In the Kitchen of Long Ago, With Grandma

[lsanderson]

In the Kitchen of Long Ago, With Grandma
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER

THE daughter of an interfaith marriage, I chose Judaism, but Christmas cookies chose me.

Every season I plow through cooking magazines, quiz friends about their baking plans and frantically upend a greasy manila recipe folder for the instructions for the chocolate gingersnaps that require more chopping than the average mirepoix.

This year I reconsidered the cookies of my youth, baked each Christmas by my grandmother. I had neglected those recipes in recent years, just as I had tossed aside her copper Jell-O molds and recipes for hot chicken salad. I had become the sort of person who puts curry paste in the Thanksgiving sweet potatoes.

But Isabelle Steinhauer set the standard for holiday cookies. For decades, she turned out between 15 and 20 varieties each season: cream cheese wreaths shot from a cookie press; papery wafers carefully dipped in colored sugar; elaborate cutout cookies of nursery rhyme characters, their eyes fashioned from metallic dragées that the F.D.A. has written off as inedible; all manner of confections with nuts. More

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