The Prairie Thistle

I should know better by now than to attempt the impossible at Christmas. But year after year I have the same problem with my family’s recipe for white cream cookies.

They are a type of cookie that is not too sweet, not crispy at all, but instead oh-so-deliciously soft in texture. Imagine that a traditional sugar cookie and a soft white cake got together and had a baby – THERE. That is the result. Typically found cut into circle shapes with a simple white cream glaze, sometimes with a hint of peppermint in the icing and only the scantest christening of rainbow sprinkles.

In holidays gone by, my family would have marathon baking days where grandma and all the aunties would descend on whoever’s kitchen was the largest and grind out the year’s supply of Christmas treats all in one fell swoop. Well, maybe not all. There was always more that could be done. Mennonites have big families! And we never stuck to cutting out only the plain circles as was tradition. Whether it was our need to stand out or bow to the whims of children, who knows, but we took out any shape of cookie cutter we could find from the seasonally-apt Christmas trees, Santa heads, and gingerbread men to (my personal favourites) stars, hearts, and bells. As Grandma aged, she surprised us by showing up at gatherings with tins full of more and more unique shapes, like horses, giraffes, tractors, race cars and dinosaurs.

“Grandma, where did you get these magnificent cookie cutters?” we would ask.

“The thrift store has all sorts,” she replied. “They are probably for playdough, but who cares?”

Eating them or making them, we would look forward to those cookies every year. And you had to store them in whatever leftover ice cream pails you saved from the recycling or it just wasn’t the same. I can still hear the sound of the white lipped plastic lid as it lifted from the container with a breathy ssssrrrrip, releasing the vanilla and peppermint scents into the wild that would call all the grandkids up to the buffet counter in the church basement.

When we moved into our house (that we bought from my aunt and uncle) 12 years ago and I made a home for all of my things in the spacious kitchen (not feeling as spacious to me anymore, isn’t that odd?), I found she had left a few things behind. The odd cup, a set of steak knives, and a recipe or two. The recipes came with a note encouraging us to enjoy the kitchen and make happy memories in it, as they had done. I wonder now if you’re reading this, auntie, did you mean to leave the steak knives and if not, do you want them back?

One of the recipes, of course, was for the white cream cookies. I attempted them that first Christmas in our house. Like a good Mennonite wife, I had been diligent in making my husband join me in our task of finishing the 4L pail of ice cream in time to wash it for its actual purpose. Our kids were still so little, we never had cause to buy such a large pail, and my husband doesn’t even like ice cream… but tradition is tradition!

And it seemed like a huge recipe. Good, I thought, and added the flour as instructed, counting, 4, 5, 6, 7 cups. Wow, this is going to be good! I stirred the batter. It seemed wet. Very wet. I added another cup of flour. Stirred. Still wet. Gloopy even. I added another cup of flour. And so on. 13 cups of flour later and the batter finally held together. I concluded that something had surely been off with the recipe my aunt had provided and that if I had to add almost double the amount of flour, maybe the rest of the dry ingredients hadn’t been doubled either. In went the added baking powder and another pinch of salt.

I rolled out the dough and cut out the shapes from the new cookie cutter sets, which were also freshly acquired just for this purpose (I’d had to buy outer space, Valentine’s, and Christmas theme sets in order to procure the star, heart, and bell that I wanted). In they went to bake and out came… not stars, not hearts, not bells. They were white and they were baked, but they were not the cookies I had dreamed of. As they baked, they had risen, a LOT, and then shifted slightly to the side. The hearts were blobs, the stars were waving starfish à la Patrick Star from Spongebob, and the gingerbread-people were less Christmas boy and Christmas girl and more Mr. Burns “I bring you love” from the Simpsons.

I called my aunt for advice. She wasn’t sure. Maybe too much flour, she said? Too much something, we agreed.

I did try the recipe again. And again. It was never quite right. I tried a different version, this time directly from the Mennonite Girls Can Cook cookbook. (Yes, there is such a thing and a website which you can CLICK HERE to find instead of taking what I inadvertently found to be a very safe risk and start to type the words into the search bar and hit the enter key prematurely after submitting “Mennonite girls”… Don’t worry. Only cooking-related posts came up.)

After that first year, I kept my baking failures to myself. I still had access to the delightful discs of gently-minted goodness at extended family gatherings, bake sales, church potlucks, and the occasional family baking days that I was fortunate to go to as an adult.

Over the last five years, as you may know, access to larger circles of community became more difficult to access for me and my family. For reasons like the COVID-19 pandemic, loss of church community, as well as an unexpected and lingering familial estrangement, getting together with other people in with my Mennonite ancestry became difficult. One of my grandmothers passed away in May of 2019 and with her passing, the generational shift accelerated. There were just less invitations to gather as a large group, even when COVID restrictions did lift. My aunties, with kids and grandkids of their own, would gather in smaller family units and their generation of siblings would meet occasionally. It would be well over four years before my family of origin attempted our own gathering. It was not successful. And there were no white cookies.

Last year, hungry for sweets and nostalgia, I tracked down my grandma’s recipes for jam-jams and pappanate (also called pfeffernuesse or peppernuts and you really must try saying some of those names out loud, it’s so fun). Just talking to my aunt filled some sort of stomach I hadn’t known was empty.

“These are the oatmeal cookies that form the base for the jam-jams,” she explained so patiently to me, “but they really are just oatmeal cookies and I think you could use them just as oatmeal cookies or substitute a different cookie entirely. It was apricot jam she used in the middle. Well, sometimes not, sometimes it was raspberry, maybe. Now for pappanate. Oh, I haven’t made them in so long. My family used to like them crunchy, you know. I added extra baking powder just to get them to puff up and release more of their moisture, and that makes them more crunchy. So this is how I made them. And extra cloves, if you want them really spicy. You roll it into ropes and the dough will be soft, like almost too soft. You will think you’re making them wrong, but it’s right.”

As I digested her words, I could feel a lightbulb start to go off in my head.

“And how about Grandma’s White Cookies?” I asked, daring to ask for one more recipe.

“Right, OK, yes, I have that one. For the white cookies, you could use sour cream, but we always used cream. Yes, just straight cream. And they will be soft, too. Like the pappanate. Very soft. Almost unmanageably soft. I just put down a lot of flour on the counter top to roll out, like a lot of flour. You will think it is wrong, but it works. You just have to try it.”

Armed with some tips and tricks on the different doughs and techniques from my auntie, I decided the infamous cookies might be worth having another go and was finally successful. It WAS very soft, almost too soft, almost unmanageably soft. But they held their shape (we let fear hold us back and stuck ONLY with circles). And as my girls happily slathered each soft, white cookie, still warm in their hands, with icing and the prescribed light sprinkle of coloured crystals, I felt something I hadn’t felt in a long time. Hopeful. And connected.

Can cookies really do that? And all of this, this ridiculous article on finding a lost recipe for cream cookies? Will it fill any of my readers out there with even a glimmer of what I remember and what I experience when I eat these sweet mementos of lives lived and lost and longingly loved?

If Mennonite recipes were honest, we would include a hands requirement right in the top of the instructions. Like, it takes four sets of hands to make one big-batch recipe of these cookies, cinnamon rolls, perogies, meat perishky, etc. If you don’t have four people helping, don’t even attempt. Preferably, have one set of hands from four generations.

You need a Great-Grandma to take up her dough-rolling station and never leave for over eight hours, despite her daughters protests that she needs a break, to get off her feet. “You can’t possibly roll for everyone, Mom,” someone will say only to hear the quiet and determined and happy (smug?) response, “Oh, yes, I can.” And then she’ll send you home with all the cookies she baked BEFORE everyone got there. And a blueberry pie from last summer’s blueberries she needed to use up to make room in her freezer.

You need an auntie to have an extra ball of perogie dough because you forgot yours at home and no, it’s no trouble at all because of course she brought extra. You need her to arch an eyebrow at your meat bun filling because you snuck some grated carrot in there to help make them more nutritious when the traditional recipe was only ground beef and potato. You need her to tell you how soft the cream cookies need to be and help you lift the corner of the dough to sneak a bit more flour under it when you’ve gotten them stuck to the counter, again.

You need a cousin to laugh with and worry about your children with.

You need nieces around to stick their fingers in dough when they shouldn’t and lick the beaters because now you are far too old to do that.

If we’re honest, we would know we needed that and let ourselves be profoundly filled up with the hunger for it. As families are simply not as large or as connected as they once were, I feel this sentiment extend beyond my own circumstance. I have grown around the grief of loss. I have sought out the ingredients that make my life full and yet I still experience an irrational sadness and dare-I-say rage this time of year. My Big Sad and my Big Anger are Christmas visitors that come reliably around this time of year and I endeavour to welcome them with curiousity.

My life is good, I say. Why are you here? What are you here to say to me?

I don’t have any good answers. This year, they just wanted me to notice them, it seems. I have a bit more time on my hands than last year and so I am baking more than usual. I call who I need to call and sit with what I need to sit with. I am alone most of the time, but I go and turn on the Christmas tree lights, one in the living room and one in the dining room and I sew and I bake. And I fill my home with the scent memories of deep roots that are rightfully mine.

—

Grandma Alice’s White Cookies (you didn’t think I wouldn’t post it, did you?)