Cookies make for sweet memories

Sugar cookie dough is rolled into balls, dropped onto a dish of sugar, then flattened with a glass to make even discs. (food styling/sheryl julian and karoline boehm goodnick; mark wilson/globe staff)

My mother clipped recipes for cookies by the thousands. She sat under the dryer at the hair dresser's and copied recipes she found in magazines (it didn't occur to her to rip out the page), and did the same in every doctor's office. When she came to my house, she sat at my desk for hours and copied recipes from my cookbook library. "Want a photocopy?" I would often ask. "No, thanks. I'm learning the recipe as I write it down."

As far as I know, she never prepared any of those handwritten formulas, which were stuffed into books, in envelopes (ones she had received in the mail and was recycling), and between the index cards of her wooden red recipe box. She made four types of cookies: something called "fork cookies," with brown sugar and egg yolk, which were pressed with water-dipped tines (her sister also made them); sugar-topped Viennese crescents with ground almonds, which were elegant; tiny walnut balls none of the kids particularly liked; and the sugar cookie mixture she packed into a metal cookie press, only ever using the disc that formed a circle. At some point she abandoned the press and used a spoon to scoop the dough into mounds on a baking sheet, flattening them with a glass dipped in sugar.

She made cookies when, as she often said, "I feel like baking." They were for storing in the freezer, layered with waxed paper in coffee cans in case company came. We often had guests, and for those occasions she served fruit for dessert accompanied by what came to be known as "freezer cookies" (often ice-cold because she forgot to defrost them).

I'm pretty sure that her sugar cookies came with Wilton's Spritz cookie press. According to the recipe on wilton.com, the company now recommends using all butter to prevent the batter from sticking to the press. On instructions I found recently in my mother's unmistakable Palmer Method penmanship, I see that the recipe called for shortening, and she wrote that she used a combination of butter and margarine.

I had never made these cookies, though I always liked them as a girl. At some point I had decided that if I baked them as an adult, they would become another of those things that are better remembered than pursued. But there are sugar cookies everywhere this time of year, so I headed to the kitchen to see what these are like.

I began with all butter, then added granulated sugar, a single egg, vanilla, and enough flour to bring the batter together. There's no baking powder in these, which means that they don't puff up and lose their shape. I let the dough chill briefly, then rolled it into balls, dropped them on a plate of sugar, and pressed them in the sugar with the bottom of a glass. This method makes them quite even, so they have the look of having been rolled out, though you haven't done that much hard work.

The exteriors are especially crackly at the edges, and the sugary coating doesn't add too much sweetness to the cookies, which are pleasingly crisp and buttery - every bit as good as I remembered.

It took five minutes to put the batter together, and the shaping and pressing were a breeze. After tasting one, I layered the rest of the batch in waxed paper in a container for the freezer. As it happens, I inherited the frozen-cookie gene. And I also forget to defrost them.