James went to his club party tonight. I was invited, but I decided to stay home and make cookies instead. I don't make many; we have nuts and chocolate in the house already and we try not to overdo. He got home just as I was starting on a second batch. I don't always do a second batch, but thought it would be nice to have some to give away.
James looked at my baking, regretful. I only make wine biscuits these days. He says, "I'm sorry—they just don't do anything for me."
I shrug. "Sugar cookies never did much for me, either. If you're going to bake cookies like that, they need to be chocolate." (And have no icing!)
With a small bow to Capote: "Imagine a Saturday in mid-December. It is biting cold, but there is probably no snow on the ground. Inside the steel radiators under the windows (and later the long, low grey baseboard heat vents) render it warm and cozy, and the cracks of the front door are already stuffed against the cold with strips of old flannel pajamas, the door closed until March." But the tale isn't about fruitcake, it's about cookies.
It had to be Saturday, since the cookies had to be ready for Christmas, but I wouldn't be out of school yet and if it was after I entered seventh grade, Mom would be at work during the week.
Sugar cookies were unknown in our house. We were Italian and made Italian cookies. At that time, Mom made about four different kinds: butterballs, molasses cookies, almond bars, and wine biscuits. In kitchens all over Providence and Cranston and elsewhere in Rhode Island, my aunts and my cousins were making the same kind of cookies, and other Italo-American mothers and daughters, up at "Federal Hill" and "Silver Lake" and Edgewood and other Italian communities, were doing the same. Some of them made other cookies, ones with Hershey kisses in their centers. Ambitious and patient women like my Aunty Petrina made wandis, which are like an Italian wonton cookie, but instead of being small and flat, they are long ribbons tied into knots and waves and deep fried and sprinkled with confectioners' sugar. They took hours of hot work to make and were a true labor of love; most people just bought them from bakeries.
Imagine the small square kitchen of a 1950s Cape Cod house. One wall, the one overlooking the narrow, one-car driveway, one with a window in the center, has a long counter broken at the end where the refrigerator is located and centered with a white porcelain sink and drainboard. Tall white cupboards reach the ceiling. The counter is of linoleum, speckled in the 1950s fashion, like the floor; the floor has a black border around the edge, giving it a nice finished look. The stove is on the left wall, a window on the right wall (and to its right, the door to the back porch), the opposite wall is tiled in pale yellow, like the rest of the kitchen and the hallway, edged in black. The walls are painted yellow. A big rectangular table takes up what wall there is opposite to the counter, because closest to the door is a big closet which is pantry, cleaning supply storage, and breadbox all in one.
The table is loaded with the various ingredients and covered partially with a long, wide board that has been used for cookie and pie baking for years, so that it has a sheen like polished furniture even though it is just a plain hardwood board from a lumberyard. And there on the table and in the little Glenwood stove that so embarrasses Mother (the Providence Gas Company did not level it properly and all her cakes are crooked), we make magic.
We make butterballs, which are called elsewhere Danish wedding cookies or even Mexican wedding cookies: sugar, butter, flour, baking powder, a bit of salt, a bit of vanilla flavoring (I believe), and chopped walnuts. Always Diamond walnuts, always Gold Medal or Pillsbury flour, always Calumet baking powder (I love the Indian on the label). When they are done they are rolled in confectioner's sugar. The scent of good butter and sugar fills the kitchen.
Daddy loves the butterballs, but also likes the almond bars to dunk in a cup of coffee. Flour, sugar, other things I can't recall, a bit of almond extract and slivered almonds. She makes them in long narrow loaves like French bread and when they are done, cuts them into slices like biscotti. Now the faint odor of almond joins the kitchen scents.
The molasses cookies are my second favorite. They are chewy and deep chocolate brown with Brer Rabbit dark molasses and have a sweet, gingery, musty molasses scent. For years we argue: I hate nuts in cookies; she says they are traditional. So she makes two loaves, one with nuts for tradition, one without for me. These are made loafways as well, and cut like biscotti. The rich dark scent of baked molasses is added.
Then my favorites: the wine biscuits. They are a "biscuit" in the English sense, made of flour, sugar, a bit of salt, baking powder, oil, and wine. (The traditional Italian recipe, I have found, adds a bit of pepper, but this has been abandoned long ago.) It is my Grandmother Lanzi's recipe, says Mom, but she has adapted it by lowering the amount of sugar. She did this with all her recipes and I am still unable to eat things that are too sweet. I'm not sure where else the recipes diverge, because when my Aunty Margaret (the oldest of the Lanzi aunts) and Aunty Lisa make them, they crumble when you bite into them. Mom's are firm and crisp.
The finest ones were made back then, before my Papà Lanzi died and for a few years after. He made his own wine in a corner of the cellar in the old house, blocking it away from heat so it was always cold, and cool even in summer. I remember big dark wine barrels laid on their sides and tapped, and the sweet/acid smell of his wine, made with deep dark purple grapes that steeped for ages before being pressed into wine and the wine was purple and so the wine biscuit dough was also purplish, a strange color with a heavenly scent. The dough was as good to eat as the finished cookies, although Mom would protest when I did so: "You're going to make yourself sick." When Grandpa's wine finally finished and we had to get hearty burgundy from the liquor store or from the state liquor store in New Hampshire on Columbus Day weekend, it wasn't quite the same. (Now when I make it, even with "hearty" burgundy," the color is anemic; I rarely get the purplish dough anymore.)
Our house was built as a two-story Cape, but we had never finished the upper story, so the hardwood stairway led up to the cold, cold winter attic. The stairs kept cold as well, and here the cookies were stored, topped in plastic wrapped bowls. On Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, and even through the New Year, Mom arranged a variety of cookies on Christmas-themed paper plates, a few of some, several of another, scattered with red and green wrapped Hershey kisses, wrapped them in plastic wrap, topped them with a bow. One would go to my Godmother next door. I worried about my Godmother; she and my Godfather never decorated for Christmas. They didn't even have a tree. Padina would protest that Christmas was for children and she and her husband had none. (When I was a teenager she finally bought one of those ceramic Christmas trees with the colored bulbs at the tips of the "branches" that you put a light bulb in. She placed it on her beautiful sideboard in the dining room on a crocheted doily and asked me, "Are you satisfied now?" Well, it was better. <g>) She decorated with Christmas cards around the door and a Christmas tablecloth.
One went to Padina's brother Jimmy (his name, like my grandfather's, was Vincenzo, but they called them both "Jimmy," a nickname I never understood) and his wife Dotty and their daughter Cindy. One always went to my confirmation Godmother, Margaret (who sent cookies back, including the chocolate ones she knew I loved) and her family, and one to Margaret's oldest daughter, Barbara, who cut Mom's hair. When I was older I would take a plate to the Gustafsons, parents of my friend Cindy, and her brother and sister, and to the Metcalfes, parents of my best friend Sherrye.
And of course there would be plates to exchange with other members of the family. I'd whisper to Mom, "But yours are best!" which made her feel good, but I truly thought so.
It was with that in mind that I made the second batch today. Not many folks like them; it's an acquired taste, I suppose, like sugar cookies. But I will share, in a Christmas paper plate, maybe with a few red and green and silver Hershey kisses scattered about.
But the memories, indeed, are worth more than the cookies...
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