Hungarian butterhorn cookies

A taste of the Old World at Christmas, these cookies will dress up anybody’s holiday sweets tray, but for me, they are a rich memory of my mother.

Hungarian butterhorns with the nutty filling will always be a Christmas tradition in our family.

Cookie baking was quite the production in the Reinhardt household, but I don’t have vivid memories of it being a particularly joyful process. It could be my memory is beginning to dull (actually, that’s likely the reason), however, Mom and Grandma tackled the cookie task as a general planned a military strike with planning, precise execution, and a thorough clean up.

There’s a woman with whom I worked who, along with her sisters, would set aside a weekend, crank up the Christmas music, pull down bottles of wine, and crank out hundreds of cookies for them to split up and give as gifts or to enjoy with their respective families. We didn’t do that. The old KitchenAid standing mixer held vigil in our kitchen for a solid three weeks, with the brunt of the work beginning the day after Thanksgiving and continuing until a week before Christmas.

As batches were baked, Dad (I helped as I got older) packed them in unused tin ink “kits” he’d bring home from his work and lug them downstairs for storage. You see, we couldn’t eat the cookies until Christmas. That may seem harsh, but cookies often were packed for gifts to bring to Mom and Dad’s work, and the mail carrier, the pastor, family and friends; the quantities couldn’t be messed with so that each platter got the exact amount of and variety of cookies.

When the antique nut chopper came out, it was time to get down to the business of baking holiday cookies.

And the offerings, for the most part, stayed the same each year: chocolate chip and oatmeal raisin, apricot bars, lemon drops, thumbprint cookies, buttery spritz, cut-out sugar cookies, pecan balls (snowballs are another name), and Hungarian butterhorns. This was the go-to list, and as inspiration moved them, one or two new varietals would be added.

The butterhorns were baked each year because my maternal grandparents were immigrants from Austria-Hungary coming to the U.S. in the early part of the 20th century, probably before World War I. Growing up, I thought my family was the only one with those weirdly shaped nutty crescent cookies; I accepted Mom baked them each year because her mother probably did. Of course, I later learned that these cookies are quite common in U.S. states with central European immigration history, including Missouri. The German name for these cookies is Schnecken, which means “snail.”

A batch of cookie dough is ready to chill in the refrigerator while egg whites are beaten into peaks.

In fact, one of the best Hungarian butterhorn cookies is made by my friend, Randy Cosby. Randy is a great cook and a wonderful baker. And like my mother, he’s a frank, honest, and good person. We worked together in the 1980s at a community newspaper.

Randy treats his close circle of friends to a tin of amazing Christmas cookies each year, and the first time I was lucky enough to be blessed with this gift, I remember calling in my thank you. “Randy,” I said, “these are beautiful cookies. Please thank Jane for baking them.” To which he replied (and I’m paraphrasing) “What the hell! I baked the (blank) cookies!”

Laughing as I wiped egg off my face, I had confessed to Randy I had no idea after these many years of knowing him and his wife, Jane, that he had a passion for baking. Don’t you love discovering something new about your friends? Nowadays, Randy’s slowing down the holiday baking to better enjoy retirement with Jane and a new granddaughter.

Hungarian butterhorns have a wonderful chew to them, and they are not overly sweet. In fact, there’s no sugar at all in the dough, and the filling is just sweet enough. Tip: keep dough chilled when you’re not rolling it. And you'll have a greater chance of success with the egg whites if you beat them in a metal or glass bowl.

I didn’t have much of a relationship with my material grandparents, so my mother was the main connection to my Austrian-Hungarian roots, and she made that connection through food. Now, when I bake these cookies for our holidays, I think about Mom as well as my good buddy, Randy. Happy holidays, Catman!

Butterhorns come out of the oven.

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Apricot bar cookies

Luscious jam filling is the star of this quick holiday dessert.

I love food and I love history. Oh, and I love Christmas. Combine these three elements and I there’s no telling how deep into the research rabbit hole I can go. But I will pack a lunch, so it’s all good.

I’ll hazard a guess here and say most busy home cooks staring at their to-do list for holiday food prep do not wonder, “Gee, I wonder why we eat this for the holidays.” But those of us who love getting lost reading about food history (like me) are here to answer that question.

One could write a book about where our holiday food traditions come from—I checked, and there are many—but for this story, let’s look briefly at why fruit is so prominent in a so many holiday foods, like fruitcake, breads, and cookies. Heck, every year, I had an apple and orange in my Christmas stocking, and my Mom told stories of how fruit was often the only gift she’d receive on Christmas.

After Pope Julius I, Rome’s fourth-century bishop, declared Dec. 25 as the official birth date of Jesus, pagan festivals celebrated around the winter solstice over the years melded into the Christian holiday. Interestingly, an ancient pagan customi n the cider-producing areas of England (Somerset, Devon, Herefordshire, Kent, and Sussex) is still practiced. On Twelfth Night, people visit fruit orchards making a ruckus to awaken tree spirits and chase away any evil ones lurking in the winter shadows. We know this practice as wassailing. Before moving to the next orchard, someone places a piece of bread soaked in wassail (the drink) into the apple tree’s branches, thereby ensuring a fruitful harvest next year.

In the Early Middle Ages, Christmas was a quiet time for fasting and prayer that lead up to Epiphany on Jan. 6 when the visit of the Magi to baby Jesus was celebrated. By the High Middle Ages, observances of the 12 Days of Christmas were in full swing. By the 1400s, breads such as panettone, fruitcake, and stöllen were baked for Christmas because dried fruits and sugar were expensive imports and saved for special occasions. Popular dried fruits, in part, included apricots. This fruit today is often seen in the German stöllens sold at traditional Christmas markets in Europe and in lighter recipes for fruitcake.

But fruit-laced baking, of course, is not confined to Christmas traditions. Many Jewish families when celebrating Hanukah serve rugelach cookies. Rugelach, which means “little twists” in Yiddish, originated in Poland’s Jewish communities. Rugelach can be filled with fruit jams, dried fruit and nuts, or even chocolate.

So, back to the apricot bars. This bar cookie was part of our annual holiday baking tradition. I still have the original recipe card in my Grandma’s handwriting. Each year, she’d pull it out of the box and mix up a batch or two.

Like most of the traditions observed during Christmas, our family just “did it” without much discussion, so as a result, I don’t really know why these cookies were always on the cookie platter. Maybe because they were not hard to make; you don’t even have to get out the mixer for this one. I have memories of Mom and Grandma deftly working the kitchen during cookie-baking season in tandem, with Mom in charge of one batch while Grandma started another. That’s probably the biggest reason the apricot bars were made each year, but the romantic in me likes to think it was Grandma honoring our German heritage that made this cookie a family favorite.

The other cool thing about these cookies is you likely have every ingredient already in your pantry. Of course, if you don’t have apricot jam, orange marmalade is an easy swap. You also could use apple or cherry jam and as a bonus, know you’d be keeping with a food tradition that goes back hundreds of years.

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Spritzgebäck (Spritz) cookies

Buttery, delicate cookies bring a bit of northern Europe to your holiday.

Who wouldn't be jolly as St. Nick with spritz cookies on the plate?

Seriously, are these not the cutest cookies you’ve seen? Pudgy and colorful, these delicate cookies can be flavored with either almond, citrus, or simply vanilla extracts. And for me, it’s as though hauling out our old cookie press calls out to the spirits of my Mom and Grandma.

My emotional ties to this recipe are twofold. With roots in Germany and Scandinavian countries—by some accounts as far back as the 16th century—these cookies connect me to my ancestry. It’s not unheard of to think that Reinhardt women may have made these with their families in Germany, where it’s common to have recipes handed down through generations, and for parents to set aside time to make the cookies with their children.

Which is exactly what my family did. Mom and Grandma mixed the dough and operated the cookie press while I got to help decorate the happy little creations. And after a tray or two of plain cookies were baked, Grandma would add in the green food coloring so we could make the wreaths and trees.

Someone hand me a tissue; I need to dab my eye.

But true confession time: I don’t make spritz cookies every year. Like most of you, Christmas baking is a fine balance between time and tradition. When my daughter was young and my Christmas list was focused on fulfilling hers, holiday baking was reduced to me buying a couple cookie mixes and churning out treats after she went to sleep. I’d look lovingly at the family’s vintage Mirro cooking press and its yellowed recipe book in the box, sigh, and move on to the next task.

Our Mirro cookie press dates to the mid-1960s.

But this year, as we all grapple with a pandemic and a physically distanced holiday, I really felt the tug to get out the Mirro, turn up the Christmas music, mix up the dough, and get to spritzing. By the way, did you know the name of the cookie (spritz) literally means squirt or “spritzen” in German?

And in keeping with the vintage theme, I used the recipe from the booklet that came with the press, which calls for shortening instead of butter, and I swapped the vanilla extract for almond. I also halved the recipe that made just under two dozen cookies. The dough was pretty crumbly and so I finished mixing it by hand and it came together quickly. I could then separate it into thirds, saving the final portion to color green for the Christmas trees. Note: the recipe card reflects the portions for four dozen.

Surprisingly, it was no struggle working with the cookie press. The first one or two cookies were misshapen before I felt like I was getting the hang of it. Two twists, lift. Two twists, lift.

As I filled each ungreased cookie pan, I remembered the year when I talked Mom into trying an electric press; it did not go well. You need that “human touch” to feel the right amount of dough squeeze through the tube. You may be tempted to line the sheet pan with parchment, but don’t because the cookies won’t release when you lift the press. I tickled me to see the finished cookies didn’t stick or break when removing, and the bottoms browned beautifully.

Another tip: To decorate the cookies, lightly wet a finger and gently brush the top of each cookie with water before adding sprinkles. This helps the sprinkles and candies to stick while baking. The raw cookies stuck to the tray while I gently brushed away excess sugary toppings.

After the cookies cooled, I had to taste one, and it took me back to a holiday many years ago. That delicate crunch and almond flavor was just as I remembered. To be honest, I became a little emotional. That’s how powerful a connector food can be. It was as if my Bubba and Mom were standing with me in my kitchen, smiling and saying, “pretty good, kiddo.”

Pretty good, indeed.

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