It’s snowing to beat the band here in Mahoosuc Mills today. In like a lion, right? A snow day means baking in our house, and I just finished making a batch of my Grandmother’s molasses cookies. Boy, they sure looked beautiful, if I do say so myself. Just like I remember.
I have Grammy’s recipe written in her shaky hand on white (now yellow) lined paper. The thing even has Grammy’s molasses stains on it. My mother had it laminated for me years ago, and I’ve used it so much it’s starting to separate along the edges.
The thing I like most about this recipe is that in the margin at the top of the page, over “Old Fashioned Drop Molasses Cookies,” my Grandmother has written, “My best.” Underlined, just like that, with a period, not an exclamation mark. It was a truth she was certain of.
Grammy used to make these cookies like crazy around the holidays, and give them away in fancy tins. But she always baked up a batch in March, too. Molasses cookies are a cold weather dessert, so these end of winter cookies had a special meaning. They were a signal that spring was around the corner, that we wouldn’t have molasses cookies again until October. Right now, as I dream about crocuses poking their hopeful green heads up between dwindling patches of snow, I try once again to follow Grammy’s lead.
Her recipe yields about sixty cookies, so making them takes a long time. I’ve tried cutting the recipe in half, but it doesn’t work. It calls for “sour milk,” or “buttermilk,” or “regular milk, to which vinegar has been added.” And after you mix it up, you have to “let it stand 1 hr.”
But here’s the deal: while the cookies smell like my Grammy’s as they’re cooking, they don’t taste like hers. Why, I’ve always wondered?
Now, I think I know why the baked chicken or roast pork of today don’t taste like my grandmothers’. The animals are raised different, and they put I-don’t-want-to-know what into the feed. Even the organic meat my niece Caitlin gets don’t taste like what I remember, (though it’s closer).
But dessert ingredients are basically the same, right? I mean, flour is flour. Still, I can follow this recipe to the letter, and please most everyone who eats the cookies, but to me, they’re not the same. To me, they taste more like the memory of Grammy’s molasses cookies: almost, but not quite. It’s like the full flavor is just out of reach.
Maybe it’s my taste buds that have changed, and nothings going to ever taste as good as it used to. Maybe those cookies tasted better because someone else made them; or that in my child’s mind, they were all wrapped up in love.
That’s it for now. Catch you on the flip side!
Hear Ida Tell It: Molasses Cookies
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March 29 & 30: Ida: Woman Who Runs With the Moose, The Footlights Theatre, 7:30, Falmouth, ME
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