is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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cookiepalooza.
Every year at about this time of year Stauffers all over the country are making kourambiethes (aka “greek cookies) using a recipe you will never find online and that none of us will share with you. (You may search and find a recipe online, but it will not be the recipe.) My grandmother was adamant about this and also about a lot of other things. In fact, such is the power of her adamantium that I’m pretty sure none of us will ever give up the recipe even though she has been gone for a long time now. (While making cookies this weekend my cousin’s kid August said, all unprompted, “when I am a dad I will make these with my kids but I won’t share the recipe with people who aren’t in the family.” The training runs deep.)
Related story: My grandmother lied about her age. I think she was 49 for 10 years, for instance. However, when she got married for a second time, some years after my grandfather passed away, she realized that the age she had related to her new husband did not correspond easily with the ages of her various children and grandchildren. So she made all of us, each and every one of us, subtract 5 years from our lives in order to make her story feasible. AND WE ALL DID THAT. Such was her power. On the day of the wedding this had two funny effects: 1) it made many of the younger ones amongst us seem very accomplished for our ages and 2) it allowed my father to walk around all day saying “I haven’t felt this young in YEARS,” and get a laugh every time, because if there’s anything Stauffers agree about, it’s that if a joke is funny once, it is even more funny 100 times.
So, back to the cookies. Something I love about these cookies, besides how GD tasty they are, is that even if I were to give you the recipe I have, you wouldn’t know how to make them. Even if I were to supplement that recipe by writing out painstaking instructions, you wouldn’t have the knack, as it were. This is a recipe that you can learn to make only by being shown how to do it, many times, over time. There are qualities of texture at various stages of the making that can only be taught in a hands-on way. Words will not get the job done on their own, and I love that about this recipe. These cookies require an apprenticeship!
There are certain variables that are different every year. I don’t know if it’s because of weather conditions or geographic locations or variations in products or a combination of those and other factors. But the amount of some key ingredients will never be exactly the same. (This is not what we are led to expect about baking: we are told that measurements must be precise or all will fail. However, even with fancy cakes there are only some measurements that have to be precise. The fun of baking is learning what those are and then playing with what you can change. That observation is beside the point for these greek cookies, however, because even the set rules get thrown out the door.)
But that does not render this a lawless process. There are so many rules about these cookies! My dad has been gone for a few years now too, sadly, and yet I’ve so internalized his rules about the cookies that it’s like he’s there with me (or against me, ha, criticizing what I’m doing) whenever I make them. Rules attend how long they are baked (this varies every year, but there are disagreements about how brown the edges should be), how much powdered sugar should be spread out before they are placed in the sugar, how much should be put on top, what size they should be, how precise of a diamond shape they should take, whether the diamond shape is the only shape they may take, etc.
I explained all this to August while we were forming the cookies yesterday. He’s old enough to understand some of the complexities. My take on the rules is that I give him the guidelines and the history, tell him what the constraints are (at least have them all be the same size on the same cookie sheet), and then let him make his own decisions. That’s my teaching style in general. My dad had a stricter approach but, given his own mother’s approach, had come a long way in terms of letting liberty into the process.
So I’ve just said that August is old enough to understand some of the cookie’s complexities. Adam, my cousin and August’s dad, was talking about how when we were kids we weren’t allowed to help with these cookies at all. It was a labor of adults and it was our job to stay out of the way. Then there was a year when I was allowed to help and he was not and it was all WTF, child-style. I did not remember this story.
Once the Randy-Stauffer branch moved to California my dad started teaching us (aka making us learn) how to make the cookies. I think I never appreciated how much I was being taught when he was repeating the rules or making me observe the various things about the dough and preparation. He was instilling in us a deeply felt sense of how the cookies get made, and helping us build up, over time, a sense of when the various stages of preparation have been reached. We could not have learned that from a recipe he gave us or even a letter detailing the process.
August has two younger siblings (with a third on the way, yay!), and they aren’t quite ready for the details yet. But they can help with forming shapes and being excited about the ritual and, of course, eating the freaking delicious cookies. And also: helping me in my longterm grieving process over the loss of my dad.
[Oh no! This took a sad turn! But I’m almost 50 and it’s the holiday season. That is a recipe for happiness that can’t free itself of loss. That’s just how it goes, with aging.]
My dad was dying for 3 years before he died. He was bedridden at home and unable to make the Greek cookies. This meant that I would show up at his house, make the cookies, check with him at key moments to get his approval, but really just do all the work myself. My sister had a very young child (Ramsay!) at the time so even when she could be there she wasn’t able to give it her full attention, understandably. And there was at least one year when I did it all myself. It is a lot of work. Making these cookies takes hours and lots of different laborious steps even if you have help.
Anyway, after my dad died, I had developed something of an aversion to the idea of making the cookies, because it just felt like it would be so difficult. But luckily I had this yearly cookiepalooza date with Adam and his kids, so that I could be reminded (again, in a kind of apprenticeship, a message that doesn’t get received if it only consists of words) that making the cookies is fun and less difficult if you have help with it. Yay for that. And now that my nephew Ramsay is also old enough to help with forming the cookies, every year I do Cookiepalooza 2 with my sister and my nephew, once I get to the bay area for the holidays. We’ll do that in a couple of weeks. I love that the cookies can play the double role of yummy seasonal treat and reminder of my connection to a line that stretches back into the past and forward into the future at the same time. And also, since there are now officially two cookiepaloozas per year, DOUBLE COOKIES FOR ME.
5:44 p.m. - December 06, 2015
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