cookies

Over the weekend N. and I made 42 dozen cookies. Excessive? Maybe, but nothing can best the smells of baking as they fill a house. Our favorites are the mint-chocolate kisses, a chocolate dough wrapped around a mint hershey kiss and then rolled in powdered sugar. Butterscotch chips are a close second, especially while still warm. Today's the last day of the term so I made both groups of my students sampler plates of the cookies (I always bring food on the last day of class), plus plates for all sides of the family and for various upcoming holiday parties (tomorrow: one for the writing program and one for the service learning faculty group, thursday: the Gesu Peace&Justice group's soiree). See, 42 dozen isn't quite as excessive as it sounds.

My Grandma D. made huge amounts of Christmas cookies each year when I was a kid. Her front porch became a makeshift freezer as tupperware containers and department store boxes full of the treats covered the porch's glider. Fig bars, anisette bars, pizelles, biscotti, and of course what she called "cut-out cookies" (a plain Italian cookie dough cut into stars and Christmas trees and frosted with a simple sugar icing). How many hundreds of those did I eat during the '70s and '80s? How wide was my Grandma's smile watching us eat them? I can hear my Grandpa grumbling about not having a place to sit on his glider but I can also see him brewing his coffee--a thick concoction to which he added salt--on the stovetop percolator and then enjoying a cup with a biscotti and a Chesterfield.

Christmas Eve at her house: pasta in oil and garlic, fried calamari, cold baccala (cod), cold broccoli dressed with lemon juice and garlic, artichokes, squid (always a picture of someone, usually my dad, with tentacles coming out of his mouth) in red sauce, shrimp scampi, and salad. Then, of course, big plates of figs, fresh fruit, and her cookies, set out on a tablecloth dotted with spots of olive oil.

Back to the present. Absent at our place is the smell of the Chesterfields and the sludge-like coffee, but we've tried to capture some of the cookie scent for Christmas. And part of what makes a break from school, time with family and friends, and the pomp of the holiday's rituals at church such a joy is recalling that this is the time of the year that made Grandma D. the happiest.