The old COOKIE JAR

"At Christmas all roads lead home....." - Marjorie Holmes

Grandmother's glass Cookie Jar became my mother's Shortbread Jar. Every Christmas.

It was filled with shortbread rounds, topped with candied peel and silver dragees.

That I would promptly pick off, so I could devour the shortbread. One by one. 

My mother only made enough to get us thru Christmas. Enough for company. She would count each one.

And then I would sneak into the kitchen late and night and take a few, from underneath their icing sugar  comforters.

My mother would wonder at how the Shortbread jar would go down so fast. 

Here is her recipe for Shortbread Rounds...........

SHORTBREAD from old torn “Zam Buk” recipe book ( about 1920’s)

(I just remember the Zam Buk  book was a torn up old recipe book that was stained with butter, flour and kind of had a scratch and sniff quality about it……..It was a hot summer day when mum first asked me to type up this recipe so she wouldn’t lose it……I think she threw out the old book after that……shame.)

1 cup brown sugar

2 cups butter

3 cups flour

Cream butter and sugar well. Add flour and mix till it may be rolled on a board and made into small cakes with the hands.

Put on a piece of peel and sift with sugar.

Bake till light brown in a 300 degree oven.

 

**Some years, mum found that ½ pastry and ½ bread flour was good)

**Can also be pressed into fluted pans and baked about 45 minutes

 

** Can also add a couple of Tbsp cocoa into the butter mixture to make chocolate shortbread.

In time that old cookie jar lid was cracked, and no longer used for Shortbread. It housed candy canes instead and biscotti at one point. Then seashells and lichen till it stank of  low tide. I  kept it in a dark cupboard for a while. It sat there alone, with it's mess of shells.

Finally a couple of years ago I gave it a new lease on life. I  cleaned it up, and placed a flameless candle inside it's glass belly. And now it glows like a beacon.  But I can still see it full of my mother's shortbread, and the icing sugar trailing from its lid, in the dark of night.....

"Christmas waves a magic wand..."-Norman Vincent Peale

Photographs 2020