love 101

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