I used to make Swedish pepparkakor cookies with my mom for Christmas. Americans would call them gingersnaps. We’d always use my grandmother’s friend’s recipe, a very simple list of ingredients and a sentence or two on a yellowing notecard written in my grandmother’s handwriting. I never met my grandmother on my mom’s side, since she died a year before I was born. My grandfather eventually married another wonderful woman, and as I grew up, I considered her my grandma.
When my grandparents still lived in Seattle, we’d sometimes bake the pepparkakor cookies at their condo. It was in an older building, the kind where the kitchen countertops and cupboards were that off-white laminate with wood trim that was popular in the ’50s. It was a small, cozy place, full of pictures of my grandparents’ trips together and their grandkids on both sides of the family.
My grandma would always ask us how we were with such warmth in her voice that I wondered if she had any warmth left for her blood-related grandkids (she did). I remember her often making cheese and crackers as a snack for my grandpa and offering some to me every time. It felt like such a kids’ snack that I thought it was silly that grandpa was having some, but as I got older I worried I was eating too much of the stash of his favorite snack.
Their kitchen was small, but well-kept and clean. We got out some of my grandma’s cooking utensils and some that we brought with us and set to work. The first, more difficult step was to mix the sugar and butter together. The recipe called for shortening, but my mother preferred the richness and honesty of butter, as if shortening was just pretending to be something it would never be. This meant trying to break up two sticks of butter while they were still cold, and mixing them with the sugar thoroughly. Knowing more about baking now, I’m pretty sure we should have warmed up the butter first for this kind of recipe. Sometimes we’d use a pastry cutter, and other times we’d just make due with slicing up the butter with a knife and mashing it into the sugar with a fork. I’d often get mom to help with this part due to my weak kid muscles (and probably some laziness).
To that mixture we’d add the other wet ingredients: molasses and an egg. I would always ask my mom to add the egg for me, because the consistency of raw eggs disgusted me at such a primal level that I still find it hard to eat even runny eggs. I was (am) a picky eater.
Separately, we then would mix the dry ingredients: flour, cinnamon, ginger, cloves, and baking soda. It was three whole cups of flour, which always felt like too much to me. It was hard to mix the dry and wet ingredients without having a bunch of little dough crumbles you had to smush together with your hands, since your hand oils were the only thing that made it a dough and not a crumbly mess.
We’d toss some flour on a clean countertop, take a handful of dough, and roll it out very thin with a rolling pin. My mom would then let me do the honors of doing the cookie cutting. Popular shapes for me were trees, stars of different sizes, Scottie dogs, and gingerbread men. After a while, my mom let me (or deluded me into) doing the rolling step myself. When done right, pepparkakor are thin and crisp. Think gingersnap. I easily got impatient with how many batches of cookies there were to roll out. As I progressed, they were not the sort of cookie that would snap anymore. My mom would come over and kindly comment that I wasn’t rolling the dough thin enough. But I also not-very-secretly preferred the cookies that way, in their doughy and chewy goodness. She wouldn’t bother to keep insisting that they be thin, probably due to some combination of loving me too much and not wanting to do all the rolling herself, so I usually got to make at least half of the cookies the way that I liked.
We underestimated the work required every year. We ended up with so many cookies, even with my shortcut, that we had no choice but to give some away or they’d never get eaten. Especially since mom would only let me have a couple at a time. But they made great gifts. My mom’s aunt hosted dinner on Christmas Day every year, and when we brought cookies they would tuck away half of what we gave them for themselves, before setting out the rest for guests.
Many of my favorite Christmas memories involve baking, often with my mom. During college, we’d even bake when I flew home over the holidays. The first Christmas after college when I had my own place, I tried making pepparkakor cookies by myself. I again forgot how much work it was, and made them thicker than they should have been. I shared them with my mom when she flew into town for Christmas, but she didn’t have much since she was trying to cut out sugar from her diet. I missed the old days, then.
This year, the third Christmas since my mom’s passing, I missed the old days so much more. It feels like there’s been an aching hole in my Christmas each year that I haven’t yet found a way to fill. I also haven’t made pepparkakor cookies in years. Maybe the answer is to bake a batch this winter and roll them out thin, just for her–and then make half of them thicker, just for me.