Comfort Cookies for Christmas
Old-fashioned treats fill the jar--and the heart--this year
“No one makes cookies like my sister Barbara,” my neighbor Susie told me a while back. “They’re always so crisp.”
“That’s how I like them,” I said. “Mine are usually too soft.”
“I’m sure she’d be happy to tell you how she does it,” said Susie, the subject of a previous post on this site.
With the holidays coming up, what better time to talk about cookies? I already wrote about rugelach, a favorite at our Hanukkah table, but with Christmas just days away and everyone in need of something comforting to dunk into a cup of tea or coffee, I was eager to talk to Barbara. Were there perhaps some special Christmas cookies in her family passed down through the generations? I had visions of elaborately decorated cookies such as some my friend Patricia blogged about a few years back or that a Ukrainian student gave me as a gift last week.
No, Barbara informed me in an email from her home near Santa Barbara. She didn’t have any famous Christmas cookie recipes to pass on, though she remembered a lot of holiday baking going on in her house when she was growing up in the ‘40s and early ‘50s.
“My mother and grandmother were the Christmas cookie and fruitcake queens,” she said. “They started baking following Thanksgiving and never stopped until the week before Christmas.”
As to her own holiday baking, Barbara said that making special holiday cookies never even occurred to her.
She always had a jar full of cookies for her three children when they were young. These days, she continues to keep a full cookie jar for her husband John, who has a cookie every morning before breakfast. “They go pretty quickly,” Barbara said.
(You can watch a video about John, a well-known potter, here. Though he no longer throws pots on a wheel, he still hand-builds his creations and sells them through a local home decor shop.)
Eight years older than Susie, Barbara, the second of five girls, was born during the latter years of the Great Depression and grew up in the Westwood area of Los Angeles. The family had moved to California, far from the rest of their kin in Pennsylvania and New York, so sending baked goods back east was a tradition.
“I remember dozens of boxes of their baking efforts being packed and shipped back to New York and Pittsburgh where the Bright and Wyman families lived,” Barbara said in her email. “Ours was the only family to move west—my dad fell in love with palm trees and of course, no hard winters.”
Her grandmother, Marion Sullivan Wyman, lived with the family and was an important figure in Barbara’s life. “She was wonderful. I spent all my time in the kitchen with her,” she said.
Of Irish and German ancestry, her grandmother was grew up on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn. Barbara remembers her making a lot of the family’s meals, and she still loves to recreate her grandma’s recipes—like spaetzle, sauerbraten, pork roast with sweet-and-sour cabbage, and leg of lamb with roast potatoes and gravy.
Barbara also has fond memories of helping make Christmas cookies with her older sister Mimi.
They made wreaths and stars using a cookie press. “Mimi and I would decorate them with cherries in the middle of the wreaths.” And then the two girls would sample a few before the cookies were boxed and put in the mail.
But in the post-war ‘50s, with commercial bakeries churning out baked goods, Barbara’s mother and grandmother, along with many other women, stopped baking Christmas treats, opting for the convenience of store-bought varieties, Barbara remembers.
Though she doesn’t bake special holiday cookies these days, Barbara does make a Christmas galette, which she refers to as a “peasant pie.” The one she made recently was filled with apples and currants and had an apricot cognac glaze. John employed his potter’s skills to make the crust, as he usually does with his wife’s galettes.
Galettes, pies with a freeform crust that are also known as crostatas, are a specialty of Barbara’s. Flavors and fillings change with the seasons and the available organic produce at her local farmer’s market. In the summer, she might make one with berries or a savory tomato, basil and cheese pie.
Eating one of Barbara’s galettes “is like being in Paris at a fancy shop that sells excellent pastries,” Susie said. The recipe for the Christmas pie was from Julia and Jacques: Cooking at Home, Barbara said. Here’s a link to an apple galette recipe that sounds similar
But back to those cookies. Barbara has three favorites she makes for John—peanut butter, chocolate chip, and raisin-nut cookies. She shared recipes for the first two, but said the last is a work in progress; she’ll share it once it’s perfected. (Meanwhile, I found a recipe for Pecan Raisin Cookies that sounds like it might be a winner.)
The secret of making a crispy cookie isn’t on a level with breaking the nuclear code, but for all my love of baking, it was something I didn’t know.
“If you want your cookies crispy, you need to refrigerate them for 30 minutes minimum,” Barbara said. It’s a simple trick, but it makes the difference between cookies that spread and are soft and those that don’t and provide a satisfying crunch in every bite.
Barbara frequently refrigerates the dough overnight because she’s a too tired to make multiple batches of cookies, but it isn’t necessary to refrigerate them that long, she said.
She makes her peanut butter cookies from a recipe in The Settlement Cook book, which she received as a wedding present when she and John got married in 1960. Most recipes in this iconic cookbook are somewhat bare bones, for it was originally written as a guide to American cooking for Jewish immigrant women—but it became popular with home cooks of all backgrounds, going through 43 reprints and selling more than 2 million copies.
Although Barbara says the Settlement Criss-Cross Peanut Butter Cookie “is still the best peanut butter cookie” she knows, she has updated it to suit her tastes, subbing unsalted butter for shortening, reducing the flour by a quarter of a cup, and using a crunchy commercial peanut butter—Skippy Super Chunk—since she and John like texture in their cookies. I used all her suggestions and was delighted with the results—crispy, delicious cookies that were, unfortunately for my waistline, impossible to resist.
The recipe for chocolate chip cookies is on the back of the package of Guittard Semisweet Chocolate Baking Chips, Barbara’s favored brand. She changes little except to again reduce the flour by about a quarter cup and refrigerate the dough before baking.
Unlike many contemporary cooks, she doesn’t use a scale to measure ingredients, but is just fine with cups and measuring spoons.
“At my age, I can’t be bothered,” she said. “I just throw things together.” She recalled that her grandmother would measure flour in the palm of her hand. “I never asked her how she figured out how much she needed. That was just how she did it.”
She also doesn’t use a cookie scoop to parcel out the dough onto the cookie sheets because she likes her cookies to have some individuality.
She takes care to bake the cookies—both the peanut butter and the chocolate chip—until they’re done just right: golden brown around the edges and golden in the middle. Even if the cookies are a little burned, John will eat them anyway, she said.
The cookies keep at room temperature for about a week and freeze beautifully, she said. The raw dough is also fine to freeze, which might be recommended—unless you are putting together a lot of Christmas care packages to send or give away this year! Depending how large you make the cookies, they do make a lot!
As for her and John’s Christmas plans, they’re a far cry from the days when 24-plus members and multiple generations of the extended Bright and Scott clans would gather at Barbara and John’s house for a traditional holiday meal of prime rib, Yorkshire pudding, creamed spinach, and any number of desserts. At 82, she probably wouldn’t be putting on such a large event anyway, but a smaller, carefully planned gathering would have been a welcome distraction during these dark and distressing times.
Lately, even though cooking is a usually a source of joy and solace, Barbara sometimes wishes she and John could visit some of the beloved Santa Barbara restaurants they used to frequent. There’s a dim sum place she particularly misses.
“We haven’t been out in almost a year now, “ she said. “It’s become a pain in the neck.”
My feeling exactly!
So what will she cook for Christmas this year? Probably one of John’s favorite meals—a small turkey with all the trimmings, including dressing, peas, rutabagas, homemade cranberry sauce, perhaps a galette for dessert, and, more than likely, a cookie or two!
Sounds perfect to me.
Thanks for reading the latest edition of Ruthtalksfood. If you enjoyed it, please click “like” and send me a comment. Please subscribe to receive future posts—and don’t forget to check out my previous story on Barbara’s sister Susie.
Yum, Yum, Yum!!!