A Christmas cookie blast from the past :-)

As my friends may recall, I have a violent aversion to nostalgia. I simply don’t look back on the past in general or my past in particular with any longing or idealizing whatsoever. Mostly, I’m glad it’s over and done with, and I embrace the future eagerly. But I’m definitely blissing out on some holiday nostalgia this week.

When I was a teen, my dad worked for Belmont Public Schools, and every year at midwinter break, the departmental secretary gave him a big flat shirt box full of homemade cookies. They were unlike any other holiday cookies I ever made or got from anyplace else. A minor highlight of the Yuletide season was when dad brought home that box of cookies. I didn’t even know quite what they were, but I knew they were something made with almonds, thick crunchy cylinders, not really curved into a “crescent” shape. The box had three kinds of cookie: homemade baklava (well, that I knew), and then the almond cookies with some drenched in the same syrup that was on the baklava and the rest dredged in powdered sugar. Every year I looked forward to those cookies, but I never got the recipes or even found out what the secretary called them.

Then my dad changed jobs, and I never saw those cookies again. That was thirty years ago, and I’ve been pining for them ever since. I deduced that the thick crunchy cylinders were “almond crescents” and a relatively well-known and common kind of cookie, and I found recipes online–but I never saw the actual cookies anywhere, and I was never sure the recipes were really, you know, the ones. Despite how much I love to cook and bake, and how good I am at it, in all this time, I’d never tried to recreate those cookies. Maybe they were just…too special. I didn’t want to try and get it wrong. Or maybe it just wasn’t the same if it wasn’t that certain box of cookies, given as a gift, with all the context that came with it.

But, I’ve been doing a lot of culinary experimentation on this new regimen over the past year, and I had three cans of “natural” whole almonds sitting in my cupboards that I hadn’t touched, and I’m buying ingredients to do food for my dad’s “open house” next weekend, and…something impelled me to give it a shot. I looked up recipes online and picked one that seemed closest to my memory of the almond cookies.

Past midnight on Friday night, I was grinding up almonds in the blender, mixing up dough and hand-molding cookies. I carefully calculated the calorie count–I even figured out how to calculate for the powdered sugar. They didn’t seem to come out coated as thickly with sugar as I recall, but memory may be exaggerating there. The powdered sugared cookies were always my favorites in the box. The cookies seemed to come out well, even though the bottle of almond flavoring I thought I had turned out to be bone dry, and I used double of this gourmet vanilla extract my sister gave me. The fragrance was just incredible–twenty four hours later the whole house still smelled like fresh cookies.

By the time they were done, I was already at my calorie limit for the day, so I didn’t try one until the next afternoon, after I’d had brunch. I took a bite, and…

Oh, yeah. That’s it. Those are the ones. Those are the cookies. Oh, man. They’re just…wonderful. I waited thirty years to taste these again, and it was worth it.

Recipe on request. 🙂