IntroductionCookies started my wonderfully wild voyage into baking. I got hooked as a child, and it’s easy to see why: They’re pretty simple to make, and they require less equipment, specialty ingredients, and know-how than cakes and other intricate pastries. But I didn’t realize what moved me to bake in the first place until I started writing this book. As the cookies formed into chapters, I realized this wasn’t just a collection of delicious cookies, but also an ode to my ancestors who baked before me. This group of incredibly strong and determined women all baked for different reasons—some to create moments of joy in a hectic life, others to express love at the holidays, and a few for survival. All the reasons my grandmothers and greatgreat-grandmothers baked have become a part of me and my cookie DNA.
One of my earliest and fondest food memories involves me buying cookies with my mom, Bubbe (my mom’s mom), and my two great-aunts, Sylvia and Rose Berkowitz, in Brooklyn. It was the 1970s and I was about five years old. I still remember walking into a tiny Jewish bakery where the rows of steamy glass cases were overflowing with poppy seed–speckled mohn kichel, triangle-shaped hamantaschen filled with apricot and prune (page 141), and still warm, buttery rugelach (page 135). We left loaded with bags of cookies, the sweet smell clinging to our clothes. I devoured as many as I could on our walk back to my great-aunts’ apartment along the Brighton Beach boardwalk.
I recently returned to that neighborhood, hoping to step through a looking glass mirror of those sugar-dusted memories and found far fewer Jewish bakeries. But the ones that remained greeted me with those familiar aromas—the nutty-stuffs, jammy centers, and sugar crackles—and delivered that rush of sweet nostalgia. The baked goods carried a life full of stories with their tantalizing smells—in the recollections of past generations and the promise of sweet days ahead.
Love and HoneyThis lovely memory stands out so strongly for me because of its contrast to my everyday life growing up in a commune with my parents, who fed me homemade tempeh, alfalfa sprouts on everything, and brewer’s yeast–topped popcorn as a treat. They were earnest hippies, and “sugar” was treated like a four-letter word. While there was plenty of cooking and baking in our Vermont communal kitchen back then, it looked very different. It came with a soundtrack of Bob Dylan and loaves of sturdy, heartfelt twelve-grain bread, pans of crunchy granola, and a lot of food assembled for fuel rather than pleasure. If there were cookies on the commune, they’d be full of brown rice, wheat germ, and “mighty mush” (the name of that cereal says it all) baked into lumps that tasted way too healthful for you and resembled something closer to tree bark than sweetness and joy. Honestly, I kinda love those flavors now, but they were less exciting to the frazzy-haired wild-child (my nickname in the commune was Frazzy Bringle) that I was back then. I’ve since learned to bake with these healthier ingredients and create delicious cookies that are full of love and honey.
Granny Neal's Christmas Cookie TinSugary, buttery cookies—and definitely anything with candy, caramel, chocolate, or sprinkles—were reserved for rare special occasions. And these moments of sugar in my early childhood were always connected with my grandmothers. Every holiday season, we visited my dad’s mom, Granny Neal, in New Jersey. I don’t ever remember her baking any other time of the year, but she sure pulled out all the stops for Christmas. When we walked into her house, dozens of holiday tins perched on every surface and were filled with all of the classic Betty Crocker holiday sweets— robustly buttery shortbread, powdery Mexican wedding cookies, thumbprints with jam, zigzag spritz cookies, and layered coconut bars—plus a few Norwegian family recipes tossed in. I still have and treasure Granny’s Betty Crocker cookbook from the 1950s. I know which recipes she loved most, because they are spattered with chocolate, butter, and oleo (another name for margarine). The book is falling apart, some pages are lacquered together from sticky fingerprints, and her notes are jotted in the margins, but I love it just the same. I also have her recipe box filled with a family recipe for krumkaker (page 119) from Norway and recipe clippings from the many, many newspapers and magazines she subscribed to, plus the beautifully scripted gift recipes she collected from her sister and close friends.
My Granny Neal also owned a bookstore, and I remember trays of cookies—likely pulled out of the freezer after her holiday baking extravaganza—next to the chairs and sofas set up around the store. This was the 1970s and 1980s—an era before chain bookstores—but even then, she knew that a cookie and coffee helped people linger and browse the shelves and leave with a new book and a smile. I remember sitting in an overstuffed chair with her cat in my lap, eating shortbread cookies and reading YA novels, all while watching customers do the same: They’d drop into a couch with a stack of books and then reach for the cookie tray. Granny Neal had it figured out.
Bubbe Berkowitz's Baking GenesMy Bubbe, Sarah Berkowitz, grew up in Williamsburg, a part of Brooklyn that was predominantly Jewish. By the time I was born, she had moved the family to Connecticut, where my mom grew up, far from the Jewish bakeries. Bubbe didn’t have much time for or interest in baking herself, but she adored sweets. During Jewish holidays and special occasions, she had boxes of macaroons—both coconut and almond (page 131 and page 134)—wrapped in plastic that, in retrospect, did not taste awesome. (Sorry, Bubbe!) But as a kid with my commune diet, I loved them because they were sweet. One thing she did bake herself was mandelbrodt (page 147), a nutty twice-baked cookie very similar to an Italian biscotti. For her, these were essential—she dunked them in the many, many cups of coffee she drank throughout the day.
For my Bubbe’s side of the family, baking cookies and other sweets wasn’t only to satisfy a craving, it also sustained their family. My great-great-grandmother Shaindel Siro grew up in a Jewish ghetto in Kyiv in the late 1800s. To make enough money to survive and bring some well-needed joy to her community, Shaindel baked in her tiny home kitchen and sold her babkas, strudels, rugelach, and mandelbrodt to her neighbors.
In the early 1900s, on the eve of the Russian Revolution, it became clear that Shaindel and her children needed to flee the Pale of Settlement, where many Jews made their home. It was no longer safe for them, especially after her husband had been killed in a pogrom. They needed to create a life outside of Kyiv but doing so was difficult and expensive. So Shaindel’s teenage daughter, Sonny, came up with a plan to get the family the money they needed. She started surreptitiously swiping ingredients such as flour, sugar, and salt from her mother’s kitchen and sneaking them into nearby army camps to sell to the soldiers. She was fearless, tenacious, and resilient—all family traits passed down through the generations. And her plan worked.
It wasn’t long before Sonny had saved up enough money from her secret operation to send one family member to the United States. Sonny was still too young to go by herself, so her older sister Zelda landed in New York City and promptly started baking in restaurants. As soon as she earned enough money, she sent for Shaindel, Sonny, and the rest of the family. These humble baked goods carried them across the sea to a new life in America. Shaindel became Shirley Sierra at Ellis Island, but in Williamsburg, she was still Shaindel. She tied on an apron and started selling cookies, cakes, and bread to her neighbors, just as she had done in Kyiv. Business as usual.
Most of my mother’s memories of Zelda (my great-grandmother) are of her in the kitchen with her pet parakeet. My mother remembers the surreal image of the two of them bustling around the cramped kitchen in their tiny Brooklyn apartment, both covered with a dusting of flour. Zelda never just baked one batch but always felt compelled to bake for the entire community, which is surely something she got from her mother, Shaindel. Her baking genes may have skipped a couple generations (my Bubbe and my mom), but they landed deeply in me. I have poodles underfoot instead of a parakeet, but sometimes their curly coats have a white sprinkle of flour while I’m at the counter. We are cut from the same cloth.
Copyright © 2024 by Zoë François. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
