Build Back Butter

The Secret Life of Holiday Cookies

My first blog launched ten years ago. It was called Sugar and Spouse, and had two features: dessert recipes and a diary of me trying to teach my engineer husband how to cook.

The blog lasted four years until the guy hosting it forgot to renew and the entire website was lost. I still miss it. I do not miss the guy.

Some of the recipes have been recreated thanks to the Wayback Machine (a strange and wondrous archive of the internet). The skills I need to teach an engineer to cook inform how I try to write my recipes to this day. For those not blessed to live with an engineer-brain, they are quite literal creatures. To this day my husband removes the pasta from the water at the exact time suggested on the box, whether it’s done or not. The logic being, if it’s written down it must be an approved calculation. Math never lies.

I try to write all my recipes as if they were for my “It’s highly-logical-captain” husband Mark, with visual, olfactory and even auditory clues. (As the chef and author Edna Lewis said, if you can hear the cake singing, it’s not done yet.)

As my subscribers I ask you to be the extra testers all recipes need. While I test all my recipes thoroughly, and at great expense (butter costs money, as does the gym equipment I need…), ingredients, ovens and interpretations vary. Please let me know what I can do to make my recipes as understandable as possible, and of course, tell me how the recipes turn out!

COOKIES THIS WEEKEND

Weekends at Cookie HQ are for making the more time-consuming recipes. While today I’ll whip up an easy oatmeal cowboy cookie (with M&Ms, per request of my brother Paul), Saturday and Sunday I’ll be making mince pies and mince pie shortbread (the recipe will appear in next week’s subscription letter). While easy enough, they’re fiddly, as they’re little teeny-tiny pies.

I’ll also be making biscotti and suvaroffs—an Austrian jam-filled shortbread that keeps well. I might cry a little, as they were favorites of my mom and dad, who were both ardent supporters of my cookie baking efforts. Also: I’m a sentimental sap, who can cry on command.

What are your holiday cookie memories?

Feel free to get weepy with me.

TODAY IN KITCHEN HISTORY

Gingerbread cookies, pepparkakor, speculoos and lebkuchen (see my grandma’s recipe from earlier this week), are all Medieval in origin, and why you often see very traditional lebkuchen made with honey, the original sweetener used. Gingerbread ingerbread-maker guilds started in the 15th century in what are now France and Germany.

The honey, spices and low-fat content make these babies nearly indestructible, by which I mean, these are keepers, by which I mean, they’re a good cookie for preppers. (Business idea! Prepperkakors: Cookies to take into the Apocalypse. All the best shelters have them. “Armageddon me some! Buy yours today!”)

You’re right. I’ll stick to recipes.

THOUGHT OF THE DAY

It’s grey and rainy here outside, and kind of in my mind as well. My brother David’s Deep State Radio podcast this week, aptly named “The One in Which They Scare the Shit Out of You,” with Laurie Garrett and Dr. Kavita Patel, reminded me to make the precautionary assumption that everyone I see has Covid-19. Also: with so many affected by the virus, this may be a very difficult holiday season for a lot of people. At the risk of sounding treacly (and you know I love my treacle, aka golden syrup), cookies and cakes are small bundles of comfort, and often, esp. this time of year, wrapped up in memories. So, I’ll keep sharing recipes and you guys keep reading them and making them.

Let me know any and all thoughts you have.

And thanks for subscribing.