Vincent wishes you a merry Christmas

Young love is so fickle

Plot twist

Christmas cookies, I should have started in June

The first American cookbook was published in Hartford, Conn., by Amelia Simmons in 1796. American Cookery included just two recipes for cookies: ‘Cookies’ and ‘Another Christmas Cookey.’ Presumably Ms. Simmons considered both cookies to be Christmas treats. 

The recipes made huge quantities of cookies. The first called for a pound of sugar and two–and-a-half pounds of flour. The second called for three pounds of flour, to which the reader was instructed to “sprinkle a tea cup of fine powdered coriander seed, rub in one pound of butter, and one and half pound sugar, dissolve one teaspoonful of pearl ash (an early leavening agent) in a tea cup of milk, kneed all together well, roll three quarters of an inch thick, and cut or shape into size you please, bake slowly fifteen or twenty minutes.”

One had to plan ahead – far, far ahead – for ‘Another Christmas Cookey.’ Ms. Simmons warns us they will be ‘hard and dry’ and first, but ‘if put in an earthen pot, and dry cellar, or damp room, they will be finer, softer and better when six months old.’

via the New England Historical Society

Get in the Holdiay spirit