Birthday cookies from grandma's recipe box

More than 20 years ago, I inherited a recipe box that documented a life’s work in a tidy Ohio kitchen. It belonged to Tim’s grandmother, Luella Fugate, who passed away just after Christmas 1991, about two week’s shy of Graham’s first birthday. We spent an unforgettable night in her apartment on that visit, Graham snoozing in her arms while we all told stories and ate cookies. 

Her recipe collection is a treasure. It’s a basic wooden box with rich grain marks, tongue-in-groove corners and an inside label that looks like a train car and reads Swift Service (SLR18552). Most of the cards show her familiar looping handwriting and scant directions, relics of an era where precise details were not needed as all housewives knew their way around a kitchen. There are a few typed recipes, perhaps from revolutionary friends, newspaper clippings from Heloise and cut-outs from packages, such as the Jell-O chocolate chip pudding cookies.

While most recipes are filed alphabetically, there is a special tab for cookies. Among its time-honored contents are cookies she would bake every year for Christmas. Since Tim was born on Christmas Eve, that means they were ever present in his birthday memories.

I dropped the box several years after receiving it and was horrified to see its contents tumble from once carefully filed sections. I never had the nerve to see how badly I messed up years of careful collection.

This year, Tim took good advantage of house rules to pick whatever sort of cake or pie you want for your birthday. He wanted his grandmother’s cookies – notably, the ones I knew as Bevington Orange Cookies, a sweet and tender carryover from her own childhood.

Lucky for me, the cookies Tim most craved were still tucked into the very front of the box, as if ready for her hands to draw them out and set on the counter. Though her handwriting has faded to the point that I had to call my mother-in-law for interpretation – and I substituted her beloved “Crisco or oleo” for unsalted butter – the results were unmistakably sound.

“My grandmother’s cookies!” Tim exclaimed upon seeing the familiar orange cookies dripping zest-filled icing from cooling racks. The flavors took me back to the card table in her apartment, where coffee tins repurposed as cookie containers would appear as faithfully as angel's wings upon the ringing of bells.

I had intended to make pecan tassies, too. These tiny, two-bite pecan pies were my own favorite, but I didn’t quite get to them in time. It’s even more proof to me that she was a tireless and exceptional baker to make so many varieties of cookies to delight her family year after year.

Orange Cookies

Makes about 30 cookies

1 cup unsalted butter at room temperture
2 cups sugar
2 eggs
1 cup whole buttermilk, such as Mapleview Dairy
4 cups flour
½ tsp. baking powder
¼ tsp. salt

Icing
1 large orange, zested and juiced
16 ounces powdered sugar

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Cream soft butter and sugar in a large bowl. Add one egg at a time, blending well.

Measure flour, baking powder and salt into medium bowl; stir to combine. Add to creamed mixture and combine by stirring with a spatula. Batter will be fairly soft.

Using a small cookie scoop, drop onto parchment lined baking sheets about two inches apart. Bake for 12-14 minutes, or until lightly golden around the edges.

While cookies are baking, pour powdered sugar into a medium bowl. Zest the orange over the bowl, then add its juice. Whisk until icing is smooth.

When cookies are done, transfer to cooking racks; place parchment or wax paper under the racks. Spread about a teaspoon of icing over each cookie while still warm. Dripped icing can be scooped up and added back to the bowl, if needed.

Cool completely. If not serving right away, pack in airtight containers between layers of wax paper.

Date Swirls

Make about 4 dozen

8 ounces dried dates
¼ cup sugar
½ cup water
1 tbsp. Cointreau (optional)

1 stick unsalted butter at room temperature
½ tsp. salt
½ tsp baking soda
½ tsp. lemon extract
½ cup sugar
½ cup light brown sugar
1 egg
2 cups cake flour

Pour sugar over dates and chop well. Transfer to small sauce pan. Add ½ cup water and simmer about 7 minutes, or until water is absorbed and mixture is jammy. Remove from heat. Stir in Cointreau, if using. Cool completely.

Cream butter; add salt, baking soda and lemon extract and blend well. Add egg and mix well to combine.

Stir in flour. It’s easier to bring together with your hands toward then end. Pat into a rectangle. Cover in plastic wrap and refrigerate until firm, about 45 minutes.

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

Cut dough into two rectangles. Roll lightly on floured surface until about 6x8 inches. Transfer to parchment paper and continue rolling until about 8x10 inches. Spread or crumble about half of the date-nut mixture over the dough, leaving about an inch of bare dough along one wide end. 

Using the parchment paper, roll dough over from the opposite wide end, covering the filling. Continue to roll dough, using parchment paper to tuck and keep the roll tight. Roll finished dough log in the paper, tucking in short ends, and return to the refrigerator for at least two hours. Repeat with remaining dough and filling.

Unroll cookie log from paper and evenly cut into 1/4-inch slices. Place on parchment lined cookie sheet about one inch apart and bake about 8 minutes, or until lightly golden. Transfer to cookie racks to cool.

Cool completely. If not serving right away, pack in airtight containers between layers of wax paper.

Debbie Moose celebrates tasty traditions in ‘Southern Holidays’

Debbie Moose, author of 'Southern Holidays,' a new volume in the Savor the South series from the University of North Carolina Press, will be the guest speaker at the 7pm Wednesday meeting of Culinary Historians of Piedmont North Carolina (CHOPNC) at Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill. The gathering also will be a holiday potluck, so feel free to bring your favorite seasonal snack.

Debbie Moose remembers leaving a plate of cookies for Santa at her childhood home in Winston-Salem. Since her mother wasn’t much of a cook, they were usually store bought and set out with a tall glass of milk.

“My dad would hover around the corner say, ‘I’d rather have bourbon,’” quips Moose, author of the new Southern Holidays cookbook from UNC Press.  

One year, her mother surprised them both by announcing she would bake wafer-thin Moravian cookies from a recipe she’d seen in the newspaper.

“My mother dragged a rolling pin out of the back of a cabinet somewhere. I didn’t know she had one,” Moose says dryly. “Those are not easy cookies. The more you work with the dough, the worse it gets. My mother said things. It’s the one and only time I saw her make cookies.”

Moose does not include a recipe for Moravian cookies in Southern Holidays, but she does acknowledge her Triad community’s impact on her holiday thinking with a classic Moravian sugar cake. As challenging as the cookies are for a novice baker, the cakes are a breeze; plus one batch yields three cakes.

“Mine is a little different. I wanted it to be thicker and more cakelike, and I use a ton more cinnamon,” says Moose, who has several tucked in her freezer to share with neighbors and take to parties. “It’s great for if you get invited somewhere at the last minute.”

Moose covers a full-year range of traditional religious observances and all-American July 4th, as well as such distinctly Southern occasions as Mardi Gras (brandy milk punch and coconut king cake), the Texas emancipation celebration of Juneteenth (smoky red rice) and – perhaps her favorite – March Madness.

Debbie Moose

“Elaine Maisner, my editor, agreed with me. We were of sisterly mind on that,” says Moose, who welcomes likeminded friends with Smokin’ Mary cocktails for round-ball parties at the Raleigh home she shares with her husband, whose own childhood inspired some of the Jewish recipes in the book. Moose’s Chipotle Brisket is standard Hanukkah fare; her kicked-up Cajun matzo balls will make their annual appearance during Passover.

“It’s a small book, so really it’s just a snapshot of how we celebrate in the South,” explains Moose, who also wrote Buttermilk. “There are so many food festivals, and a lot of them are in the summer. I tried to pick ones that reflect cultural and historical things, like the Blessing of the Fleet. Any coastal community has a blessing of the fleet celebration when the fishing season starts. I chose to focus on the Gulf Coast because so many of the fishermen are Vietnamese.”

Tucked into the spring chapter, the section includes Vietnamese spring rolls and a seafood gumbo with oysters, crabmeat and shrimp. Other featured festivals leave a reader pining for peaches, Greek chicken from Raleigh’s Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church and creamy cheese blintzes from Savannah’s Shalom Y’All food fest.

This week, Moose will be turning her attention to Hanukkah, which begins at sunset on Tuesday. In part, the holiday commemorates the occasion where a single day’s supply of oil miraculously burned for eight nights.

“It’s a lot of fried stuff. Who doesn’t like that?” Moose says. “I have a recipe for sweet potato latkes, which I really love. I kept trying to make them grease-free until my husband point out that the oil is what it’s all about.”

Moravian Sugar Cake
Reprinted with permission of UNC Press from 'Southern Holidays,' a Savor the South Cookbook by Debbie Moose.

Winston-Salem, North Carolina, has a Moravian community that goes back to the 1700s, when members of the church founded Old Salem. Moravian breads, which come from the German baking tradition, are wonderful, and this sweet yeasted coffee cake was a holiday favorite of mine growing up.  Today, I follow the lead of my neighbor, Cathy Hedburg, who bakes and freezes sugar cakes in disposable foil pans for Christmas gifts. They’re great for breakfast on Christmas Day.

Makes 3 sugar cakes

For the cake
2 (¼-ounce) packages active dry yeast
2/3 cup plain, unseasoned mashed potatoes (see NOTE below)
1 stick unsalted butter, at room temperature
¼ cup vegetable shortening
1 cup sugar
2 teaspoons salt
2 large eggs, slightly beaten
3½ to 4 cups flour

For the topping
¾ cup brown sugar
3 teaspoons cinnamon
1 stick unsalted butter, melted and slightly cooled

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Butter three 9-inch cake pans.

In a small bowl, dissolve the yeast in ½ cup warm water. Set aside until it foams, about 10 minutes.

In the bowl of the stand mixer, combine the mashed potatoes, 1 cup hot tap water, and the butter, shortening, sugar and salt. Mix on low until the ingredients look like watery scrambled eggs. Stir in the eggs and dissolved yeast. Gradually stir in the flour until the dough resembles heavy but not too dry muffin batter. Cover bowl with a lint-free tea towel and let the dough rise in a warm place until doubled in size, about 1½ hours.

Punch down the dough, then divide it evenly among the three prepared pans. Cover the pans with your trusty tea towel and let the dough in each pan rise in a warm place until it reaches the top of the pan, about 30 minutes.

Prepare the topping by stirring the brown sugar, cinnamon and melted butter until combined.

Use your thumb to make indentations all over the top of the dough in each pan, about 1 inch apart. Push all the way down to the bottom of the pan. Drizzle the topping evenly over the three cakes.

Bake for 15-20 minutes or longer until light brown. Serve warm or cool completely, place in airtight plastic freezer bags, and freeze.

NOTE: If using leftover mashed potatoes, be sure they contain no butter, milk or salt. You can use instant mashed potatoes, but be sure to buy the unseasoned variety.  

Holiday lights twinkle at Tanglewood Park's drive-though display

                                                                Photos courtesy Visit Winston-Salem

Growing up in Northern New Jersey, there was no sign more certain that Christmas was nigh than the arrival of the singing choir boys down the street on our neighbor’s front lawn.

The stiff plastic trio, illuminated from within, cast a comforting glow on the snow-covered lawn of the Lyng family home – where Billy, the eldest son, was the acknowledged dreamboat among the little girls who lived nearby. We’d gather to stare at the angelic faces as Christmas songs played on an endless loop, hoping that Billy, like St. Nicholas, soon would appear.

Holiday decorations have long since gone high tech, but there still is something undeniably charming about driving around and seeing the lights of the season. For those who still crave such magic, the Tanglewood Festival of Lights in Forsyth County is celebrating its 22^nd season of presenting a drive-through display.

Long lines of vehicles, many filled with excited children, inch through the park’s rolling lanes to enjoy what is described as one of the Southeast’s largest holiday light shows. While some certainly are more spectacular than others, 83 named displays dot the route.

(If the possibility of a two-hour wait might spoil your festive mood, plan to be in line when the park open at 6 p.m. You can dial into a local radio station to hear holiday tunes, but a word to wise men and women the wheel: come prepared with your own favorites.)

After gliding through a series of twinkling arches, viewers are welcomed by perhaps the most fabulous sight of all – a series of sparkling snowflakes strategically placed so as to create a sense of driving into a winter wonderland. Squirrels chase nuts up a tree, skipping from limb to limb before scooting down one on the other side of the lane. Reindeer similarly sprint overhead. Later, roll down the windows to hear jingling bells as you ride past hundreds on display.

If you’ve been to one of these spectaculars before, many of the visions will be familiar. There is a silly slip-sliding penguin and fire-snorting sea serpent, a grand garden of poinsettias and a serene nativity scene. Given the park’s proximity to Old Salem, there also is a shimmering Moravian star. And on the assumption that other celebrants might find the route appealing, Hanukkah and Kwanzaa displays are given token acreage.

There is seasonal kitsch aplenty to keep a carload of revelers amused along the drive, and those wanting a keepsake or snack can visit the concession area at the Red Barn. Despite the demands of their busy schedule, Santa and Mrs. Claus will be on hand to greet children and accept last-minute additions to wish lists.

The Tanglewood Festival of lights will remain open from 6-11 p.m. nightly (except for Dec. 25) through Jan. 1. For admission costs and other information, call 336-703-6400 or visit http://forsyth.cc/parks/tanglewood/fol/.

Note: My tour of Tanglewood Festival of Lights was arranged by Visit Winston-Salem. Additional posts about things to do in Winston-Salem will follow. For information about other area events and activities, call Visit Winston-Salem at 336-728-4200 (toll free, 866-728-4200).