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.
