped the maple recipe for the older one and never looked back.
I added one more cookie to our permanent Christmas cookie repertoire. One day twenty-some years ago, my mother was reminiscing about pfefferneuesse, a cookie they bought from the store during her childhood. Pfefferneusse are traditionally made with ginger, cloves, mace, cinnamon and allspice and candied orange peel. I remembered those tubs of commercial candied mixed peels from the days of fruitcake and shuddered. But both of us like candied ginger, so I decided to substitute that for the candied peel. Later, I started candying my own orange peel and made the cookies with a combination of the two ingredients.
The first time we made pfefferneusse they lacked something. Mom thumbed through some old cookbooks and discovered that the cookies used to contain ground white pepper. I threw some white peppercorns in the coffee grinder and added the fragrant powder to my next batch of dough. That was it — the “pfeffer” in “pfefferneusse.”
Most of our cookies are plain, not frosted, topped only with a sprinkle of colored sugar, but pfefferneusse require a coat of royal icing flavored with anise. I still struggle with getting the icing to set properly and watch for a dry day to make it.
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Fast forward to 2023. My mother is ninety-three and has severe dementia and terminal cancer. I became her primary caretaker some months ago and do not have the time to bake Christmas cookies. I bought some chocolate stars she wanted from Trader Joe’s. We’ve eaten a few, but we don’t really like them: we miss our traditional cookies.
I put out a plea on Facebook, describing our Christmas cookie traditions. A friend offered to send us some cookies, to order them from a local bakery. I began to look at bakery menus. No one made the right things: there was too much chocolate, too many year-round cookies. My friend Kate offered to bake us some cookies if I could come up with something simple. I assigned her Russian teacakes, sending her the recipe that Mom had used for years. She brought them by a few days before Christmas with a small bag of her traditional homemade Christmas cookies. The teacakes were almost right, but a bit underdone and sporting only a thin and mottled powdered sugar coating (What we would consider the first of two required coats). Someone else dropped off first a bag of gingerbread cookies and then a bag of cut out cookies and rocky road fudge. A third friend, an experienced baker, volunteered to bake a batch of cookies for us. I sent her the pfefferneusse recipe and the maple sugar cookie recipe. When no one chose the pfefferneusse, I candied a batch of orange peel, hoping to make just that one cookie before Christmas Day (That is as far as I got with that project, but several of the twelve days of Christmas remain).
Alice chose the maple cookies and brought them by on the evening of Boxing Day, along with lemon biscotti, anise biscotti and stamped gingerbread that she had made. After she had gone, I opened the boxes to look. I found small maple stars, at least a quarter-inch thick, bearing marks of flour, sans decorative sugar. You could stack four of our cookies in the space of one of hers.
The flavor of the maple cookies was good, but, alas, they were not our cookies, rolled so thin as to be almost translucent. The lemon biscotti, however, were delicious. I might ask Alice for the recipe.
After sampling Alice’s cookies and Peg’s cookies and Kate’s cookies, I realized that our Christmas cookies, which I have always loved, are truly special. Other people make thick cookies, doughy cookies, under-baked cookies, when they make cookies with cookie cutters. Some of them apply white icing. I have not tasted a single cookie this season like our cookies.
In the past, only two people have come to bake Christmas cookies with me. The woman who is now my brother’s wife came to learn to bake them, spent a long afternoon with me in San Leandro cutting and decorating one year. She never came again. And an old friend came to take part in the holiday cookie marathon. She enjoyed decorating cookies with colored sugar, but soon suggested we abandon the project and walk to the mall instead. “This is a lot of work,” she said.
Indeed. A more recent friend suggested that I develop a sideline in baking cookies. “I would buy them,” she said.
“Too much work,” I responded, “I would never do production baking.”
At my current age of sixty-five, it probably takes me two days to make the four main cookie doughs and perhaps another two or three days to roll, cut, decorate and bake three kinds of cookies, plus a half-day to ice the pfefferneusse. It is a lot of work, special to the Christmas season: I only make these cookies once a year in a year when I have time to bake. I enjoy baking them and baking them tires me: once a year is enough, but I miss them in years when I don’t make them. Sometimes I pack up tins of them to send to friends or send them home with Christmas dinner guests.
I don’t know whether I’ll get even the pfefferneusse made this year. Yesterday I made homemade noodles and cloverleaf yeast rolls. I have not made any Christmas pie yet (twelve days remember) and I still have to bake my Mom an elaborate lemon-filled coconut cake for her 94th birthday. I’ll make Christmas cookies again though in some less busy year because their absence has taught me how unique and wonderful they are.
thekalechronicles 