A 100-year-old great-grandmother’s sugar cookie recipe to sweeten the holidays.
Gingerbread cookies, chocolate peppermint cookies, thumbprint cookies, and snowball cookies are all classic holiday cookies baked during the holiday season.
With hundreds of different traditional cookie recipes, especially sugar cookies, it’s hard to find one that tastes like Grandma’s baking.
It’s time to set down the Betty Crocker book to try a recipe that feels like home.
About 100 years ago, my great-grandma, living in South Africa, was a young woman baking treats and writing them down in her green-bound black journal.
That’s when she wrote a simple sugar cookie recipe, called Rockies.
When my mom was growing up in the coastal town of East London, South Africa, my great-grandma would bake Rockies for my mom and her sister. They would watch her in the kitchen mixing and breaking the dough; then together, they would push the balls of cookie down with forks right before they went into the oven.
My great-grandma passed away when she was 57 years old.
I never got to meet her, but when my mom takes out her green-bound black journal, with now brittle, yellow pages, and the binding almost completely gone, I feel her gentle spirit with us as we bake her recipes.
The first recipe I think of in her journal is her Rockies cookies.
My mom and I would take out her sugar cookie recipe and make it together. To preserve my great-grandma’s recipes, my mom has started writing them out in a new journal.
From my great grandma’s recipe book to yours, here is her Rockies sugar cookie recipe:
2 lbs flour
1 lb sugar
1 lb butter
2 teaspoons soda (that’s baking soda, btw)
4 teaspoons cream of tartar
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
Bake at 325 degrees (175 c) until light brown.
Bake at 325 degrees (175 c) until light brown.
Mix butter and sugar to a cream. Break in eggs and add flour mixed with bicarb soda (another name for baking soda) and cream of tartar. Break off pieces of the dough about the size of a walnut and press down with a fork.
To half the recipe, you will use about 4 cups of flour, about 2 cups of sugar and butter, and 1 egg instead of the amounts above.
For those who are gluten and/or dairy-free, you can switch out all-purpose flour with your favorite gluten-free flour, switch out milk with your favorite lactose-free milk, and butter with dairy-free butter.
If you make them right, they’re sugary, but not too buttery. You will taste a dash of vanilla flavor, which will have you grabbing seconds, and let’s be honest, thirds.
After 100 years, my great grandma’s Rookie recipe will live on, for my family and now for yours.
Calla Patino is the head editor of The Setonian’s Opinion section. She can be reached at calla.patino@student.shu.edu.
