The Catskill Chronicle

By Jude Waterston

I cook. There have, however, been various, short-lived stints of baking in my life time. As a young child, I was obsessed with Thomas’s date nut bread, which I  would eat smeared with a thin layer of sweet butter. My mother suggested one day that we try making our own and compare the cost of the two. I don’t recall the economic outcome, but thereafter, I baked date nut bread two or three times a year. To this day, I use the same recipe my mother and I did over four decades ago.

In my late teens, I worked in the kitchen of a summer camp. My co-worker was a close friend from the high school of Art Design; a serene Columbian beauty whose resourceful mother had a predilection for stealing and who passed that ability on to her daughter. On our afternoons off, Clara would saunter into town with me reluctantly in tow. There was a little family-owned local market, its floors covered with sawdust. My friend would nonchalantly slip oranges and pints of cream into a massive canvas bag slung over her shoulder and then we’d walk boldly up to the counter to purchase a bag of flour and some walnuts. “Always buy something,” she instructed. Meanwhile, my stomach was in my throat and my legs quivered. The thrill and triumph Clara experienced was lost on me.

Back at camp, we had the enormous, eerily quiet kitchen to ourselves for a few hours before we had to prep for dinner. There, Clara taught me how to bake whole wheat bread studded with chopped walnuts. Sinking my hands into the warm dough and punching it down was a singular experience. I loved the yeasty scent in the air and the finished bread, still warm from the oven, was eaten slathered with clover honey.

In college, I made chewy chocolate chip cookies and brownies laced with mildly mind-altering ingredients, and at home I’d bake the occasional tea cake loaf of cranberry or zucchini bread. But there my interest in flour, sugar, and butter ended. Cooking is about inventiveness and experimentation. Baking is a science, and I never did well in that subject.

My sister, Janet, is the consummate cookie maven, having inherited our maternal grandmother Bella’s cookie press and recipe for her butter cookies. These were so popular with family and friends when we were growing up that they were simply known and referred to as “grandma cookies.” They are the quintessential cookies of the genre: crunchy, buttery, classically designed. Eventually, Janet, who has no interest in cooking, had a yen to branch out and purchased baking books devoted solely to cookies.

She developed a small repertoire of unusual, impressive looking and delicious cookies that she brought to Thanksgiving dinner and distributed to friends during the holiday season. A few years ago I asked if she would share some of her recipes, so that I could give an assortment of cookies to my coworkers for Christmas. One of her most popular confections is a shortbread sandwich filled with fruit preserves. They are either dipped in, or drizzled with, melted bittersweet chocolate. A chewy, tender, spicy cookie that incorporates both ground ginger and finely chopped crystallized ginger became another favorite, as did a molasses cookie one year, and one chock full of toasted walnuts. And grandma’s butter cookies were always a given.

Last year we found a recipe for “ambrosia coconut cookies” that turned out to be the most fantastic tasting macaroons ever. Grated orange rind is added to the dough and the final cookie is drizzled with dark chocolate. Unfortunately, they proved to be a pain in the butt to make. We were tripling the recipe, so we set up three huge bowls into which the ingredients were combined. Perusing the recipe, Janet reported that each sheet of cookies had to be baked one at time and for 25 minutes apiece, then cooled in the pan for another 15 minutes until they could be moved to racks to further cool before being given their topping of melted chocolate. It took the better part of a day to finish the tripled recipe. Ultimately, Janet said she’d be dropping that cookie from her collection the following year.

The next year being currently upon us, Janet decided on her old standbys of butter cookies and shortbread sandwiches. Believing variety to be the ultimate spice of life, I was bent on coming up with a third cookie for my gift boxes. Afraid to present something I hadn’t tried previously, I spent the weeks before Christmas test baking. A promising sounding peanut-butter-chocolate -chunk cookie that was made with creamy peanut butter, both cashews and peanuts, and chopped chocolate was a disappointment. I prefer my cookies chewy as opposed to crunchy and this was the latter. They just didn’t bowl me over. They weren’t awful, but cooking and baking for friends and family is an extension of oneself, and I wasn’t comfortable sending forth anything I found uninspired.

Recalling Janet’s molasses cookies that were crisp-edged, yet chewy inside, I searched her recipe file to no avail. I found a recipe in one of her many cookbooks that sounded promising and set about making a batch. Surprisingly, the recipe called for only a meager quarter cup of molasses and the tiniest bit of ground nutmeg. Throwing caution to the wind, I added a small amount of ground cinnamon as well. The finished cookie was the ugliest, most tasteless example of a confection I’ve ever encountered. I photographed a big platter of them before passing them on to a neighbor who insisted on having a sample before I dumped the whole load. She ended up scattering them onto her lawn for the deer, chipmunks and squirrels that come to feed. Her two dogs looked at them quizzically before deciding against trying anything so ominous-looking.

After much deliberation, I compiled my menu. It would consist of grandma cookies, shortbread sandwich cookies, and those annoying, yet stupendously delicious coconut macaroons. Janet and I spent the weekend prior to Christmas at our house upstate in the country, baking up a storm. The tree in the living room was lit, and we played classical baroque carols and other holiday recordings as the house filled with the scent of vanilla, cinnamon and chocolate.

For fun, and as an experiment for a cookie for next year, Janet baked up a batch of huge, dense and chewy flourless chocolate cookies. They were outrageously good, tempting us to invite over a small group of friends for cookies, hot spiced cider, and dollops of a chilled fruit mousse I spontaneously put together. We exchanged Christmas gifts and talked gaily and loudly as the sugar rush kicked in.

The night before we left to head back to the city, the cookies were packed into decorative holiday gift boxes and labeled with the names of my coworkers. I brought them to the job the following morning and distributed them before the work of the day began in earnest. As the hours passed, each recipient, one by one, commented on my gift. There were accolades and then some. For me, it was a revelation and a cause for pride. Of course I couldn’t have done it without Janet’s help and expertise, but still I felt elated. The cook had baked.

Ambrosia Macaroons

Makes about 45 cookies

½ cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, softened

¾ cup sugar

1/8 teaspoon salt

2 teaspoons finely grated orange peel

3 large eggs

24 ounces sweetened flaked coconut (about 6 cups firmly packed)

4 ounces bittersweet chocolate, melted

Position rack in center of oven; preheat to 325 degrees. Line 3 large rimmed baking sheets with parchment. Using electric mixer, beat butter in large bowl until smooth. Add sugar and salt; beat until blended. Beat in orange peel, then eggs, 1 at a time. Mix in coconut. Drop batter onto sheets by tablespoons, spacing 1 ½ inches apart. Bake macaroons, 1 sheet at a time, until golden on bottom and browned in spots, 25 to 30 minutes. Cool completely on sheets. Using fork or demitasse spoon, drizzle chocolate over macaroon. Chill on sheet until chocolate is firm, about 30 minutes.

Ginger Bites

Makes about 32 cookies

Chewy but tender, these shortbread cookies are little bursts of sweet-hot ginger in your mouth.

 

2 cups all-purpose flour

1 tablespoon ground ginger

¼ teaspoon ground cinnamon

¼ teaspoon ground nutmeg

½ teaspoon baking powder

½ teaspoon salt

1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, softened

¼ cup granulated sugar

¼ cup firmly packed brown sugar

1/3 cup finely chopped crystallized ginger

½ teaspoon finely grated lemon zest

Make the dough:

Sift together the flour, ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, baking powder, and salt into a medium bowl. Set aside. In the bowl of an electric mixer, beat the butter and sugar at medium-high speed until light in texture and color, about 2 minutes. Beat in the crystallized ginger and lemon zest until combined. Reduce the speed to low and add the flour mixture, mixing just until blended. Scrape the dough out onto a work surface and shaped it into an 18-inch log 1 ½ to 1 ¾ inches in diameter. Cut the log into two 9-inch logs. Wrap each dough log in plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 2 hours, until firm (or up to 3 days).

Slice and bake the cookies:

Unwrap the dough. Cut the logs into 3/8-inch slices and arrange the cookies on ungreased baking sheets, spacing them 1 ½ inches apart. Bake, two sheets at a time, for 23 to 25 minutes, switching the position of the sheets halfway through baking, until the edges are slightly golden. Transfer the cookies to a wire rack and cool completely.