love 101
- December 2009
- Simple Living
My dad just turned 70, and I am headed to Salt Lake City tomorrow, where my awesome brother and his wife live. My parents are coming too, and we are going to have a 70th birthday celebration party for my dad as well.
My grandparents are all dead now, and one memory I have of my sweet paternal grandmother Helen was being in her classic grandma’s kitchen, with the teacup collection on the wall (displayed on wooden shelves that my grandpa had built, all of which have now moved to my house where they are occasionally used for macchiatos), and the ceramic pig cookie jar, waiting for her signature sugar cookies to come out of the oven. Those sugar cookies were big, white, soft, and tasted of nutmeg. I loved them. She would fill the pig cookie jar, and we would eat some after each dinner we spent at her house in Michigan. My dad grew up with those cookies.
Years later, I got the sugar cookie recipe from my grandma, and my mom did too. Occasionally we would bake them, and my dad would taste them and say tactfully yet honestly, “these are very good. But they don’t quite taste like my mom’s.” We would be really annoyed, because we had followed the recipe exactly. But they never did turn out exactly like Grandma’s, and eventually we just gave up and ate them at her house, when she made them herself.
Several years ago, my grandfather passed away. My grandmother never quite knew how to live without him, and a few years later she quietly passed on too. Being vegan now and totally directed in my eating choices by ideas of health, environmentalism and compassion, I never quite had the motivation to revisit that classic, white sugar cookie recipe, knowing what kind of “traditional ingredients” it was full of.
But I was thinking about my dad’s 70th birthday and some way to make it special tomorrow, and it suddenly occurred to me that I could try to bake Grandma’s sugar cookies again for him, after all these years. Not necessarily because I considered them a food item, but for the idea behind it.
My mom found the recipe somewhere, and it was about what I had expected:
Grandma’s Sugar Cookies
Mix and sift dry ingredients
2 cups sugar
5 cups flour (4 cups cake flour + 1cup regular flour)
2 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. nutmeg
Add 1 cup shortening and mix
Then add the following after mixing together first
1 cup buttermilk
1 tsp. baking soda mixed in the above buttermilk
2 beaten eggs
1 tsp. vanilla
Bake 375 degrees for about 10 to 12 minutes
Actually purchasing white sugar, bleached cake flour, vegetable SHORTENING, buttermilk and eggs was difficult. Mixing the shortening into the white flour was also a real hurdle for me. I read the ingredients on the shortening, and regretted it. But I did it, and got the cookies baked. Honestly, it was all a little disturbing.
They don’t look like my grandma’s. They seem a little fluffier than I remember. I haven’t actually tasted them, since I really don’t eat any of the ingredients that are in them except for vanilla, nutmeg and salt.
But like I said, the fact that I don’t consider these “food” at this point in my life is not the point. I just want my dad to feel good, that I thought of making them, that my mom still had the recipe, and that these cookies are somehow, somewhat, something similar to what his mom made 60 some years ago, when he was a boy.
Merry Christmas 🙂
Thanks for posting this, I’ve had similar thoughts & experiences and it is nice to read them expressed so well. I always enjoy your blog, (there are some obvious reasons for that… I’m a climber, I‘m a dog person, I love to travel, I’m generally interested in diet and health, blah blah blah, we have a lot in common) but I also just enjoy the way that you express yourself and the voice that you write with.
I had a similar cooking/family experience over this most recent Thanksgiving holiday. I decided to take a shot at making my grandmother’s rolls (fortunately, my grandmother is still alive, although we live in different parts of the US). So I called her, and her recipe was definitely from the same era of cooking that your sugar cookie recipe represents. Yes, it included shortening, which I thought was a step up from lard.
After making two batches, which never turned out to be as good as grandma’s, my wife and I proceeded to gorge ourselves on them with various spreads for three days. I had mixed feelings about this. We’re not strict vegans or even vegetarians, but we definitely pay attention to what we put in our bodies. Consuming 90% of your calories in the form of bread made with actively questionable ingredients cannot be a good thing. But grandma’s fresh baked rolls are a really really powerful (even if our version wasn’t as good as they would’ve been if grandma had baked them). So we ate a lot of rolls, and we’ve been having a great holidays season ever since.
I’m happy to read that you are also, I think it’s great that you made inedible cookies, and I cant wait to see what adventues await in 2010!
Take care,
mose
PS- I read somewhere that you are working on a new book, good luck on that, I’m looking forward to it already.
Well, it was no surprise when my dad tasted the cookies and they weren’t the same as Grandma’s! But he did like them. I felt pretty foolish when I discovered vegan, non-hydrogenated shortening at the health food store yesterday. Because the shortening was really where I draw the line (and actually felt bad feeding these cookies to my dad!!).
So, my next experiment will be to health-ify Grandma’s cookie recipe for my dad..! I mean, if they’re not going to taste the same as hers anyway, why not de-sugar, de-wheat and de-dairy them? I’m excited to try! Clearly my dad will never know the difference, at this point 😉
I bet a lot of us go through this, with our family recipes from a generation back….I’m hopeful Grandma’s cookies can be brought into the 21st century so we can keep loving them. I remember talking with her once about food, and she said “the nice thing about when I was young was that we never had to worry about everything we ate like nowadays!”
🙂 Happy New Year! At least champagne is all vegan 🙂
This reminds me of how I tried make a healthy version of my grandma’s Christmas cookies, which are essentially molasses cookies with sprinkles. The original recipe called for lard! Yuck! I think the healthy version, with shortening (possibly non-hydrogentated), just didn’t measure up. I should try again since new products are available. Boy the family would be so psyched to have those again since it was annual event to get a box of them in the mail during the holidays.