In 1960, my oldest daughter was in the first grade at old St. Rose school in the East End of Cincinnati.  The three or four block area where we lived was like a small town with little shops, the water works, the gas works, St. Rose church and school and great ethnic diversity.  There were a lot of German, Hungarian and Austrian folks in the neighborhood – hard working with meticulously clean houses and in every one of those homes, there were tins and tins of baked cookies stashed away for the holidays.

At our December PTA meeting, held in a very chilly basement of the church, the ladies brought in tins of cookies for a treat – each tin different according to the woman’s background.  Each lady passed her open tin among the other guests and took great pride in her baking and decorating.

There were so many delicious varieties – Spritz, butter cookies, gingerbread -  but the Austrian Crescent cookie was my favorite.

Those little morsels were buttery, full of ground walnuts, and coated with powdered sugar – heaven.

In later years, they became my oldest son’s favorite as well, so I make sure I have some every year for him to take home and enjoy.

AUSTRIAN CRESCENTS

• 1/2 cup butter (not margarine)
• 6 Tblsp. granulated sugar
• 1-1/4 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 cup ground walnuts
• Dash of salt
• 1 tsp. vanilla
• Powdered/confectioners’ sugar for coating

Preheat oven to 325 degrees

Cream butter and sugar.  Mix in flour, walnuts, salt and vanilla.  Roll into balls about 1″ in diameter and then form the balls into crescents (about 1/4″ thick).  Place on an ungreased cookie sheet, allowing 1″ of space between each cookie.

Bake at 325 degrees F for 8-10 minutes.  My son likes them crispy brown, so I bake his a few minutes longer.  Cool slightly on a rack and placing the rack over a baking pan, use a sieve/strainer to sprinkle powdered sugar over the cookies while they are still warm.

Yield:  2-1/2 to 3 dozen cookies, depending on size.

I like to serve the cookies on plates purchased on a trip to Austria in December of 1990.  I don’t know that these cookies are as good as those made almost 50 years ago by a lovely Austrian housewife, but they come close.

My two great-grandchildren have never come to my house before to make Christmas cookies, but this year their mother thought they were old enough at 2 and 4 years to have the fun she used to have with all the flour and butter and cookie cutters.  Here’s their mother baking cookies when she was nine years old.

I supervised as great-granddaughter measured flour and sugar, and even broke an egg.

The two-year-old wanted to do anything his sister was doing and got right into the spirit.

Great-granddaughter soon caught on to the art of rolling cookie dough….

….and great-grandson let his mother help him, his only comment being, “Bite, bite” for bits of the cookie dough which we didn’t want him to have.

They each brushed milk and sprinkled colored sugar on a sheet full of wonderful cookies.

We used the same recipe from all those years ago – it’s a good one.

Grandma’s Sugar Crisps

One of my earliest memories is of sitting at a table with my mother, father and little sister.  We are in a one-room, second-floor flat on Elm Street in downtown Cincinnati in the mid-1930s.  All day, Mother has watched over a simmering pot of beans with a pig hock added for flavor.  My father has come in from his timekeeper job on the WPA and we are having about the cheapest supper possible in the midst of the Great Depression.  I have a plateful of beans and a tiny bit of the small amount of meat that is on a pig hock (my father gets the biggest portion of meat and my mother claims to love chewing around on the bone).  The beans are steaming and the teaspoon or so of meat is flavorful – I love it!  It was said in my family that you weren’t an Applegate if you didn’t love beans, so I guess I qualified as a full-fledged member of my father’s side of the family.

As time went on and my father moved to better jobs with the City of Cincinnati and then Dayton Acme (a World War II defense plant), there was more money in my mother’s food budget and she stopped using the mostly-fat pig hocks and either threw in a pork chop or two to cook with the beans or had crisp bacon or fried ham on the side.  This was the only time my father ate pork … along with his beans topped with chopped onion and a lot of black pepper.

By the time my future husband started coming to the house for meals, Mother had added a big cast iron skillet full of fried potatoes to the menu.  It was his favorite supper.  After we were married, I continued to have this meal one night a week.  Every time I hear the John Denver song, “Back Home Again” and the line about “supper on the stove” and the wife who felt the baby move, I think about my young husband coming home to an expectant wife in our little apartment with the windows all steamed up and a big white and red graniteware pot of beans simmering on the range.

My four children didn’t inherit their parents’ love of a bean supper and I got out of the habit of making it.  But now that I’m alone, I crave the beans of my childhood, especially in the fall and winter.  I make a healthier, easier version with a slow cooker.

GREAT NORTHERN CROCKPOT BEANS

• 1/2 lb. Great Northern dry beans
• 6 cups cold water*
• 1-1/2 tsp. ham flavored soup base (L. B. Jamison’s)
• Salt and pepper to taste

Place the dry beans cold water in the slow cooker.  *I use this amount of water to insure that I’ll have enough broth to make dumplings.  Cook on low overnight – approximately 8 hours.  Add the ham flavoring, then taste before adding salt and pepper.

I was the only one in the family who liked dumplings with my beans and I used to make a one-person serving.  This works very well for me now when I want to make a meal just for myself.

DUMPLINGS FOR ONE

• 1/4 cup of My Biscuit Mix**
• 1-1/2 Tblsp. (approx.) of cold water

In a small bowl, stir the biscuit mix and water together to make a thick, moist dough.

Heat about 1 cup of bean broth and 1 cup of beans in a small pot to boiling.  Drop the dough into the boiling mixture by the tablespoonful, making three dumplings.

Lower the heat to simmering, cover the pot and continue simmering for 10 minutes without lifting the lid.  Note:  The white and red graniteware lid is from my original 1952 set.

Serve immediately with chopped onion and a grating of black pepper.  A small serving of meat is good, but not necessary (to me, at least).  Today, I happened to be browning hot sausage to freeze for my Thanksgiving stuffing and kept back enough to make myself a small grilled patty.  It tasted wonderful.  This is truly my soul food.

**MY BISCUIT MIX

• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 tsp. salt
• 1 Tblsp. baking powder
• 1/3 cup vegetable shortening (Crisco)

Mix together the flour, salt and baking powder.  Cut in the vegetable shortening.  Store in a covered container in the refrigerator until ready to use.

This is good for making individual servings of biscuits, pancakes … and dumplings.

Recipe for Walt’s Polish Stuffing