Sometime in the next few days, I'm going to lose my grandmother. It's been the toughest thing I've experienced yet, and at the same time, it's helping me regain some focus for what I truly have to be thankful for this year. With that said, as I put together my list of cookie recipes I'm racking my brain for something that could be commemorative of her. Just now, I realized why I haven't thought of anything.
For the life of me, as far as I can remember, my grandmother never baked cookies.
As my boyfriend puts it, my grandmother was a real spirit of a person, strong minded and compassionate. One would have to be, I suppose, to succeed as a Luthern, Puerto Rican single mother in the Bronx in the mid-1900s. I still remember the feel of her apartment carpets, the faded, stained tiles and tub, and the scent... a lingering composite of decades of immaculately prepared Puerto Rican dishes. My grandma taught me how to fall in love with food--roasted pernil that melted off the bone, delicate combinations of spanish rice and saucy beans, and stews that simmered for hours until all the windows in the place fogged up, drooling in anticipation right along with us.
My grandmother taught me how to cook, and those will always be amongst my most cherished memories. But she was diabetic, and she never made cookies. She would bake a cake from a Pilsbury box from time to time, or make Goya flans in small custard bowls, but her Christmas cookies were simply a never-ending blue tin of sugar-crusted Royal Dutch cookies shaped like bows and gems, stacked neatly in cups of white paper.
Christmas cookies from scratch were really my mom's thing. And since her mother passed away long before I was born, maybe I won't be able to make an intergenerational thing out of this cookie project. But just for the hell of it, I'm going to find a Puerto Rican cookie recipe to add to the list.
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