The Lost Cookie

How in fact does one bake a memory? I am finding this out.

In or about 1960 CE, my grandmother Julia Regusic Davidovitz would come to visit with us in our flat on Hayes, between Cole & Clayton, usually at Easter. It was right across the street from my first grammar school. We were in the upper flat, a classic San Francisco apartment with two bedrooms on each side of the hall, the toilet separate from the bathroom, and a sunroom at the back. The place was really quite salubrious especially on a junior high school teacher’s salary.

When she came to visit Grandma Julia would take over my mother’s small yellow kitchen and cook. You might think that I am a force of nature but that’s only because you never met my Grandma Julia. She went out to the back garden and planted zinnias, she and then come back into that little kitchen to make sarma (stuffed cabbage) and other Yugoslav delicacies. And she made sweets. Among others she made very particular orange-flavored crescent cookies. 

Like so many memories made of taste, these cookies are essential to my early life. I know how the dough should smell, I know how the cookies should feel in the mouth and what sort of sweet they should be. And, because they are so connected with her, I never tried to make them. Neither have any of her daughters. Not Mary, her eldest daughter and one of the greatest hostesses I’ve ever known. And not to my mother Katherine who taught me everything I know about making salad and pie.

 

 Please find the aforementioned Katherine

The recipe and its methodology went with my grandmother into the arms of Jesus when she was only 69 years old. (They eat really well in Heaven.) For decades I either ignored or was too afraid of the orange crescents to ever attempt them. But now, at 62 years of age, I find myself wanting to make these orange crescent cookies. Yes, but how?

‘To the internet, and beyond! I began by just looking up recipes, first for sour cream dough; I quickly knew that that wasn’t what I wanted. Cream cheese was the answer. It was Alice Medrichs (an important chocolatier, writer and all around smart foodie) whose cream cheese dough I found. If she says that a particular recipe is the very one, who am I to question? And so I began, with very basic instructions for one of the elemental cookie/savory doughs in all of Central Europe, the search of the lost cookie.

3 1/2 cups of flour, equal parts (12 oz) butter and cream cheese, a little salt and not enough sugar (more about that later). It sounds so simple. When I started to blend the elements a certain if very gentle smell came to me, rich and slightly sour. And once the orange zest was added, there was what I was looking for, there was the smell I remember. Having worked with doughs that need to be kept cold, I knew what to do, and that was to put all parts into the kitichenaid, blend it up, roll it up into a tube and put it in the fridge overnight.

As said, there was not enough sugar in this, the first iteration, but there was cream cheese and orange zest. When I opened the dough tube I smelled that combination and knew I was on the way. (But, dammit Alice, there isn’t enough sugar in your recipe. Not for cookie use. Rather than three tablespoons I need at least a third of a cup.) So I made three different bakes of this terrifying cookie. 

The first bake was undercooked and nowhere near flavorful enough (not enough marmalade). The second bake was better but still not enough marmalade. The third actually worked except the sugar (read: marmalade) baked onto the cookie sheet and made the cookies very difficult to scrape loose. The folks at work wolfed them down even as I bleated that these weren’t right yet. The dough needs to be rolled out thinner. It’s naturally dense (you know, cream cheese and butter) but it needs to flake up more. And I’m a pie and biscuit maker, this I can do.

There is another element to this story. I look like Grandma Julia. When I was young, she lived in Las Vegas with Uncle Danny and Aunt Charlene. Yet many people in Sierra Madre remembered her and they would tell me how much I looked like Julia. But she was Grandma and my 10 year old mind did not want to look like Grandma. And then the pictures showed up. An image of her just before she came to the US, at about 16. And in her wedding picture, wherein my Grandfather Rudolph looks almost pleasant, there is my face. There is the rectangular forehead, the broad cheeks and the stubborn chin. My mother says she had a lovely soprano but I cannot remember her singing. I did become quite proud that I look like her. The eyes were always wrong though, I have my father’s eyes. 

So here is the key. I am her age and so proud to be one of her grandchildren. And of all of them I am the most interested in home cooking. I make sarma, I throw a mean Easter and now I am willing to pick up the gauntlet of the orange cookies. I pick it up with gratitude and all love. Thank you so, Grandma Julia.

 strength for the journey

When I kneel at the Altar rail Mauricio or a lay Eucharistic minister comes over, displays the Host and says, “The Body of Christ.” In many Episcopal and other Protestant churches, this statement is followed by, “Strength for the journey.” Going up to Portland to actually lay eyes on our Kirk, to visit Julie, to meet new babyWren and love her older sister Mathilda, has given us strength for the journey.
Ever since we learned, a little over two months ago, that Kirk’s cancer had turned so badly that the most drastic response was necessary, I have been crying. The tears have been sitting right behind my eyes, like water behind a dam. One Sunday I was crying so much I didn’t go to church because I couldn’t sing. Taking the breath necessary to make the sound brought on the flood. Philip went in and out. Some days he just sleepwalked, going through the motions and only breaking down when he got home. We traded off coming apart, trying to address the possibility of losing of our darling Kirk. With that on our hearts we planned to go to up to Portland to visit our young family.
I drove my poor boss quite mad because the dates kept on changing but finally the weekend of 02/17–02/20 came and we headed north. It was raining when we left Oakland airport and raining when we got to Portland. The day before our trip I had a terrible thought: “Is it still snowing in Portland?” But no, thank goodness, just cold wet rain. Lots and lots of cold wet rain. We landed, got to the rental car pick up and that’s when I realized I left my wallet on the plane. I took it out to pay for a drink and put it in the back of seat pocket. But the drinks never came because of turbulence and I forgot my wallet. The first rental car was a sub compact. That’s what I asked for. The dear woman at the rental counter looked at Philip and didn’t believe that he would fit in the car. She was too right, he didn’t. She laughed at him when he came back to the front desk. He got the great big Jeep and was a very happy man. Someday I’ll tell you about my husband, a Jeep and a New Mexican road we should not have taken.
Kirk and Julie’s new home is a whole five minutes from Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU) which is on a steep hill in SW Portland. This hill holds multiple hospitals including one that specializes in eyes and a Shriners. (There is something very dear about a statue of a man in a suit, holding a child’s hand and wearing a fez with a shoulder length tassel.) Kirk has walked to appointments at OHSU many times.
The house is up many stairs on a large uneven lot with much lush greenery including a huge very old conifer (no, I don’t remember what kind). The front room is solid windows with a lovely fireplace and beautiful new floors throughout. It is the perfect house for our gardener, her lover the massage therapist and their divine girls. We didn’t call from the hotel, as I faithfully promised I would, so we had to wait for them to come back from the store. Kirk had his new shunt put in earlier that morning in preparation for the chemo dump that was to come. He was thinner than the last time we saw him yet still has some eyebrows. Oddly his beard is there but it is tow colored, just like when he was a very little boy. All that really mattered was we could see and touch and talk to Kirk.

Julie sits on the love-seat in the beautiful bow windows, to nurse Wren. The little bird is on a tear. She wants to eat all the time, sleep some of the time, dance when someone will lead, and grow. It had been many years since Philip danced a baby to sleep but he hasn’t lost the knack. As for me, I am simply amazed at this creature who changes as I look at her. At six weeks she holds her head up and the gaze of power is beginning. In her first pictures it appeared she might be dark haired, like her wonderful mother. But no, the red will not be denied and the old Saunders strain is coming through. We shall see.
Mathilda takes the bus across town to her school. Mathilda draws all of the time. Mathilda wrote a report on Rosa Parks that she would present to the 4th and 5th graders. (I have to talk to her about how that went.) She can be crazed as only a 3rd grade girl can be. When we went out to dinner on Friday night, we brought along a school friend and they dissolved into a whirlwind of eight year old madness. In Mathilda’s eight years of life her father has been fighting caner for five. She loves her grandfather very much and I pray for the time when seeing Grandpa is not equated with Daddy being in the hospital. This is a very strong family.
Dinner: it was our plan to take care of our family as well as they wanted. Portland has lousy weather, let’s just admit it. London, Berlin and many other great cities have drippy, rainy weather when one just prays for a sight of the sun. So it is with Portland and yet it has its own joys. One of these is a treasure trove of brew restaurants. I cannot call them pubs because they are too large. The food in these places is good to very good and Friday night we went to one of these. Kirk’s palate has been deeply affected by all the chemo so foods and beers he used to love are no longer available to him. But some new flavors have come forward so he and his father were able to discuss the brewers art at some length. Kirk still loves caramel.
What city has enough parking, certainly not Portland. But there are parking structures dotted around downtown so it really wasn’t bad. We did discover that Mathilda has a super power. She, like my sister, has powerful parking juju. After we have circled the block and found the big old parking building, parked and walked to the restaurant, we would find the rest of the family. They had already put our name down for a table. P and I never had to wait more than five minutes. All of this is because of Mathilda’s magic parking power. He father swears that the mere invocation of the girl’s name can find a convenient parking wether she is in the car or not. Her mother supports this assertion. That’s some big time juju.

We stayed at a motel about three minutes from Kirk & Julie’s. This gave them some privacy and us the comfort of our own space. OHSU is so important that the hotel gave us a special rate because we were visiting a patient at one the hospitals. Sunday morning we slept late (for us) and went down to the sports bar that was part of the hotel and found that they had FIFA direct and while I wrote up my travel notes, Philip watched Barcelona eventually do their job. Trust me, when we go up again, we will stay there.
Sunday was a day of obligation. We had planned to take Kirk to Powell’s. Julie chose to join us and thus the entire family invaded one of the greatest bookstores in the world. For those of you who are not bookstore centric, Powell’s fills an entire city block in downtown SW Portland. They carry new and used books. They even carry music thus Philip was tempted by a score of The Makropoulos Affair by Janáček. It was just too pricey.
I on the opposite shore stood in the middle readers section of a massive children’s room and tried to focus. Primarily I was shopping for Mathilda. At Christmas I sent her The Dark is Rising by the great Susan Cooper. But it is too old for her now; maybe next year. Having seen the girl and her bestie at dinner on Friday, stories about two girls growing up together seem perfect. So I’m turning her on to the Betsy-Tacy books by Maud Hart Lovelace.
(Standing at the ‘L’ shelves I saw a very old friend. When I was in 4th grade I read the works of Hugh Lofting. The stories of Dr. John Doolittle were my meat and drink. Yet I’ve never owned one of them, till now. A citizen of Puddleby-on-Marsh, Dr Doolittle put his mind to the language of animals and their care. My copy is a Canadian edition from 1923.)

And then suddenly it was Sunday afternoon. We sat by the fire in the front room, ate pizza and tried to pretend that the grandparents didn’t have to go home. Philip did try to get a job in Portland. Three times the same position, at Nike in Beaverton, has showed up online. The job description could have been lifted from Philip’s résumé, Each time he applied he heard nothing back. Always looking for the silver lining, I’m seeing a problem at Nike. The same job turning over three times in 16 months? Something is wrong there.
Our flight was very early so we made our goodbyes Sunday evening. Leaving was difficult. After hugs and kisses, all we could do was walk down the stairs and into the dark evening. Yet, by the time we blearily walked down the long concourse of Portland Intl. Airport, the difference was clear. Terrified parents went up to visit with their sick son and his family. The son is still very sick but his blood is strong and his family is even stronger.
With that in our hearts we came home to live, to love and to look clear eyed into this next year. Strength for the journey.