Things our children will miss out on, part 289
I’m taking a break from studying how technology changes society as well as the baking I should be doing to talk a little about baking and how technology has changed society.
I had a special request from a customer to make “Hannukah cookies” which don’t really exist in the way Christmas cookies or Purim cookies do. The special sweet for Hannukah is sufganiyot, or jelly doughnuts, and I can’t make those. But I thought about how my mother used to make sugar cookies in the shape of dreidels and stars and menorahs with blue sugar on top. My aunt does the same thing so I assume my grandmother did too. Maybe it came over from Christmas sugar cookies, I don’t know. So I suggested that and my customer agreed. I happen to have my mother’s recipe boxes from when we cleaned out my parents’ house last year and I looked through them.
I think the thing that struck me most was how dishes I had thought of as my mother’s really came from her friends and neighbors and how every one was clearly marked, “Mrs. So-and-So” on the top right corner. My mother was like me and saved everything so the recipe boxes are also full of notes from people saying, “Hi, here’s the tzimmes recipe you asked for…..” Some are still in little envelopes. I think if you looked through my computer, you’d see the same thing but in .doc files. And I do call many of my recipes by the person who gave them to me. So it’s Monka Muffins and PaxilRose’s Chocolate Chip Crack and Aunt Honey’s cookies.
But I mean, look at this picture… I somehow don’t think it will be the same. Sure, the search would be a lot easier, but it will also be a lot less fun.
On the other hand, Hannukah cookies clearly don’t not-exist–I mean, in the way that Tisha b’Av cookies and Yom Kippur cookies do not exist.
Certainly, any holiday on which eating is permitted could always be enhanced by a cookie. Even moreso by a plate of them.
This is sort of like the difference between your girlfriend and your friend who is a girl.
That recipe box looks like my mother’s–I wonder whatever became of it? I have my own little old recipe box, some recipes handwritten by my mother. It stops with my generation, I’m afraid.
Funny about the Hannukah cookies–I just finished decorating a small batch I was sending to one of my invisible friends. I had made dreidels, menorahs and stars with blue sugar. You must have been sending me brain waves.
The loss seems more melancholy to me. There is something talismanic about handling the college ruled notepaper on which my Grandma Belle wrote out her recipe for chopped liver (no bakers among my forebears, I’m afraid) even though I will never make anything that requires me to purchase schmaltz, much less render my own chicken fat.
I have a recipe box that looks exactly like this – my mother-in-law gave it to me. I love parking myself in my comfy chair in the sun room with a cup of tea and just flipping through the recipes.
I usually use it as a way to get out of my normal recipe rotation rut, and I still store the good recipes online, but still… it’s a good way to sit back and relax, kind of like going back in time.
I do think it’s a bit sad, I just take a light tone around here. It seems like kids now won’t get the memories we all get to relive. But I think as long as the food carries on to new generations, it’s OK. That’s what really matters.
Also, I have no children so what do I care.
I kid, I kid.
PS, Irish saved my ass with one of her recipes, let it be known. It might even be the one she mentioned in that comment.
Yes! The very same recipe. I’m all for saving derrieres.