Old Cookie Recipe for a New Year
I’m not an eater of cookies. I seldom even bake them. I’m funny that way (and other ways). But as the holidays drew closer, cookies began pushing their way into an important part of my brain. Specifically, the cookies most beloved in my family, from Minnie, my great-great-great-great aunt on my father’s side.
Minnie and her sister Jenny came here from Bohemia in the Czech Republic a century ago. The mystery is why they settled in Miami. We’ll never get to the bottom of it. What we do know — Minnie was genius in the kitchen. She had a light touch and could make jam cookies she topped with a latticework pastry of lacelike fineness. No one else could make them as delicately as Minnie, so at one point, she gave up and taught my grandmother, Marcella, her niece, to use her basic cookie dough recipe to make thumbprint cookies, little jam pots. Years later, my grandmother taught me.
Jenny passed away long before I was born. Minnie, though, was still alive, and according to my parents, when we’d visit, I’d patter to the kitchen, which is where she’d alway be, and throw my arms around her. She’d hug me right back and give me a cookie. I remember her scent of roses and butter and sugar. Here’s what I don’t remember — she had one arm. She’d lost the other to diabetes. But she still made jewel-like pastries with one arm, still hugged perfectly fine with one arm, and always beamed when she saw me, her old face suddenly young. Minnie never learned English, so our common language was love and cookies.
Most food is complicated to a child. It requires implements. It must be consumed sitting down at a specific and inconvenient time, interrupting a good day of play. Most is served too hot for children to enjoy. There’s a high risk of mess, and of scolding. But you can give a child — or a grownup — a fresh baked cookie and the message is transmitted in full, I love you, here’s a little delight, off you go. Minnie’s thumbprint cookies fit in a child’s hand.
They melt in the mouth. They can be enjoyed in a bite or two. My father, who loved them all his life, pretty much consuming them whole, maybe without chewing.
Being Czech, Minnie used butter. Liberally. When I went vegan many years ago, her cookies were doubly off my list. But they haunted me. I didn’t crave eating them, I craved the primal welcome and warmth they conveyed. Besides, if you want to sell someone on vegan, dessert is the secret weapon.
So this holiday season, I made them. Just as Minnie must have worked to adapt to this new home, this new country, I adapted Minnie’s thumbprint cookies. I did it with vegan butter. The idea of vegan butter might have alarmed Minnie, and in truth, it alarmed me, too, until seeing and tasting how it effortlessly replaced dairy butter in Minnie’s recipe. Butter from cultured cashews not cows did not exist until a few years ago, and it’s one good thing about living in the present age.
Our food choices look so different than they did a century ago. I doubt Minnie and Jenny would recognize half the food in a supermarket. Or even know what to make of a supermarket. But the urge to feed the people you love is eternal.
This is a massive head note for what is really a simply cookie. From the past to the present, from Bohemia to Miami to wherever you are, from Minnie to me to you, enjoy.
Ingredients
- 1 pound vegan butter*
- 1-1/2 cups sugar
- 8 tablespoons aquafaba**
- 4-1/2 cups flour
- 1-1/2 teaspoons vanilla
- seedless raspberry jam and/or apricot jam for filling cookies
Instructions
- Using a standing mixer, beat together vegan butter and sugar for a few minutes, until pale, light and fluffy.
- Add aquafaba and vanilla, and gently, slowly mix in flour. Resist the urge to overbeat. Once everything comes together, boom, you’re done.
- Wrap dough well. Chill in the refrigerator for two hours or up to two days.
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line a rimmed baking sheet with parchment. Or you may lightly oil it.
- Pinch off a walnut-sized piece of dough. Roll into a ball. Place balls 2 inches apart.
- Create a small well at the center of each cookie. They may be called thumbprint cookies, but I bet Minnie’s is the only thumb that was small enough for the job. I use my pinkie finger, or sometimes, the well-washed cap end of a felt-tip pen.
- With patience, add just a dab of jam, enough to fill the indentation, but no more. This is one instance in which being overgenerous does not end well, resulting in sloppy-looking product.
- I suppose you could use other fruit jams, but raspberry and apricot were Minnie’s choice and come on, I can only play around with tradition so much.
- Bake cookies for 10 to 12 minutes. Cookies will still be pale and will emerge soft from the oven, but quickly firm up as they cool.
- Once they are good and cool, transfer cookies to a tin or other airtight container. Keep refrigerated until ready to eat. They can also be frozen. Let them thaw and come back to room temperature before serving. Dust with powdered sugar if you want.
Notes
* Several commercial brand exist but I highly recommend Miyoko’s plant-based butter. Like innovator/creator Miyoko Schinner, it’s a real high performer.
** the brine from a can of chickpeas. Sounds odd but it makes an excellent plant-based egg substitute.
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