The Tale of the Cookie Press

“Imagine a morning in late November. A coming of winter morning…”

—Truman Capote, A Christmas Memory

Most families have that one recipe that must be made each year at Christmas. Usually, the preparation and cooking of that particular item is greatly anticipated with a light sprinkling of dread due to difficulty of the steps, odd ingredients, or time commitment. The joy far outweighs the dread, of course; in fact, the challenge makes for a good story. Mom’s Swedish Sprits was that very Christmas, set-in-concrete traditional recipe.

Mom loved participating in cookie exchanges during the holidays. She would meet with several friends at a host house and bring a dozen cookies for each attendee and an extra dozen to share at the event. The advantage? Mom brought home several dozen cookies of different varieties in exchange for her own, which made entertaining easier for the rest of the holidays. The downside? Mom was usually in two or three different exchanges with six friends or so in each party. Do the math—potentially 18-20 dozen cookies to prep, bake, decorate, and wrap. And in spite of my dad’s muffled mutterings about blisters wrought by the copper cookie press, our counters and table would be filled with sprits.

You may own a cookie press—typically a squeeze-the-trigger-handle affair that extrudes cookie dough through a stencil into a variety of shapes. Simple. The device has been refined to make the cookie process quick and painless. But my parents lived in the halcyon days before the time of automation. Mom made bowls of colored dough. Dad created sprits with the rugged hand-crank press, creating dozens of identical sprits by the sweat of his brow and the blisters on his hands. 

The old press had no complicated parts to wash or thin plastic seals to crack (I’ve broken two of the newfangled cookie presses with one or two uses). Dad filled the copper tube with chilled, buttery dough and muscled a thin copper knob with the precision of a surgeon to create green trees and white snowflakes. The press required lifting at the exact moment leaving a raw, perfect cookie. Too much dough resulted in a green puddle; too little left little niblets of dough that wouldn’t bake together. It was a culinary art that my perfectionist dad loved and hated. He’d fill a baking sheet, then set the press down and rub his hands, informing mom that “this year is the last time I do this.” Those crumbly, buttery-rich cookies were so worth the effort!

This recipe is completed by using a cookie press. The dough works best when baked on baking parchment-lined pans. You can color your dough with a few drops of food coloring depending on the shape of the press stencil. My mom decorated the cookies with silver or colored nonpareils.

Swedish Sprits

1 ½ cups butter

1 cup sugar

1 well-beaten egg

2 tsp vanilla

4 cups sifted flour

1 tsp baking powder

Thoroughly cream butter, sugar; add egg, vanilla. Beat well. Sift dry ingredients; add to creamed mixture; mix to smooth dough.

Force through cookie press, forming various shapes. Decorate with colored sugar. Bake on ungreased cookie sheet in hot oven (375°–400°) about 8 to 10 minutes. Makes about 4 dozen.

This recipe was copied from my mom’s Better Homes and Gardens Red Plaid Cookbook, page 192. She received it for a bridal shower gift in 1958. Mom’s original recipe stated “hot oven 400°” but I remember that she would burn a batch every year. She would exclaim, “NO, I burnt them all!” Dad would fuss, “Well, there goes a lot of butter in the trash! Just gimme some coffee and I’ll eat them.” In order to avoid potential kitchen drama, I suggest using the temperature of 375° recommended in the Better Homes edition that I received for my wedding.

The featured image is courtesy of  Rebecca Matthews of Unsplash and we are grateful for her kind generosity.

Annie Nardone

Annie Nardone is a lifelong bibliophile with a special devotion to the Inklings and medieval authors. She is a Fellow with the C.S. Lewis Institute and holds an M.A. in Cultural Apologetics from Houston Christian University. Annie is the Director of Visual Artists for The Cultivating Project and columnist for Cultivating Magazine. She is founding board member, managing editor, and author for the apologetics quarterly, An Unexpected Journal. Her writing can also be found as travel blogger for Clarendon Press U.K., with published poems at Calla Press and Poetica.

She holds a MA in Cultural Apologetics from Houston Christian University, and is a Fellow with the C.S. Lewis Institute. Annie writes for Cultivating, Literary Life, and Clarendon House Books, and is a managing editor and writer for An Unexpected Journal. Annie collaborated on three books in 2022, published by Square Halo Books and The Rabbit Room. She recently designed a curriculum detailing the intersection of theology, the arts, and history and is a Master Teacher for HSLDA. She resides in Florida with her Middle Earth/Narnia/Hogwarts-loving family, and an assemblage of sphynx cats and feline foundlings.

literarylife.org