Dead Cookies
Dead Cookies meant Christmas.
It was just six on a mid-December evening, Mom fixing dinner with the TV news on while I was settled at the Formica pedestal table, Snoopy binder open to my homework sheets. The kitchen pendant turned the window into a mirror, doubling the warm pool of light in the cozy room. Our dog heard Dad’s car in the driveway before we did; she ran to the door, tail wagging, to greet him, and Dad came in bringing a rush of cold winter air and a gold foil box of assorted cookies: mini apricot and raspberry Linzer tarts; swirled butter cookies with a chewy red candied cherry in the center; ridged oval chocolate sandwiches half-dipped in chocolate coating; and my favorite, rich vanilla wafers topped with sparkly, crunchy sugar crystals.
I was just as glad never to meet Dad’s colleague, Fred MacGrath, who worked out of a white Colonial near the church, his family business’s name spelled out in a spooky black Gothic font, but we all knew the name of the local funeral director as well as any of our school teachers’, and we called his annual Christmas gift “Dead Cookies.” This belied how delicious they were to us, so unlike the cookies baked in our own kitchen. Dad set down his attaché case and handed the box off to me.
“They’re coals to Newcastle, but here you go.”
The cookie tin in our house was rarely empty. We helped ourselves to cookies as afternoon snacks and to top our dessert scoops of Breyers ice cream. Most of the year, we ate bar cookies, using the recipes on the packages of Quaker Oats, Nestlé chocolate chips, and Baker’s chocolate—for oatmeal raisin, chocolate chip blondies, and brownies, respectively—one-bowl doughs easy to press or pour into a pan, bake, and slice in volume for family. Simple.
But at Christmas, Mom pulled The Joy of Cooking, The Spice Cookbook, and The Fannie Farmer Cookbook off the shelf and went into high-volume fancy cookie production for the Open Houses she was expected to host for the choir and congregation, and for Dad to distribute to parishioners he visited in the hospital. Cookie plates also went to the church custodian, the organist, the mail carrier, and of course to the funeral director, Mr. MacGrath. It would have made sense to make several batches of bar cookies, box them up, and call it a day, an efficiency my practical mother could certainly get behind, but Christmas was a time for individual drop cookies and multi-step filled cookies. The baking sheets cycled in and out of the oven for days.
At first, I just helped Mom arrange the cookie plates for Dad to distribute. I set up a tidy assembly line, laying out a circle of paper plates on the kitchen table next to the open cookie tins, taking four from each to make a balanced assortment, arranging them prettily to vary color and shape. Cookies ticked certain boxes: spice or chocolate; chewy or crisp; round or square. Mom kept lists of each year’s output in the back of her Joy of Cooking, and penciled annotations to each recipe—how many batches she’d baked and any changes she’d made—in her tiny, careful script.
I’m making this all sound more business-like than it ever felt. Baking Christmas cookies was part of the seasonal cycle, and for several weeks in December, the air in the kitchen was fragrant with cinnamon and toasted nuts.
We made chewy Jam Bars and Thumbprint Cookies; we made meringues like the delicious chocolatey-almond Wasps’ Nests and Cocoa Kisses; we made Cinnamon Stars, or Zimtsterne, with ground almonds, cinnamon, and flecks of candied lemon rind. In a nod to Mom’s maternal heritage, we made several other German cookies: anise-flavored Springerle; walnut and sour cream Speculatius; Lebkuchen, a soft spice cookie; and finally Pfeffernüsse, which would go rock hard unless we put an apple wedge in the cookie tin. And then there were always Bourbon Balls, which Mom made early and let cure in their tin for a couple of weeks before Christmas, carefully labeled so that they weren’t inadvertently eaten by children.
Bourbon Balls weren’t the only cookies that weren’t kid-friendly; most of them weren’t. Full of nuts and strong spices, the cookies were distinctive and Christmasy in an Old World, European way, but not a lot of fun. Even the chocolate ones, which were not as sweet as a simple brownie or chocolate chip cookie, were a bit stern. There were no decorating sugars in Mom’s pantry, no pastry bags for colored frostings, and the cookie cutters gathered dust in a pale green plastic box. Mom owned a cookie press, with a set of discs to emboss pretty patterns on butter cookies, and I loved the idea of firing cookies out of it onto the baking sheet, but it didn’t work as dramatically as I wanted so we rarely pulled it out of the cupboard. Only the gold foil box of Dead Cookies carried a little Christmas sparkle and color into our kitchen.
The main impulses governing Mom’s Christmas cookie baking weren’t taste or preference so much as tradition and volume. The Joy of Cooking Christmas cookie section, with its subsection (in those days) of German Christmas Cakes, was our guide, augmented by the ones Mom’s mother had made, and which her mother had made. Mom showed off a bit with these cookies. A generous host with a pedagogical edge, she enjoyed being an expert and answering questions, even about something as trivial as the particular flavor in the toasty brown, confectioners’-sugar-coated Pfeffernüsse (black pepper).
Mom liked eating cookies as much as anybody. She didn’t begrudge us the sweet extra, the break from our otherwise whole-grain life, but they were a bit of an obligation, too. So she kept it easy most of the time, put her anise and black pepper spin on the cookies she served at Christmas, and then eventually turned the whole operation over to me.
I was in fourth grade. Mom had been working full-time for a year, but was still expected to fulfill the various hostess duties of the Rector’s Wife. She had already dropped Wasps’ Nests from the cookie menu, saying they used too much sugar, and now suggested skipping Speculatius because the dough needed to be rolled into logs, squared off, wrapped, and chilled before slicing and baking. “But I love them!” I wailed. “You do?” Mom raised an eyebrow, and then surprised me with her response; “OK, wonderful! Then you can make them!”
I just had to promise not to drop Pfeffernüsse, and why would I? They weren’t my favorite, but they were familiar, and they signaled the season. I looked forward to my one weird, peppery Pfeffernüsse each year almost as much as I looked forward to the box of Dead Cookies.
I worked deliberately, setting out my measured flour, sugar, nuts, and spices in the mise en place I learned from the occasional cooking shows I watched with Mom. The organization of it all pleased me, and gave me a comforting sense of control to finish one process—measuring—before embarking on the subsequent steps of mixing and baking. I made the burning hot sugar syrup for Wasp’s Nests, realizing maybe it wasn’t the abundance of sugar so much as the finicky recipe that made Mom abandon them. I rolled Speculatius dough into thick, tidy planks and wrapped them tightly in waxed paper. I leaned into the hot oven and used my potholders to slide out trays of Thumbprints, midway through baking, pressed a hole in the center of each, and filled them with Dad’s jam. I did abandon the soft Lebkuchen and lemony Cinnamon Stars but otherwise I didn’t stray from Mom’s lists, proud to flex a little independent kitchen muscle (though it didn’t even occur to me to make decorated sugar cookies until I had children myself).
These first cookies—small, relatively quick, low stakes (no one, despite how they might feel, is going to perish without cookies)—led to other cookies, and ultimately other baking, from the simple fruit crisp Mom taught me (its 5-ingredient topping still the only recipe I have memorized), to Crazy Cake to breads. I even started listing my holiday cookie baking in my own The Joy of Cooking, beginning in graduate school and continuing to this day.
And I still make Pfeffernüsse. No matter how many cranks of the pepper grinder I give them, though, they are not nearly as assertive as the cookies of my childhood. At first, I thought I just didn’t have the right recipe, and I searched used bookstores and cooking websites, but it’s not that. I think my longing for the peppery-sweet flavor has deepened as my taste buds have dulled. Every December I make them anyway, chasing a sharpness I can’t quite reach, trying to taste my way back to my comfortable childhood kitchen.
