Olson - The cookie party cookbook: the ultimate guide to hosting a cookie exchange

The Cookie Party Cookbook

The Ultimate Guide to Hosting a Cookie Exchange

Robin L. Olson

St. Martins Griffin

New York

THE COOKIE PARTY COOKBOOK. Copyright 2010 by Robin L. Olson. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address St. Martins Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.stmartins.com

Book design by Phil Mazzone

Illustrations by Sally Mara Sturman

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Olson, Robin L.

The cookie party cookbook : the ultimate guide to hosting a cookie exchange / Robin L. Olson.1st ed.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-312-60727-2

1. Cookies. 2. Entertaining. I. Title.

TX772.O47 2010

641.8'654dc22

2010030354

First Edition: October 2010

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

In memory of the woman who taught me how to bake,
my mother-in-law, Sylvia Olson.
Even though youre not here anymore, youre always near,
especially when Im in the kitchen baking your cookie recipes.

In 1980, I became engaged to Kim Olson. That first innocuous invitation to bake Christmas cookies with my fianc and his family was the beginning of what would become a treasured lifetime activity. The Olson family baking tradition started with my husbands grandmother Anna West Olson, born 1886, and continues to this day, with the chain unbroken. Our daughter, Stephanie, is an avid cookie baker as well.

I began baking under the tutelage of my future mother-in-law, Sylvia. Little did I know what I was in for, as I was twenty-one and she was fifty-nine, and of strong personality. It was no match, and I was immediately conscripted into baking boot camp before I even knew it. Syls daughters, Beth and Jackie, were married with families of their own and lived elsewhere.

Christmas was Syls favorite holiday and much work and detail went into the making of an Olson Family Christmas. On a scale of one to ten, Syl was a ten. The kickoff of the holiday season was the annual cookie bake-a-thon right after Thanksgiving. The majority of the thousands of cookies baked were destined to be shipped to relatives across the country.

That first year and in the ensuing years, we would bake double to triple batches of ten to twelve types of cookies the first week in December, eight hours a day, for three days. There were stacks and stacks of cookies everywhere, around two thousand cookies. There were no excuses, and it was expected that I would show up and assist, and I did for the next twelve years, until we moved back East.

Syl was an excellent baker who made the best-tasting cookies. Syl always hand-stirred all her dough. I dont think she even owned an electric hand mixer. She was very particular about her measurements and also of not leaving a smidgen of dough in the bowl, which I credited to her growing up during the Great Depression. Waste not, want not!

The cookie stance: Syl would stand in the middle of the kitchen, place a large mixing bowl in the crook of her left arm, and, wielding a large wooden paddle in her right hand, she would then proceed to beat the butter and sugar into submission, using a lot of elbow grease. Syl always proclaimed, This is what makes my cookies taste better than all the others. She was old-fashioned about many things, and her cookie-baking technique was one of them. However, I, being young and impatient, used an electric hand mixer at home when out of her sight, but Syl never knew that!

Syls mother, whom we called Gram Parker, was not a baker. Syl was taught how to bake by her mother-in-law, in the early 1940s, when Syl was a newlywed. Anna, a lifelong avid baker, did not just bake cookies, she baked everything: breads, rolls, cakes, and pastries. After Anna was widowed, she went to live with my in-laws; that was very common back then. Anna then went with the family when they moved from Indiana to California in 1960. The Olsons had three children, Beth, seventeen; Jackie, eleven; and Kim, who was four.

Kim has fond childhood memories from the mid-1960s of sitting in the kitchen listening to baseball games on the radio with Anna, who was a huge baseball fan. The Olsons were originally from the South Side of Chicago and Anna never missed a Ladies Day at Old Comiskey Park.

While theyd listen to the baseball games, Anna would knead bread dough or roll and cut cookies. Even after she went blind in her old age, Kim remembers that his grandmother would measure and handle everything she needed as if she could see.

My favorite cookie is the that came from Anna. Year after year, Syl pieced together the three yellowed scraps of paper with the original handwritten recipe on it. Shed bend over the kitchen countertop with her nose practically touching the recipe as she tried to read the crumbling, faded, stained pieces of paper.

Every single year Id ask Syl if she would let me take the recipes and photocopy them. But alas, shed never let me take any of her crumbling, handwritten recipes out of her house. To her, these handed-down recipes were her family jewels. Syl passed away in 2005 at the age of eighty-five, so I now have all of the crumbling, handwritten recipes, ancient cookbooks, and clippings, thanks to my sister-in-law Jackie Thomas, of San Diego. Id like to think that Syl would be pleased to know that not only did I not lose her beloved recipes (apparently her greatest fear), but Im publishing them, so they will never be lost or forgotten.

In his later years, my father-in-law, Melvin Olson, had a retirement job as General Manager at the Jesuit Novitiate in Montecito, California, from the mid-1970s until he died in 1988, at age sixty-eight. Mel was also a World War II hero, a tailgunner in the United States Army Air Corps. He sat in the back of the B-17 bombers, in subzero temperatures, shooting at the enemy. It was a dangerous job and many did not survive it. Mel was in Jimmy Stewarts squadron and he flew twenty-seven missions, the most allowed. He was the typical strong, silent type of the 1940s and he never bragged about himself. (That was Syls job.) As a couple, opposites attract: where he was quiet, Syl was outgoing. They moved in unison, always got along, and were happily married for forty-eight years.

The Novitiate had a huge commercial kitchen to feed all of the Brothers, Superiors, and Novices. Mel would bring home industrial-size sheets of parchment paper that his friend, Chef Veane, had given him. Veane told Mel that lining the baking sheets with parchment paper was the professional bakers secret. Well, if it was good enough for professional bakers, it was good enough for the Olsons. Mels job for the home bake-a-thon was to cut the parchment sheets with scissors to fit a home-size baking pan. His other job was to chop all the nuts in a little old-fashioned nut grinder before he retired to his workshop.

Syl started her own business, a hobby and miniatures store called Sylvias Memories in Miniature, when Kim was in high school. Because Syl didnt get home from work until 5:30 P.M., we didnt start baking until after dinner. For at least eight hours, three nights in a row, we would have a production line of cracking eggs, measuring ingredients, mixing and rolling the dough, slicing, nut chopping, sprinkling, timer setting, baking, transferring the cookies to the cooling racks, and then doing the icings and toppings.