Was washing some pots and pans at the kitchen sink when a flash of memory caused me to smile. And all because I thought of my mom’s old cookie sheets. I had just washed one of mine that I’d used to roast some vegetables the other day. Her cookie sheets could not have been used for that purpose. They were flat with no sides, just a slight rim at either end to grab to pull out of the oven.
They were thin, lightweight and easy to slide cookie from the sheet to a plate. Most cookie sheets I see these days are rimmed all the way around. Yes, it keeps things from falling off and offers greater versatility but I miss those old cookie sheets.
‘Tis the baking season. While most people are thinking about pies, my younger self would be making a cookie baking schedule. During my high school years, I began my tradition of cookie baking. In those days I mostly made spritz cookies. Those are the buttery little morsels that pop easily into the mouth. The dough is pressed through a cylinder which accommodated different designs. One cookie sheet could hold 18-24 cookies depending on the design.
The problem with the older presses is they were built to just turn to the right. Used to living in a non-lefty world, I would struggle year after year to turn to the right utilizing my right non-dominant hand. Or I’d have to use my left hand to turn to the right, very awkward. Regardless of the technique, it resulted in painful blisters on both hands. For that reason those cookies were the last to be made.
And I liked decorating those little cookies using my mother’s old frosting decorator cylinder. It looked like a large aluminum syringe and the plunger was pushed from the top so there was never a worry about hand injury for me. It had lots of different aluminum tips. Buttercream frosting, made from butter and confectioners sugar, could be thinned and tinted to perfection. I can’t tell you how many tiny trees and wreaths I decorated. I must have had a different level of patience then.
One detail I recall is our kitchen table had a leaf that folded down when not needed. When extended up, it didn’t provide a truly flat surface. And those old cookie sheets of my mother’s were far from being perfectly flat. One learned to work with what one had.
Because I’m me, there was a ritual to my baking. It involved an outfit and certain music. In the early days jeans with a dish towel tucked into a front pocket sufficed. This morphed over the years into athletic shorts topped by a chamois shirt or sweatshirt. And always a backwards baseball cap to keep hair out of the eyes. Stacked on the turntable in the adjacent living room were some requisite albums: Jo Stafford’s Ski Trails; the Broadway version of The Sound of Music; and one of The Great Songs of Christmas albums from the record club. For decades, those albums had flour dust on the edges from being flipped between batches of cookies.
Cookies varied from year to year. Spritz cookies were a constant. Some years there were cut sugar cookies or gingerbread men. Many years there were Russian Tea Cakes because they looked like snowballs. Another constant was fudge in addition to a confection known in my house as French Chocolates. Today they’re known as truffles.
I cranked out dozens of cookies using only two cookie sheets. I suppose that’s all one needs with just one oven. I almost forgot the raspberry chocolate chip meringue cookies. Those required the cookie sheets to be lined with brown paper. So it involved using right-handed scissors to cut a grocery bag. More systemic torture for me. It was worth it.
Stories Are For Eternity 