Yesterday, I made a batch of my Grandmother’s molasses cookies, and boy, they sure look 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, 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 toward the end of March, beginning of April, 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. So, as the snow drops bloom in our neighbor’s yard, 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 1 tablespoon 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?
It’s the same with the baked chicken or roast pork of today. It just doesn’t taste like I remember it tasting when I was a kid. It’s probably because 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 doesn’t taste like what I remember, (though it’s closer).
But dessert ingredients are basically the same, right? I mean, flour is flour, molasses is molasses. Still, I can follow this recipe to the letter, and the results please most everyone who eats them. 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 my taste buds have changed, and nothing’s going to ever taste as good as it used to. Maybe those desserts tasted better because someone else made ‘em; 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