Weisboder

My mother-in-law was the youngest daughter of Swiss immigrants. Although her mother arrived in the United States as a babe in arms her Swiss grandmother taught her mother many of the dishes from her home country. She in turn passed the recipes on to her daughters. One of these recipes is a Christmas cookie that no Christmas was complete without when my husband was growing up. I remember arriving home for the holidays and stepping into her shinning, warm kitchen redolent with the smells of good food, and being greeted with a cookie and a hug. To her food was the biggest expression of her love that she could offer. When you were in her house, you ate!

She was a great cook but her trademark was the delicate Weisboder cookies that her mother had taught her to make. They were thin, crisp cookies baked in a sheet, iced with a pink, slick frosting, then cut into diamond shapes. Their distinctive flavor came from the large amount of cinnamon used. We all loved them. To all of us they represented Christmas.

The time came when I decided that I needed to learn to make these cookies to carry the tradition on to my children. I actually spent one delightful day making Weisboder with my mother-in-law, with her showing me every step of the procedure. My father-in-law, definitely not a cook, supervised the whole process. It is one of my fondest memories. At the end of the day I went home with a precious tin of cookies and a recipe. I put the recipe up and continued to eat my mother-in-law's cookies every Christmas.

Then time passed and the ravages of her disease took her memories of how to cook and the precious Weisboder. I decided it was time to pick up the torch and carry on. Unfortunately, too much time had passed and my recipe couldn't be found. Over the following years I kept an eye out for her recipe in her kitchen as we cared for her, but with literally hundreds of recipes and clippings stuck into books, boxes, files, and drawers we didn't find it. We resigned ourselves to only having memories of the delightful cookie.

After her death, in clearing out her house, I was delighted to find two copies of the recipe in her distinctive hand-writing. With joy I prepared this holiday to recreate the cookies for my husband, children and grandchildren. I gathered the ingredients, followed the recipe and my faded memories and made Weisboder. Unfortunately the results were a little disappointing. They were thicker, gooier, not crisp, the frosting was sticky and too fluffy. My husband and I munched on cookies and thought. Then we started comparing memories and laughing. She never made a recipe that she didn't "tinker" with it and "improve" it. What we were missing were the changes she made to the recipe each time she made them. She knew that she liked more flour, a larger pan, to cook the frosting longer or with more sugar to get just the cookie she wanted. Unfortunately, we didn't know all her tricks.

However, as my husband said, our children don't really remember her Weisboder and these were good cookies, just not what we remembered. So these will be the wonderful Christmas cookies that our children and grandchildren will know as the Swiss Christmas Cookies. They will carry on their Swiss heritage and family traditions with this cookie and hopefully remember a lovely, little lady who made them for her children.

I, on the other hand, will probably spend a lot of time over the next few years, "tinkering" with a recipe trying to catch a memory.