Best Food Writing 2013 (41 page)

Of course I didn't. Part of that has to do with a kind of culinary habituation: Once you eat something for so many years, you pay less attention to its flavors and textures, gobbling it down mindlessly, your brain automatically filling in the missing details. I think that is particularly true with our family's gingerbread cookies. It was a distinctly homely thing in the first place: a thick, dry beast slathered in pink icing (yes, pink) and always in desperate need of dunking in milk. I still loved it, with every molecule in my body, like only a cookie-addicted boy could. It always reminded me of Monna Kuykendall, my maternal grandmother, and her warmth, generosity and (for some unexplained reason) souvenir spoon collection.

Anyway, about two years ago, as the gingerbread story unfolds, Deborah was visiting relatives when she realized the horrifying truth about her ginger-less gingerbread cookies. True to her first-born, bossy-sister personality, she wasted little time regretting her 35 years of spice-free Christmas cookies. Instead, she conducted an FBI-like investigation to track down the origins of the family recipe. By the time she was done, she had collected five gingerbread cookie recipes, spanning four generations, and forwarded them all to me.

Which launched my own attempt to research the recipe that
produces a cookie everyone in the family loves to eat, but few love to make. After spending almost an entire weekend reviewing recipes, and baking and baking some more, I came to one incontrovertible conclusion: My family is full of lousy copyists. Every generation made errors in copying the recipe from the preceding generation, sometimes omitting ingredients (such as ginger or a full cup of sugar), sometimes transposing the amounts needed, sometimes neglecting directions altogether. It was a game of telephone, home baker-style, and the message had become so scrambled that it was like Bill the Cat translating the words “I love you!” into “Eck oop thhhttpd!”

The original recipe is attributed to my maternal great-grandmother, Stella Miller, whom everyone called Mimi (pronounced “Mimm-me,” not MeMe). Mimi Miller was born in the late 19th century in Ohio and was known among the family as an excellent baker, remembers my mother. Around the holidays, Mimi would make bourbon balls, Russian tea cakes and, of course, “ginger cookies.” Her moist, russet-colored gingerbread cookies were based on a beautifully minimalist recipe, one that calls for a modest amount of flavoring agents, like molasses and cinnamon, another form of Midwestern self-denial. Most important, though, the recipe did not call for a set amount of flour. Instead, the directions just said to “alternate buttermilk + flour till a soft dough to roll.”

In the span of one short generation, however, Mimi Miller's flowing, open-ended recipe had hardened into a set rule over the amount of flour. In her own handwritten recipe for Ginger Cookies, Monna Kuykendall, my grandmother, directed all bakers to sift the dry ingredients “with about 8 cups flour, enough to roll out to cut.” My mother, Kay Billingsley, and my older sister dutifully followed the eight-cup directive in their own recipes, even as they omitted, ignored or changed other steps and ingredients. (My mom's icing, for instance, called for blending butter, not whipping three reserved egg whites, which she arbitrarily decided belonged in the cookie dough instead.)

Let me tell you something about trying to incorporate eight cups of flour into this dough: After a certain point, it's like trying to roll out a hardened lump of potting clay with a toothpick. I suddenly realized why my family hated making these cookies. This was weight
training, not baking. The fascinating part about this blizzard of flour is that the resulting gingerbread cookies are still delicious when topped with icing, which helps sweeten the slightly bitter, molasses-rich dough that's short one whole cup of sugar compared with the original cookies. My main problem with these flour hogs is that they turn to rocks within 48 hours.

This recipe mutation, I realized, needed to stop before Mimi Miller's original gingerbread cookies ultimately morphed into frosted paperweights. The proper course of action, it seemed, was to go back to the source recipe, as an homage to my great-grandmother, the baker, the one who injected flavor and sweetness into the holidays through many generations. I followed her recipe exactly, save for one thing: I ditched the pink icing, which, according to family lore, became a tradition when there wasn't enough red food coloring on hand.

The time had come to correct this longstanding early-20th-century (and probably apocryphal) pantry deficit. Could we not spare a few more drops of food coloring? Mimi Miller's legacy, after all, deserved to be preserved in deep, vibrant shades of red and green. I mentioned this to Deborah, and she wholeheartedly agreed. She even asked me to bring some gingerbread cookies to our younger sister's wedding later this month. They will be the gift of something old.

Mimi Miller's Long-Lost Gingerbread Cookies

       
Before it finally comes together at the end, this is one sticky dough. Accordingly, it's better to use a hand mixer; the dough's sticky stage tends to gum up an electric mixer.

       
MAKE AHEAD: The dough needs to be refrigerated for at least an hour before it is rolled out and baked.

Makes 60 cookies

For the Cookies

           
1 ½ cups solid vegetable shortening

           
1 cup granulated sugar

           
1 cup packed light brown sugar

           
1 cup molasses

           
1 large egg, plus 3 large egg yolks

           
6 cups flour, plus more for the work surface

           
2 tablespoons ground ginger

           
1 tablespoon ground cinnamon

           
2 teaspoons salt

           
1 cup buttermilk

           
1 tablespoon baking soda

For the Icing

           
3 large egg whites

           
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

           
3 cups confectioners' sugar

           
Green and red food coloring (optional)

           
For the cookies: Use a hand-held electric mixer to beat the shortening and sugars together in a large mixing bowl. Add the molasses, the egg and the egg yolks, and beat until combined.

           
Sift the flour, ginger, cinnamon and salt into a separate large bowl. Pour the buttermilk into a large measuring cup or glass and stir in the baking soda to dissolve it.

           
Add about one-quarter of the dry ingredients and about one-third of the buttermilk mixture to the shortening-egg mixture, and beat to incorporate. Repeat two more times, adding one-quarter of the dry ingredients and one-third of the buttermilk each time and making sure they are incorporated.

           
Dust a work surface with flour and turn out the dough out onto the surface. Using your hands, blend in the remaining flour by kneading it into the dough. The dough should be soft and a little tacky, but not overly sticky. Form the dough into 2 disks, wrap with plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 1 hour.

           
Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Dust a work surface with flour. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.

           
Work with one disk of dough at a time. Use a rolling pin to roll out the dough on the work surface to a thickness of ¼ inch. Cut out individual cookies as desired, transferring them to the prepared baking sheet. Bake for 8 to 10 minutes or until the cookies just begin to firm up. Transfer them to a wire rack to cool. Repeat to use all of the dough, mixing the scraps together, re-rolling and cutting them into shapes.

           
For the icing: Beat the egg whites in the bowl of a stand mixer or hand-held mixer until the whites form stiff peaks. Beat in the confectioners' sugar and vanilla extract until the mixture is creamy. If desired, add drops of red or green food coloring to create your desired hue.

           
When the baked cookies have cooled, use a dull knife or offset spatula to paint the top of each one with a layer of icing.

 

 

H
ORTOTIROPITA AND
T
HE
F
IVE
S
TAGES OF
R
ESTAURANT
G
RIEF

By Michael Procopio

From
FoodForTheThoughtless.com

Michael Procopio has knocked around the San Francisco food scene for years, holding many jobs, none of them too distinguished. (He still waits tables.) In his irregular—and irreverent—blog Food for the Thoughtless, he invites us into his cranky gourmet life—like the effort to resurrect a “lost” menu item.

S
ometimes, there are things a person takes for granted, thanks to their close proximity or easy availability: a spouse, a friend, a favorite market, a booty call.

When one of them packs up and leaves town, he or she realizes the great thing that was always at hand is now out of reach, only to be replaced by an un-healable abscess of sorrow. Or a substitute, which will be constantly compared to the original, for better or for worse.

Now you can understand my state of mind when, earlier this year, I suffered my own, devastating loss–the
spanakotiropita,
served at my restaurant since the day it first opened, vanished into phyllo-thin air.

Spanakotiropita
(Greek spinach and cheese pies) aren't especially glamorous by nature. They weren't exactly the show-stopping feature on our menu, but it was comforting to know they were always there like a fresh box of Kleenex or a shut-in roommate who knows the Heimlich maneuver. They were homey, a little homely, and entirely delicious, no matter what Olympia Dukakis says about them.

I was horrified by their disappearance and mortified by the all-cheese
tiropitakia
which replaced them.

“But
why
did the
spanakotiropita
have to go?” I asked our chef, as if I were a bewildered child asking his mommy why daddy left with that big suitcase or why on earth she was burying a favorite pet hamster behind the rose garden.

“Oh, just trying something new,” he said.

Just trying something new. I wondered to myself if this was the culinary version of a midlife crisis, like getting rid of a dependable car with great gas mileage and the always-there-for-you wife who put you through grad school and replacing them with a 2-seater sports car and a blond with big tits to put out inside of it.

There was nothing I could do but accept this answer from an otherwise reasonable man. But it would be a cold day in restaurant hell before I would ever accept this wholesale abandonment of an old favorite for a new item, no matter how big its tits were.

I found myself flying through Kübler and Ross's
Five Stages of Grief
:

       
1.
Denial:
I refuse to believe that anything of this horrible magnitude could ever befall my beloved restaurant.

       
2.
Anger:
I want to stab these new pies with a steak knife.

       
3.
Bargaining:
Perhaps if I get enough restaurant guests to sign a petition, the old pies will come back. Or, just maybe, if I prayed hard enough, they would return.
*

       
4.
Depression:
I cannot will these new pies to taste anything like the old ones and therefore am considering suicide.

       
5.
Acceptance: I
never made it that far.

I was grateful that I was able to process all of this terrible grief within the span of a few days. And when I recovered, I came to a few important realizations: