The Stars and the Cookie Jar

Tonight I made mohnkichel (little poppy seed cookies meant to resemble manna). When my grandmother made them, they were rolled thin, cut into ruffled thimble shapes, and baked until the edges just colored.

I do own a ruffled thimble cutter circa 1950, and I had washed it for the occasion and carefully dried it.

But those cookies. They were out to get me. They stuck to the Silpat, even floured. They stuck to the cold silicone rolling pin. They stuck to the silicone cookie scoop I had swabbed with vegetable oil. I couldn't flatten them with an offset spatula once they were on the parchment, because they stuck to the offset spatula and the parchment too.  In the end, I quenelled them off grapefruit spoons into little tea-ball-sized mounds, and sprinkled them with fine Dutch blue poppyseeds anyway.

They did turn out very tasty, but I may have had occasion to call them [deity]damned pig[violating] [sodomy] cookies. I wondered as I stuck to my spatula, my quenelling spoons, my parchment, and my oven mitts why we even make these, we're Litvaks and the cookies are Austro-Hungarian.

Four sheets of cookies later, I realised the problem. My foremothers made the mohnkichel parve, with hard vegetable shortening. That stuff will kill you, but it hardens in the fridge and makes cookies that are flaky rather than sticky, and easy to roll. If only I stocked hard vegetable shortening!

But only old women make them anymore, so I'm glad to have had the experience.