Bahby's Cookies

BAHBY’s COOKIES

It was earlier than early. Early felt so different in Bahby’s (my maternal grandmother) apartment. Everything felt different. The drapes and blinds were always closed. In my house, letting the light in was what we did. In hers, “the slipcovers will fade…” In my house, I could tell time with mom’s soap operas; in Bahby’s I could tell time by my grandfather Shimen’s coming and going to synagogue. 

I couldn’t wait for this week to come. I was having a sleepover. I had my new nightie, my new clothes, a book, and all my dreams. It was Chanukah time. No school, presents and special foods and smells. And cookie baking. Eight special days, some of which I’d spend there, when I could light the candles on the menorah that came all the way from Busk in Poland where she was born, a place no longer on any map.  Me lighting them, not my sister. Just me. And cookie baking.

Bahby Esther came to the USA at a young age, her passage being in steerage, her possessions few, her hopes grand. And when she got here, she learned English and got a job and brought from her little town her whole family to join her on the lower east side on New York. By the time I was born, her father, my great-grandfather Zaide, her brothers and sisters and all their families were here and she had a second husband, the first dying from the scourge of TB when my mother, an only child, was only 8. And, she would eventually marry a third time. What a gal!

Bahby was a little woman when I knew her. I don’t think she ever grew bigger from that time. To me, “she was short for her age.” And I didn’t know her age- she’d never tell. Women were so funny about that. “Older than Methuselah,” she’d say, whoever he was. She had blue white hair in sharp waves; she had plastic rimmed glasses; she always wore an apron over her house coat.  The apron was a favorite of mine with chocolate stains or red ones from horseradish she called khreyn in Yiddish. Some words would always remain in Yiddish. Her breasts under the apron were huge- I once saw her brassiere hanging in the bathroom. It could fit on my head. That was scary to me with nothing more than tiny dots under my undershirt. She also wore a corset with “stays” she told me. “Stays?’ what the heck were those. So many things to learn from her. Her shoes for around the house had sections cut out to accommodate her bunions. I knew what those were! And her stockings were always rolled to keep them up. No garter belt like my modern mother!

I loved the kitchen in the apartment on Madison Street in the Vladeck Houses projects. Sparkly white counters with formica and linoleum on the floor. The cookie jar had a clown face, the jars filled with spices and nuts, the sack in the corner with flour and the huge bowl for sugar. Never changing, year to year except when it was Passover and all the hametz was tossed out. The refrigerator was small but all she needed was there. I loved to get the chance to chop the ice with a screwdriver from the tiny little freezer section, taking care not to “hit anything electric.” Funny the things that made us happy when we were so little. Bahby had silverware and dishes and pots and spaces for meat and dairy. I felt like I had to take a test to get it right. My mother did too but there a mistake would not end in imprisonment! Bahby had knick-knacks she called them; many of them were “from occupied Japan,” she said. I had no idea what that meant.  She had wax fruit in a bowl and a bunch of rubbery grapes.  Lots of ashtrays although I was not supposed to know she smoked. My mother told me. And my mother also told me that she was almost forced to smoke as a young girl, Bahby believing “it was glamourous.”

Babhy and Shimen and I sat down at the little Formica table in the eat –in- kitchen for my first breakfast that week. Warm milk and bananas and rice krispies. Yes, I had to acknowledge the snap-crackle-pop in the bowl like it was a magic trick. Babhy had coffee with evaporated milk. When you slept over, you could get to have coffee in your milk, just enough to turn the milk tan and to make a little girl feel so grown up. My father would kill if he knew. I guess coffee was a drug and maybe even then I’d make it a habit. And I got a sweet cake to dunk in the milk mix and let drip down my chin. Rituals.  So comforting.

But the best was yet to come. After I helped with the dishes, after I made up my bed, after I washed and dressed, it would be time to bake the famous cookies. Everything in the little kitchen was ready. Shimen was out, Bahby and I, in there. The Pyrex bowls, the little hand mixer, spoons, a large cookie sheet, the oven turned on, the window open to “unheat,” many of the ingredients lined up like soldiers waiting for battle. I had a little stool so I could reach the counter top but really Bahby could use one too. “So, how do you make those chocolate chips, millions of them? How?” “Oh, I just add a little of this and that and a pinch here and there.” Of course I knew that! I watched so I would forever remember but drops got dropped fast and pinches disappeared quickly. Brown sugar, white sugar, butter, eggs, flour, baking soda, salt, hot water, vanilla, semi-sweet chocolate and nuts in some of them. It was magic. A wave of her hand/wand. I could not get my mind around how many of this and that there was. All was mixed in that special bowl. Everything was special. I mixed and I shaped and I dropped little doughy balls onto a greased cookie sheet. Then into the 375 degree oven for about 10 of the longest minutes of my life they went. The smells soon made the kitchen the only place to be in the world. I could already taste them from her special magic recipe that maybe she brought from her little village. When the first batch was ready, we scraped them from the sheet and replaced them with more dough. We put the cooked ones on a large plate to cool. I knew lunch had to come before cookies even in Bahby’s house. 

Shimen came home from his prayers. So many prayers and time. I would learn later in my life that he’d meet his friends; they might play pinochle and have a glass of tea someplace. The three of us sat for our sandwiches and juice and for cookies. Delicious, some still warm and drippy with chocolate and crunchy. I liked the thinner ones with burnt edges. That done, we’d clean up and parade ourselves into the livingroom and turn on the radio and listen to the news or to a “story” or some music. Evening would come, another meal, more cookies and lighting the candles with both my grandparents singing something I could only hum. I had the best time, the most memorable time and yes, cookies that I never could make.

Years go by in all our lives. Holidays come and we create our new families and try to keep old traditions. I wanted to make cookies with my boys, Sean and Ryan. At first I tried the little this and that. I had a cookie of a sort. Not Bahby’s, no matter how many “pinches” I tried. I called my mother. “I’m trying so hard to make Bahby’s cookies with the kids. I’ve done the this and that and the pinch but they just don’t taste like hers. I wish I had written it down. What can I do? She always said it was her secret recipe.” My mother was laughing. “I guess the jig is up,” she said; she really said that! “Bahby’s recipe is common knowledge, doll (my parents called all of us that). It is the famous Toll House Cookie Recipe from 1939. Everyone knows it. You and I and your sisters make it also.” I looked it up. Darn, she was right. It did seem like the one we made together, Bahby and me. Ruth Wakefield of New England’s famous Toll House Inn created them. In the 1940’s batches even were sent overseas to the troops.  

Public knowledge-- Http://clickamericana. com/tag/chocolate-chips). Now you have it too- The Original Toll House Recipe that I will always believe is the original Bahby Esther recipe that she made with me, her granddaughter in that early time, that special Chanukah time so long ago in another lifetime.