Christmas Cookies🌲Stay Close to My Heart - No. 316

Pecan crescents + a grandmother’s cheese date cookie

Dee’s Cheese Date Cookies are tossed in powdered sugar while still warm. Or you can leave them unsugared.

COOKIES GET PERSONAL this time of year.

My maternal grandmother, Elizabeth Emmaline Stephens Carr, was a strong and loving woman her fourteen grandchildren called ‘’Dee.’’ Widowed when my mother was 13, Dee didn't have a lot of time for cooking or baking, but when she did, it created memories.

I recall the thrill of spending the night at her cozy Nashville apartment. Grandchildren slept in a small bed in the spare bedroom, and she slept in the other room across the hall. In the middle of the hallway was a telephone nook where Dee would pull up a stool for long conversations. Those were with her five daughters and the American Red Cross.

She worked in the Red Cross home services division after World War II and into the 1970s and the Vietnam War. Often her phone rang late at night, and we grandchildren recall her talking to soldiers far away or to their family in this country.

My grandmother Dee at Nashville’s Red Cross office, December 1947.

Dee helped American servicemen find their way back home by booking lodging, sending them money, or just listening. My cousin Joe recalls she wrote down everything said on those calls in ‘’the book,’’ which she would pick up at Red Cross headquarters in downtown Nashville each afternoon.

When she didn’t get phone calls, she played cards with us—Hearts, Go Fish, Spades, even Bridge—which fueled our family’s lifelong love of cards. She lived across the street from a large golf course, and because golfers tend to over-swing, we’d pick up their golf balls that had flown across the road and rested under her large weeping willow tree.

And in the morning we awaited a royal breakfast of an orange half pre-cut into sections, crisp bacon, and buttered toast. We’d spread her Damson Plum preserves over the toast, and to this day I still wonder how she put up so many jars of preserves in that tiny kitchen.

Cheese Date Cookies were a recipe Dee baked each year for the holidays, both Thanksgiving and Christmas, using Swan’s Down cake flour, butter, and sugar.

She also baked a small round sugar cookie topped with a candied red or green cherry and called those Purcell’s Afternoon Teas.

I recall everyone gathering around her silver cookie tray and sighing. The date cookies exercised every one of our taste sensations, sweet and sticky from the dates, crunchy from the pecans, and salty thanks to the cheese. It was an other-worldly sort of flavor combination to a child.

You didn't expect cookies like this. And yet, that's why the flavor has stayed with me all these years.

These cookies couldn’t be simpler. Make the cheesy dough, roll out like pie crust and cut into squares, dollop on a mix of chopped dates and pecans, roll up, and bake.

Dates were new to the baking pantry at the turn of the 20th Century and one of the food crops sought for U.S. farmers to grow by "Agriculture Explorers" employed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Finding that the growing conditions of California's hot, arid Coachella Valley were much like those in Iraq and Algeria where date palms thrived, the explorers and horticulturalists worked together to plant Algerian date palms in California in 1900 and launched the domestic date industry.

When the war years and Great Depression rolled around, dates were a frequent addition to recipes because you could add less sugar (which was rationed and expensive) and the dates helped sweeten cookies or cakes. And my grandmother, born in 1891 and 90 years of age when she died, knew all about rationing and stretching meals. She could slice a beef roast thinner than anyone.

There’s a second Christmas cookie recipe close to my heart, and it is similar to butterballs or what you might call Mexican wedding cookies. We call them Crescent Cookies.

What makes this recipe so likeable is that the dough has just a few ingredients and can be made a day ahead. You form them into the half moon crescent shapes and then dust with confectioners' sugar while the cookies are still a little warm, so the sugar will stick.

When I was traveling in Toledo, Spain, several years back I saw crescent-shaped cookies in bakeries and asked our guide the story behind them. He said the crescent symbol is Arabic. You see it across Europe in the almond cookies of Austria, Hungary, and Germany originating with the Turkish crescent moon from the days of the Ottoman Empire, he told me. Even the croissant is Viennese in origin, and not French.

So it’s likely the humble crescent cookie found its way into American baking through bakeries and then into homes. One of the first recipes shared for crescent tea cookies with pecans was in Eleanor Howe’s Household News column in newspapers in Port Allen and Shreveport, Louisiana in 1939.

Heading into the holidays, we have a giant recipe box of cookies handed down to us from our ancestors. They might be hand written on recipe cards or flagged in favorite cookbooks. We just need to bake them, take a bite, and let the memories flow.

What I learned when writing the book, American Cookie, was that cookies are expressions of love, small squares of a nostalgic place in time, stains in a beloved old family cookbook, remembrances of cookie jars and a childhood past, little dots connecting the holidays in our lives. Cookies are timeless, precious, and remind us of people dear.

- xo, Anne

What are your holiday cookie memories?

P.S. I’ve got a special cookie treat (or two) Thursday for paid subscribers. I’m baking cookies from a new cookbook called The Ultimate Minnesota Cookie Book, by Lee Svitak Dean and Rick Nelson. Hint: One pairs chocolate and peppermint. Don’t miss it!

THE RECIPES:

Dee’s Cheese Date Cookies

Look for pitted dates, a pound-size container of them. Sometimes it’s not easy to find dates at the supermarket, but they are there. Look in the produce department and where the store stocks dried fruit. You will need to finely chop the dates and combine them with finely chopped pecans. This can be done a day ahead and set aside, covered, at room temperature.

Makes about 6 dozen (72) cookies

Prep: 25 to 30 minutes

Chill: Overnight

Bake: 15 to 20 minutes

• 1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, at room temperature

• 8 ounces (2 cups) shredded sharp cheddar cheese

• 1 1/2 cups (180 grams) all-purpose flour

• 1/4 teaspoon salt

• Filling:

• 1 pound pitted dates, well chopped

• 3/4 cup finely chopped pecans

• To dust:

• 1/2 cup (58 grams) confectioners' sugar

1. Place the butter, cheese, flour, and salt in a large mixing bowl, and with an electric mixer blend the mixture until it looks like coarse crumbs. Continue blending or working with your hands until the mixture comes together into a ball. Flatten it out, wrap in waxed paper and place in the refrigerator overnight.

2. The next day, make the filling by combining the chopped dates and pecans. Set aside. Preheat the oven to 350ºF. Remove the dough from the refrigerator, and cut it into two halves. Work with one half at a time. Return the other to the fridge to stay cold.

3. Lightly flour a work surface, and roll the dough out to 1/4-inch thickness. With a knife, cut it into rough 1 1/2-inch squares. Place a teaspoon of filling onto each square. Roll the filling into the dough like a small jellyroll. Press the dough to seal any cracks, and place the cookie on a baking sheet. Bake about 18 at a time until they are golden brown and firm, from 15 to 20 minutes.

4. Remove the cookies from the oven, transfer to a wire rack, and when cool enough to handle dredge in powdered sugar. Let cool before serving. Repeat with the remaining dough and filling.

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Our Crescent Cookies

I always use a soft low-protein flour in this recipe because I want them crumbly and tender, something like a White Lily or Swan’s Down cake flour works well. If you use a flour with more gluten (protein), reduce the flour to 1 3/4 cups. Sift the confectioners’ sugar if you need to remove the lumps.

Makes 4 dozen (48) cookies

Prep: 20 to 25 minutes

Bake: 18 to 22 minutes

• 16 tablespoons (2 sticks) lightly salted butter, at room temperature

• 2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract

• 1/2 cup (58 grams) confectioners' sugar

• 2 cups (240 grams) all-purpose flour

• 1 full cup (4 ounces) very finely chopped pecans

• 2 cups (216 grams) confectioners' sugar for dusting the cookies

1. Heat the oven to 325º F, with a rack in the middle.

2. Place the butter and vanilla in the large bowl of an electric mixer and beat on low until creamy, 1 minute. Add the 1/2 cup sugar and beat just to combine. Add the flour and the pecans, and beat just until blended, 30 seconds. The dough will be stiff.

3. Pinch off 1/2-inch pieces of dough and shape into crescents. Place these on ungreased baking sheets about 2 inches apart. Bake until the cookies turn light brown, about 18 to 22 minutes. Remove the pan from the oven, let the cookies rest for 2 minutes on the pan, then remove with a metal spatula to a wire rack to cool partially, 3 to 4 minutes.

4. Place the 2 cups confectioners' sugar in a shallow bowl and carefully roll the warm cookies in the sugar, dusting off the excess. Place them on the rack to completely cool, 1 hour. Repeat with the remaining cookie dough.