Category: Desserts

Dorothea’s Swedish Cookies

I have a vivid memory of my father beating coloring into a bowl of butter. He is sitting at the kitchen table in our house in Hayward. World War II had ended but good butter was expensive and still difficult to buy in the grocery stores. However, from time to time my mother’s older sister Helen and her husband Ernie supplied us with butter.

Aunt Helen and Uncle Ernie lived with my cousins in the caretaker’s house on a modest estate east of Hayward owned by the Kobzy family. Like some of the more substantial lake homes at that time, the property included a small farm with horses, cows and chickens. Most of the year Aunt Helen and Uncle Ernie and my cousins were supplied with eggs from the flock of chickens and milk from the small herd of cows that provided those items for Mrs. Kobzy and her family who spent the summer in the lodge on Little Round Lake.

In early summer, Mrs. Kobzy and her children rode the train to Hayward where Uncle Ernie picked them up and brought them to the lodge. In addition to serving as a chauffeur he was responsible for maintaining all the buildings, managing the farm, mowing the lawns, clearing the riding trails and planting a large garden, so there were fresh vegetables for both families.

When summer ended, Uncle Ernie drove Mrs. Kobzy and her brood to the train depot in Hayward. The cows kept producing milk and cream which Aunt Helen churned into butter. By December, however, the cows’ diets no longer included fresh green grass and clover with the carotene that turns butter yellow. The butter was white, the color of lard or, even worse, oleomargarine.

I refused to eat it. At the age of four, I was already a principled diner. It was illegal to sell colored oleomargarine in Wisconsin at that time, so drug stores sold annatto food coloring to people who bought oleo. The annatto turned Aunt Helen’s butter into a delicious golden spread that pleased my young palette. That was why my father was grumbling while stirring annatto into a bowl of butter.

Our niece Gina got me thinking about butter by giving me Elaine Khosrova’s book, Butter, A Rich History, for Christmas. Gina has a talent for finding really appropriate gifts for friends and relatives. She knows that I like butter on toast, pancakes, French toast, steaks and spice cakes and that I use it in cooking almost everything from apple cake to Yorkshire chicken.

When I finally got around to thanking her for the book, I told her that I especially appreciated Chapter 8, which documents how questionable medical research promoted by the oleo industry gave butter a bad name. Prompted by claims of “Better than butter,” millions of people began eating a chemical product high in trans fats. Those fats are associated with higher rates of coronary heart disease.

My wife Jerri, like Gina, knew that I had long rejected the claims that oleo was better for my health. I tried to be polite, but when a supposedly gourmet restaurant tried to foist oleo off on me, I would ask, “Why don’t you serve butter?”

If the waitperson made the mistake of saying “Margarine is better for you,” I would then ask, “If that’s true, how do you explain why the French have less than half as many deaths from heart attacks even though they eat more than three times as much butter as we do?”

The innocent server would mumble something and hurry away. Jerri would be irritated with me and say something like “Maybe the French walk more than you do.”

“And they drink more wine, too. Maybe that’s the reason,” I would say as I drained my glass and called for another. I am often amazed that she has put up with me so long.

For a long time I felt like a prophet crying in the wilderness. Today I am someone who can smile and say, “I told you so.” Butter has regained its reputation. Doctors now say it is just fine to eat butter, as long as you do it in moderation. The Greeks and Romans said the same thing over two thousand years ago.

As Ms. Khosrova so clearly explains in her book, butter not only has a place in a healthful diet but is also an indispensable ingredient in many recipes. Here is one from a friend of ours.

When I asked Judy for a favorite family recipe, she brought me a photocopy of a cookie recipe in her mother’s handwriting. Judy’s mother, Dorothea Lang, made these cookies for Christmas every year. It is her recipe for “Swedish Cookies (Xmas),” but as you can see by the list of ingredients below, they are really a butter cookie that you can enjoy anytime. My mother would have called them an icebox cookie. I call them simply wonderful.

INGREDIENTS:

1/2 lb. salted butter
1/2 cup powdered sugar
1 tsp. vanilla
1 3/4 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup chopped pecans

PROCEDURE:

Cream the butter and powdered sugar together, add the vanilla and beat the mixture until it is light and fluffy. Sift the flour gradually into the butter mixture and stir until you have a smooth dough. Chop the pecans into a rough quarter-inch dice and fold them into the dough.

Turn the dough onto a lightly floured work surface and shape it into an oblong shape, transfer it to a piece of wax paper and make a roll about an inch and a half in diameter. Put the roll into the refrigerator overnight or at least twelve hours.

Preheat the oven to 350º. Use a serrated knife to cut thin slices (about a quarter of an inch thick) and arrange them about half an inch apart on ungreased baking sheets. Bake for ten to twelve minutes or until the edges of the cookies just begin to brown.

Hide a few before they disappear. The cook deserves some too.

Bill Clinton’s Lemon Chess Pie

I was squeezing lemons to get the juice for a lemon chess pie when I was reminded of helping squeeze oranges and lemons for my mother. Before the days of frozen concentrates in cans at the Co-op or A & P, if you wanted orange juice or lemonade you did what Mom and Dad did. You bought oranges or lemons, took them home and squeezed them in your kitchen.

Oranges and lemons were expensive, so a glass of orange juice on a winter morning was a real treat. We each got a small glass once or twice a month. After juicing the oranges, my mother soaked the pulp in some water and added it with a little sugar to make the juice go further. The result was what something like orangeade and we loved it.

Lemonade replaced orange juice in the summer, and we enjoyed some almost every week. The juice from three or four lemons could make a half gallon of lemonade complete with slices of lemon rind floating with the ice cubes. Perhaps Mom’s lemonade would not satisfy a gourmet, but we all loved it, especially on hot evenings when the mosquitoes drove us indoors to a house that felt like an oven.

As I pressed and turned the halves of three small lemons on the ridged glass cone in the center of what is technically called a juice reamer, I flashed back to how I did the same thing nearly seventy years ago at the kitchen counter next to the sink. I think that the only difference is that Mom’s juicer (or reamer) was made of pale green glass while ours today is clear.

You can still buy juicers like ours, probably because they are dependable and inexpensive. If you need to juice a lot of fruit, they are not for the weak of arm, but for making a half gallon of lemonade or getting a quarter cup of lemon juice for chess pie, they are more than adequate and work well even if the electric power goes off on a hot day and the air conditioner fails.

There are many different recipes for lemon chess pie. Like all chess pies, the ingredients include fresh lemon juice, eggs, sugar, butter and cornmeal or flour or both. Chess pies are usually thought of as a southern specialty, but there are variations from northern states as well. Mildred Jorgensen, who gave our children piano lessons and was organist at St. Luke’s Lutheran Church in New Richmond for many years, gave us a cookbook from the Cedarhurst mansion in Cottage Grove, Minnesota, that includes a recipe for lemon chess pie.

The recipe below produces a richer pie with a more lemony flavor than most lemon chess pies. That is probably why it is said to be Bill Clinton’s favorite chess pie.

Like all chess pies, it is really easy to make.

INGREDIENTS:

2 cups granulated sugar
1/2 cup salted butter
5 large eggs
1 cup milk
1 T all-purpose flour
1 T yellow cornmeal
1/4 cup freshly squeezed lemon juice
The zest from two or three lemons (2 – 3 T)
1 nine-inch unbaked pie shell

PROCEDURE:

Begin by lining a nine-inch pie plate with a crust. You can make your own with this recipe for plain pie crust or use a commercial crust.

Bring the butter, eggs and milk to a warm room temperature. I microwave the butter under low power until it begins to soften, heat the milk at full power for a minute or so and put the eggs in a bowl of warm water.

Next, juice and zest the lemons. You will need two or three lemons, depending on the size. Remove the zest from the lemons with a zester or a kitchen grater and strain a quarter cup of juice. Set the zest and juice aside.

Preheat the oven to 350º.

Measure the sugar into a large mixing bowl and add the softened butter. Cream the butter and sugar with a wooden spoon until they are light and fluffy. Beat in the eggs one at a time, then stir in the milk.

Add the flour, cornmeal, lemon juice and zest and beat at medium speed for a minute with an electric mixer.

Pour the filling into the crust and bake on a center shelf for forty to fifty minutes. Use a table knife to check for doneness. Insert the knife near the center of the pie at forty minutes. If the knife comes out clean the pie is done. If not, bake another six or seven minutes and check again.

Let the pie cool completely before serving. Cut small slices as this is a very rich pie. If a diner asks for more, you can always relent with another small slice.