Mom’s favorite: “Ice Box Cookies”

A confession: While dad’s favorite “Christmas cookie” — the Snack Time Molasses I wrote about last week — was pretty well liked by everyone in my family, mom’s favorite didn’t enjoy such universal appeal. These “ice box” cookies were always the last ones to be eaten among the many cookies baked each December. In fact, brother Jay and I quietly stopped making them the last few years. (It was a time-saving decision to reduce the baking hours).

Yet a funny thing happened each year when we did make them: They may have been the last ones gobbled up, but once all the other options (molasses, oatmeal, peanut butter, etc.) were gone, the ice box cookies grew on you, and started tasting pretty good. Which describes MT’s response when I resurrected the recipe for this test kitchen entry.

“The flavor is very plain,” she said when tasting the first one at our home. A short time later, as I walked by the couch where she sat with cat in lap, she asked “can you bring me another cookie?”

I eagerly took them into the newsroom the next day to get impartial feedback from people who have no history with this particular cookie, and MT sampled one anew, saying “they remind me of Pecan Sandies.”

The moral: Even if you don’t find these basic cookies particularly flavorful on first bite, consider giving them another try.

Or you may enjoy them right off, as several taste testers did.

“I thought it was delicious,” Kevin Carroll said. “It reminds me of the Girl Scout Trefoil cookies, the shortbread, and those are my favorites.

“A lot of people think that’s weird,” he added.

Bill O’Boyle dubbed the cookie “very good” and similarly compared it to “those Girl Scout cookies.”

Lindsay Bartos asked if it was shortbread, and I noted no one in our house ever called it that, but, yeah, they do seem similar. “I thought it was good,” she said, “especially with my coffee. It has an olden-day cookie taste, very subtly sweet.”

I agree, on both counts: It always seemed like a cookie well suited to coffee, and it always struck me as a recipe from long ago — a feeling reinforced by calling them “ice box” rather than “freezer” cookies.

Then Lindsay added what arguably is the main feature of these snacks: “It grows on you.”

Of co-workers who sampled, Hannah Simmerson probably reacted most closely to what I had expected. “I don’t normally like hard cookies,” she said, “but it was the perfect blend of hard and soft. As to the taste,” she shrugged, “it was OK.”

Roger DuPuis, on the other hand, had the most positive response: “I loved it. Basically, it tasted like short bread. Having tasted proper British shortbread I can tell you, this is it. It has a subtle texture with a nice crumb finish.”

Then he added “It doesn’t immediately conjure Christmas.”

That’s true of most of the cookies we made every year for so long. Visually speaking, I think the only Christmas-looking cookies baked in the Guydish house were the holly leaves I made last year for the test kitchen, and the sugar cookies colored and cut into shapes like a red Santa Claus, green Christmas tree, blue bells and yellow stars.

But of course, the only thing you really need to make a “Christmas cookie” is to make them for Christmas.

Dobru chut!

Ice Box Cookies (Mom’s old recipe box)

2 cups brown sugar

½ pound butter

2 eggs

3 ½ cups flour

1 teaspoon baking soda

½ teaspoon salt

1 cup chopped nuts

1 teaspoon vanilla

Mix together, shape into rolls, wrap in wax paper and freeze.

Heat oven to 375°. Slice frozen rolls into cookie rounds and bake on ungreased sheet for 10-12 minutes.