Tag: icebox cookies

Mary Emily and Lorraine’s Fruit Slices

Judging from the number of cards for icebox cookies in her recipe boxes, I think that my mother and her friends must have really loved them.   Actually, they seemed to like just about any kind of cookie, but simple ones like drop cookies were obvious favorites, and ice box cookies were a close second.

Mary Emily Libbey may well have shared my mother’s enthusiasm for a cookie dough that you can stir up, put in the refrigerator and use to bake fresh cookies every morning.  I first tasted these cookies at a Christmas open house hosted by Lorraine and Chris many years ago.  Lorraine got the recipe from her mother-in-law, Mary Emily Libbey, whom Jerri and I met at one of those holiday extravaganzas when Chris’s mother was visiting.

Mary Emily was celebrating Christmas in Wisconsin, 1,300 miles from her home in Westborough, Massachusetts, where Chris grew up.  I wish I had known more about her when we met, as she was an impressive lady.  Besides helping Chris’s father make lollipops to sell on his milk and egg route, she started the first food shelf in Westborough when she was seventy years old.  Her concern for others manifests itself in Chris and Lorraine’s community service today.

Chris and Lorraine met and married when he was a student in Springfield, Massachusetts.  His choice of a bride who was a stranger from a city sixty miles away meant that it took a long time before Mary Emily decided to trust her daughter-in-law with the recipe for Fruit Slices.

Finally, seventeen years after Lorraine had been welcomed into the Libbey family, Mary Emily shared her recipe for Fruit Slices.  This year Lorraine gave me the recipe and permission to share it with anyone who likes a delicious icebox cookie.  My mother would have loved them, and I think you will too.

Here is Mary Emily’s recipe for a cookie that is perfect for giving at Christmas or enjoying and sharing anytime. 

INGREDIENTS:

1 cup salted butter

1 cup granulated sugar

1 large egg

1 tsp. vanilla

2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour

1/8 tsp. salt

1 cup coarsely chopped pecans or walnuts

2 cups candied cherries

PROCEDURE:

Put the butter and sugar into a mixing bowl and allow the butter to soften while you cut the cherries in half and coarsely chop the nuts.

Cream the sugar into the butter.  Beat the egg and vanilla into the creamed sugar until you have a smooth batter, then sift the flour by thirds into the batter.  Mix in the fruit and nuts after two-thirds of the flour is added.  Stir well between additions and make sure that all the flour is incorporated into the batter.  The dough will be very stiff.  If necessary, you can add a tiny bit of water if the egg was not large enough to provide all the moisture needed.

Tear three or four fourteen-inch pieces of wax paper from a roll and put them near your work surface.  Put a quarter of the dough on a sheet of wax paper and press it into an oblong shape.  Wrap the dough in the paper and form it into a log by rolling it on the work surface.  When the log is about ten inches long, place the log seam side down in a baking pan.

Make the other logs the same way and put the pan in an unheated room or refrigerator for at least three hours.  When the logs are hard, they are ready to cut into cookies.

Preheat the oven to 325º and use a serrated knife to cut the logs into thin slices about a sixth of an inch in thickness.  Place the slices a half-inch apart on ungreased baking sheets and bake the cookies ten to thirteen minutes until they just barely begin to brown on the edges.

Cool the cookies on wax paper and store them in a sealed container.

NOTES:  Lorraine noted that she sometimes uses a combination of a half teaspoon of vanilla and a half teaspoon of another flavoring.  Almond would probably make a delicious variant.

Mary Emily’s recipe called for pecan or walnut halves, but I agree with Lorraine that coarsely chopping the nuts makes sense.

Lorraine says that she now substitutes fruitcake mix for the cherries because she likes the different colors in the mixed fruit.  I prefer the cherries, both for appearance and flavor.  If you want a nice effect, use half red and half green cherries.

Chris told me that the cookies I made were thicker than the ones he remembered his mother making and Lorraine said that they were thicker than hers.  Both Chris and Lorraine said that the flavor was fine, but that the cookies were not as crisp as Mary Emily’s.  If you want cookies like Chris and Lorraine remember, try making the slices an eighth of an inch thick.

In case you are wondering if I missed an ingredient, Lorraine confirms that there is no baking soda or baking powder in this recipe.  

Finally, Lorraine’s emailed recipe ended with this comment:  “Enjoy – you are the only one I have shared this recipe with.  We were married in ’67 and I did not get this recipe until ’84!!!!!”  

Grandma Weingarten’s Icebox Cookies

When I was a little kid growing up in Hayward before we moved out of town, we lived just a couple of blocks from Grandma and Grandpa Weingarten.  Until I was grown up I didn’t know that their names were Frieda and Otto.  They were just Grandma and 

Grandpa.  They weren’t actually my grandparents, but that’s how I thought of them.  

Otto died when I was just a boy, but I still remember his “soup strainer” mustache.  That might have been because my father told me he always tried to take communion from the common cup before Grandpa Weingarten with his big mustache.  Grandma Weingarten spent her last years in a nursing home at Hayward, where Jerri and I visited her a few times.  She was still a grandmother to me.

One reason why she seemed grandmotherly is that she treated my mother like a daughter.  Mostly, she listened to Mom’s problems as a young wife and gave what I assume turned out to be good advice, since she and my father lived to celebrate their fiftieth wedding anniversary.  However, Grandma Weingarten was indirectly responsible for the first really big fight that my parents had.  I was too young to remember it, but Mom told all of us kids the story many times, and Dad confirmed her account: “She was really mad,” he would say, and grin.  After a few years, even Mom thought it was a little funny.

On a duck hunting expedition with his younger brother, my father shot a merganser.  A merganser is a large duck that looks a little like a large mallard.  Their luck had been bad that day, and when the merganser appeared in front of him, Dad decided to play a practical joke on his young wife.  My mother’s knowledge of wild game was very limited, though she was soon going to learn the difference between a tasty mallard and an inedible merganser.

Like any free range duck or chicken (and most humans), mallard ducks are omnivores.  They eat almost anything that tastes good which includes seeds, vegetables and a variety of insects, crayfish, and even the occasional small frog.  If you watch a mallard hen teaching her ducklings to forage, you will see that she puts great emphasis on lots of fresh green vegetables like clover and watercress.

Merganser ducks, on the other hand, eat mainly fish. Their diet includes a few green plants along with some insects, but mergansers are piscavores.  They love fish, whether it be a lowly sucker or a tender trout.  One would think that a bird eating trout dinners day after day would be delicious.  According to my mother, one would be wrong.

As she told the story, Dad brought home a beautiful big duck on a late Sunday afternoon and asked her to clean and roast the mallard he had shot.  Having grown up on a farm, Mom knew how to kill, gut, pluck and clean chickens and ducks, so she promised him a mallard dinner for Monday night’s supper.

After picking out “millions of pinfeathers,” she stuffed the duck with homemade sage dressing, rubbed it with butter and put it in the oven after lunch to have dinner ready for Dad when he got home.  

In a half hour or so, she began noticing an unpleasant odor that reminded her of dead fish.  The smell was beginning to make her feel a bit queasy.  She said, “I thought that I was going to throw up, when Frieda knocked on the back door and came in.”

Grandma Weingarten reared back on her haunches, wrinkled her nose, and said, “Ach, what are you cooking?”

“I’m roasting a nice big mallard that Harry shot for supper tonight,” said Mom.

Without taking off her coat, Grandma Weingarten marched over to the stove, opened the oven and looked at the enormous carcass from which emanated the miasma.  “That’s not a mallard,” she announced, “That’s a fish duck, and it will taste worse than it smells.  Harry’s playing a trick on you.”

Mom said that she threw the duck out the back door by the steps so Dad would see it and know that he was going to encounter what we now call a “situation.”  When she told the story of that evening, she always started off by saying that she had me in a snowsuit because she had opened all the windows and doors “to get rid of the stink,” that she had let the fire go out in the stove because she didn’t feel like cooking, and that she was maddest of all at all the pinfeathers she had had to pull out.  

“I was so mad I was crying, and that made me even madder.  And your dad came in the door smiling, and that made it worse.  He’s lucky I didn’t kill him with a frying pan.”

Somehow they got through the crisis.  I doubt that Dad built a fire and cooked anything, so he probably bribed Mom with a hamburger and a beer at the Twin Gables, which was just a couple of blocks from our house.  In the course of the evening, Mom told Dad not to bother bringing any ducks home again.  It was ten years before she roasted any wild ducks, and when that happened, they were dressed and cleaned bluebills from Gus, the old farmer who lived down the road from us.

After educating my mother about how to tell a fish duck from a mallard, Grandma Weingarten continued to mentor her and other young women in the neighborhood and in our church with a sympathetic ear, good advice and recipes.  Here is Grandma Weingarten’s recipe for icebox cookies that I found in one of Mom’s recipe boxes.

INGREDIENTS:

1 cup white sugar

3/4 cup vegetable shortening

2 large eggs

2 cups all-purpose flour

1/2 tsp. salt

1/2 tsp. baking soda

1/2 tsp. cream of tartar

PROCEDURE:

Cream the shortening with the sugar in a mixing bowl.  Beat the eggs until they are lemon colored and stir them into the sugar mixture.  Sift the flour, salt, soda and cream of tartar by half cupfuls into the sugar and egg mixture and stir until everything is well blended.  You need a stiff dough, so add a tablespoon of flour or so if necessary.

Turn the dough out on to a sheet of wax paper dusted with flour and form a log about three inches in diameter.  Try to square the ends of the log.  Refrigerate it for at least eight hours until the dough becomes firm. 

Preheat the oven to 350º.  Cut the chilled dough into rounds a quarter to half an inch thick and bake on parchment paper or a lightly greased cookie sheet until they begin to brown on the edges, eleven to thirteen minutes.  Space the rounds by an inch and a half.

NOTE:  Grandma Weingarten’s recipe doesn’t say anything about toppings, but I sprinkle a little white sugar over the cookies before putting them in the oven.