Holidays are for Cookies

I wasn’t quite fifteen, and it wasn’t quite Christmas, when I came to the United States in the first days of December 1991 as an exchange student. The Soviet Union was a couple of weeks away from complete disintegration, and Moscow, from which I flew to New York, was dark and cold.

It was the shortest days of the year, when dusk fell at three pm, and street lamps were sparse. The world I was leaving was the world of startling food shortages, long lines for the bare necessities, and complete uncertainty, where a pair of jeans would either cost you half a month’s wages or be made in some underground workshop.

The world I came to was the world of Christmas lights decorating private homes with backyards, a room for each child, weekly hauls from the supermarket, and baking sheets upon baking sheets of Christmas cookies that my host mother made for colleagues, family and community.

Even though my own mom was an excellent cook and baker, and we never had store-bought cookies at home, just homemade cookies and pies and cakes, such treats had been increasingly rare in the months before my departure, as finding staples such as sugar and butter and even flour required scavenging. So I could be forgiven for falling head over heels for all this traditional American baking. There are few cookies I remember specifically, except for peanut butter, chocolate chip, and the ones with bright M&Ms sprinkled all over them. But I do remember the sugar rush very well. I gained my “freshman fifteen” that winter while a sophomore in high school.

Even though later, when I would return home on school vacation and the food shortages were gone, and my mom would bake all of my childhood favorites, America remained in my mind as the land of cookies. To this day, most of the cookies I bake come from American cookbooks or websites. I usually cut the sugar by at least a third, but otherwise stick to the recipes.

And yet, saying that there were no cookies in home Russian cooking would be untrue. Just recently, I conducted a random poll among friends and acquaintances about cookies that were made in their homes when they were young. Their responses brought back memories. The most popular cookies by far were the so-called “tvorog envelopes” (some called them “goosefeet cookies,” because of their shape) made with nothing but tvorog, flour, and butter, with some sugar thrown in for caramelization. When I lived in the States in the 1990s, the closest alternative to tvorog was cottage cheese, but it wasn’t the same because of its high moisture content. Today, I understand that what is sold as “farmer’s cheese” works as a good tvorog substitute, but if you want to the cookies to be especially tender, I would recommend using ricotta cheese.

Tvorog Envelopes

The main thing to remember about the ingredients for these cookies is that the amount (by weight) of farmer’s cheese/ricotta/tvorog should be about the same as the amount of flour, and the ratio of cheese to butter should be 3:2. From those simple ratios, you can make as few or as many cookies as you’d like.

Farmer’s cheese/ricotta - 200 g (7 ounces)
Flour - 200-210 g (7 ounces)
Butter - 120 g (4 ounces)
Baking powder - 1 teaspoon
Sugar for dipping

Take the butter from the refrigerator and let it soften on the counter (or placing it under a hot bowl to speed up the process). Once the butter has softened considerably, mix it well with the ricotta to form a homogenous mass.

Add the baking powder and flour and mix well to form a soft and pliable dough. At this point, I sometimes like to add some poppy seeds or dried, minced lemon or orange peel into the mix. If you can’t imagine a cookie without sugar, add 2 or 3 tablespoons here as well, but keep in mind that you’ll be covering the cookies in sugar before baking.

Heat the oven to 200℃ (390℉). Roll the dough out on the flat surface (you can do this in batches, there’s no need to roll out all the dough at once). Don’t flour the surface, because then the sugar won’t stick to the dough.

The dough should be pliable but not sticky. Don’t make it too thin or too thick (2-3 mm, or a bit thicker than a quarter), as you’ll be folding the dough. Use a cookie cutter or large glass to cut out circles about 9-10 cm (3-4 inches) across.

I like to have some burnt/caramelized sugar on the bottom of my cookies, so I dip both sides of the circle in sugar and then fold it in half and then once more. If you don’t want that, dip just one side of the circle in sugar, fold the sugared side in, dip the half-circle in sugar once more, fold the sugared side in, and then sprinkle some sugar on the top quarter.

Bake for about 20 minutes, cool, enjoy.

Makes about 25 cookies.