I didn’t develop up with a Christmas cookie custom, which was effective — I didn’t lengthy for one; I had, and have, no candy tooth.
We’re Entenmann’s individuals for essentially the most half, and even then, I’d nearly at all times quite have a slice of pizza or a grilled cheese sandwich or perhaps a little whitefish salad on a toasted sesame bagel from Tal’s. I come from a household whose males are recognized to hoard Mallomars throughout Mallomar season (September by means of March). And within the days of Mrs. Herbst Bakery in Manhattan, we’d typically double park on weekend nights, ready for the bakers to take apple strudel out of the oven. What few Christmas cookies I ate have been gingerbread, and procured from JayDee Bakery on Queens Boulevard in Forest Hills; I ate the frosting and the little silver balls, and gave the cookie to my grandmother. Precise Christmas cookies have been alien to me and my expertise till I met my spouse nearly 1 / 4 of a century in the past and moved in along with her after a yr of weekend journeys backwards and forwards from Manhattan to northern Connecticut. And I perceive that they’re a factor, and that individuals get very severe and even a bit of uptight about them, and now I perceive why.
I bear in mind years again, when Susan’s mom Helen was nonetheless with us, and her many siblings (who ranged from 80-100), nieces, nephews, and various different kinfolk would come to her home for Christmas, for a meal that Susan and I might cook dinner: normally a complete fillet, at all times mashed potatoes, at all times inexperienced beans. The run as much as dinner can be inevitably soused, for all of us: the older people have been hardcore vodka drinkers and by glass quantity three have been combating in a method that solely members of the family can struggle. There was a cousin who the remainder of the household fooled by pouring Welch’s grape juice right into a wine glass and mixing it with a tiny shot of vodka so he’d get some semblance of a buzz with out being conscious that he was not ingesting Carlo Rossi. Inebriation is inebriation, and the Gods of Extra don’t know the distinction between Two Buck Chuck and Petrus, and so we have been frankly neither higher, nor totally different: Susan and I saved the great wine — the Romanée-Conti and the Saint-Émilion — on a basement shelf behind the crockpot in order that it wouldn’t be mistaken as a mixer for the Popov.
These pecan balls are just like the Spanish Fly of Christmas cookies.
After the arguing and the plate-passing and the chance of Auntie Et eradicating her enamel had handed, the cookies would come out: there have been the straightforward ones I acknowledged (sugar, thumbprint, glacé cherry) and the extra sophisticated ones I didn’t. And sitting on Helen’s tiny spherical kitchen desk beneath the plastic wall clock and the palm cross from the earlier Easter have been two cookbooks of the kind assembled over time, in installments: there was one lone quantity from a Girls’s Day collection, in all probability courting to the early Sixties or late Fifties, again within the day when all meals images turned out orange; and a large assortment of brief cooking pamphlets (meats, appetizers, snacks and sandwiches, truffles, and many others) of the sort a credit score union would possibly offer you for opening a brand new account, or in change for a number of sheets of S&H inexperienced stamps. And between the covers of those books: absolute baking gold.
When Helen died a number of days wanting her ninety fifth birthday in 2014, we made positive we introduced house the cookbooks with us.
However that is the factor: no person wants extra cookie recipes. Most of them are household favorites; for instance, my buddy, the sensible meals author and editor Susie Middleton, simply wrote about her mom’s molasses crinkles. When the vacations arrive, Susan — who’s a rare baker: she’s a e-book designer by occupation and measures issues for a dwelling, so all of her balls and biscuits find yourself being precisely the identical dimension, whereas I might simply make one espresso truffle the scale of a golfball and one other the scale of a grapefruit in the identical batch — hauls out these cookbooks, I do know that Helen’s pecan balls shall be forthcoming. And when they’re within the technique of being baked, I can’t be in the home. I can’t work, can’t suppose straight, can’t deal with something when the cloud of heat pecan, butter, sugar, and salt wafts down the hallway.
As a result of: these pecan balls are just like the Spanish Fly of Christmas cookies. Unusual issues can occur when one nibbles on these cookies. The important thing right here is that they don’t seem to be overly candy, and they’re greatest made with salted butter, which gives a terrific counterpoint when you select to roll the balls in granulated sugar (which you don’t need to do). We’ve by no means frozen them — they only don’t final that lengthy in our home — and, because the recipe signifies, they don’t journey properly as a result of they’re given to straightforward crumbling. As in: they crumble in your mouth. In case your Christmas vacation features a deliberate seduction (assuming you’ve obtained the power, after the wrapping and the visiting and the cooking), that is the cookie for you.
When Helen Turner made these pecan balls, they have been the one issues that obtained her siblings and prolonged household to cease combating. They’re the one baked good that I look ahead to, ever. I suppose Susan might make all of them yr lengthy, however, like Mallomars, they’re seasonal, and they should keep that method.
As a result of some issues are simply that particular.
This publish was initially revealed on Elissa Altman’s weblog Poor Man’s Feast, The James Beard Award-winning journal in regards to the intersection of meals, spirit, and the households that drive you loopy. Learn extra on her Substack, or sustain along with her archives right here.
Photographs courtesy the writer.
