Christmas Cookie Collection

Santa Claus did all right on the cookie front at our house this year. Tom, serving as Santa’s personal representative, negotiated successfully for three batches of traditional favorites, while I stipulated for the addition of one new-to-me kind.

 

The new one I made is Spritzgebäck, a hazelnut cookie, from a recipe in the Cooking of Germany volume of the Time-Life Foods of the World series. We love hazelnuts, and I found excellent imported Piedmontese nuts in a local specialty store. Making the dough was easy: butter, sugar, egg, vanilla, flour, and ground hazelnuts. But shaping the cookies was awful.

The dough was to go into a pastry bag fitted with a star tip and be pressed out into crescents. My dough was so thick it utterly refused to emerge. Substitutions of three increasingly large-hole tips were to no avail. I had to settle for squeezing it out, messily, from the bag alone. The best shapes I could achieve that way were clumsy semicircles.

They tasted good, though: crunchy, sweet, and nutty. Still, I don’t think this recipe will enter my holiday cookie repertoire. Happily, the traditional cookies I made later were much better behaved.

 

Peanut butter cookies have been part of my Christmases for as long as I can remember. I used to make them exactly as my mother did, but over the years I’ve experimented with various recipes. You can’t really go far wrong with a peanut butter cookie.

The recipe I like most, one I clipped from Saveur magazine many years ago, calls for chunky peanut butter. In all other respects we’re a smooth peanut-butter household, so usually I buy a jar of the chunky just for Christmas. This year I used the smooth I had in the pantry, and chopped some of those excellent hazelnuts into the dough. As always, the cookies came out fine: happy throwbacks to the Christmases of my youth.

 

For this year’s batch of Toll House cookies, I even considered putting in more of those hazelnuts. (I’d bought a lot of them!) But there were chopped walnuts in my freezer that needed to be used, so I decided to stick with them, as usual.

For these cookies I always use the recipe on the Toll House morsels bag, but I noticed that the morsels themselves weren’t quite the same this year. They’re called “dark” now, not “semisweet,” and they’re bigger. The recipe still doesn’t specify light or dark brown sugar, so I tried light brown for a change.

They were good cookies too, though a little different from my standard. More crumbly and less chewy – possibly from the lighter brown sugar? The morsels seemed more intensely chocolaty, which tended to mask the walnuts’ flavor. Next year back to the drawing board, to recover the old style.

 

My third Christmas cookie classic was Ruggelach. Though I make these tiny cream-cheese pastries almost every year, from a recipe of my mother’s, I often vary the filling ingredients. This year I decided to try dates and – guess what! – hazelnuts. They were delicious, as always. Beautifully nutty, with rich little centers of fruit sweetness from the dates.

 

I’d started my cookie making fairly early in the month this year, so it required a certain amount of self-control every day, as we passed them sitting in their decorative tins, to be sure there’d be some left for Santa. Happily, there were.

 

 

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Pork Tenderloin with Dates and Walnuts

It’s no wonder that people sometimes think cooking is a skill that’s too hard to learn how to do. There are recipes for really good dishes that are so poorly written that, if you followed the instructions exactly, you might have a disaster on your plate. So it was this week, alas, for a lovely dish I made from Teresa Barrenechea’s The Cuisines of Spain.

This is a handsome book, and Barrenechea is an accomplished cook. My copy is a paperback, but we used two recipes from my friend Hope’s hardcover edition in the Spanish cookathon that I wrote about here last year. (The book’s recipes used there were for the coca and the hake dish.) Almost all the recipes are unusual and sound interesting. I was struck this week by the book’s Solomillo de Cerdo Mudéjar.

The recipe is for a pork tenderloin, the meat butterflied and lined with dates and walnuts, closed up, and baked in a dish with tomato, carrot, onion, celery, wine, and stock; the cooking liquid boiled down and seasoned with thyme and rosemary, plus a little cornstarch to thicken.

To give you the good news first, the dish turned out very well. But making it had a number of pitfalls.

One of them was my fault. The recipe called for two ¾ pound pork tenderloins to serve four. The ones I can get seemed much bigger than that – a packaged tenderloin from my butcher weighed 2½ pounds. I was halving the recipe for a dinner for two, but after I’d cut off a ¾-pound piece I realized it was actually two tenderloins tightly packed together. So after the butterflying I had two squarish pieces of meat rather than one long, narrow one.

That was only a cosmetic problem, however. I laid out the pieces and laid a line of halved walnuts and dates along them.

The recipe said to close the meat up “tightly,” season with salt and pepper, and brush with olive oil, preparatory to baking it in the oven. How should you tightly close a stuffed piece of meat – sew it closed? use skewers? string? I got no help from the recipe. So I swathed my pieces in string to keep the stuffing enclosed, regardless of how they’d look.

In a baking dish, they were to be “covered with” a diced tomato, some carrot cut in inch-thick slices, some diced celery, some coarsely chopped onion, and modest amounts of white wine and beef stock. The dish was then to be put in a 350-degree oven for a mere 20 minutes. Think of what an inch-thick piece of carrot will do in a moderate oven for that short amount of time – nothing, that’s what! I cut the carrots much smaller. As you can see below, the meat was hardly what anyone would call “covered” with those ingredients, and I dithered about moving everything to a deeper, smaller dish. But I didn’t.

I also knew that my plump little stuffed pork pieces weren’t going to be anywhere near done in 20 minutes, so I planned accordingly. It took 40 minutes before they became tender.

The next step was to remove the pork and keep it warm, put all the other contents of the baking dish into a saucepan along with some dissolved cornstarch and some rosemary and thyme, and boil it all over high heat 5 minutes. Now, I don’t boil anything over high heat unless I’m trying to reduce it, and there wasn’t that much liquid to be dealt with here. I allowed it a brisk simmer for that time and then passed everything through a food mill – which my carrots were just barely soft enough to be forced through.

Then it was just to slice the meat (after removing the string) and lap it with the sauce:

As I said near the beginning, the dish was excellent. Though the vegetables, herbs, and liquids were ingredients common in any number of French and Italian preparations, somehow the sweet essence of the dates had been distilled out of the tightly wrapped meat packages to give the sauce a very different – Iberian? – essence. The herbs were a definite presence despite their brief time in the sauce, the walnuts were more of a texture than a flavor, but the overall effect was quite charming.

Still, look at all the changes I made in the techniques. If I had merely closed the pork over the filling, however tight it started out, I’m sure much of it would have spilled out during the baking. If I’d baked the dish only 20 minutes, the pork would not have been tender. If I had cut the carrots as large as the recipe said, they’d have been way too hard to go through the food mill. And if I’d boiled the sauce mixture over high heat it would have dwindled down to almost nothing.

Sometimes problems like these stem from authors’ over-familiarity with the recipes or techniques: They’ve lost sight of what less-expert cooks need to be told. Sometimes the culprit may be typos missed by editorial cost-cutting: I think the days are long past in which we could count on all the recipes in cookbooks having been actually tested before publication.

If you know enough about cooking to make adjustments like those I made in preparing this dish, you can tolerate what amount to misleadingly written recipes. But some of this book’s recipes use ingredients and techniques that I’m not familiar with. I don’t think I dare trust it in those circumstances, and therefore I may never try making those dishes. A pity.

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