A Cookie Made for Memories

Butter, sugar, chocolate: all the ingredients for your favorite cookies. But there’s no need to preheat the oven. No-bake or boiled cookies have been around for some time, but they’re becoming a lost art. Many of my friends have never heard of them, much less tasted their sugary goodness. These cookies can be traced back to the Great Depression, but most people believe they’ve been around much longer. They’re known by many names, from preacher cookies in the South and Appalachia to cow patties out west to poodgies in Texas, to no-bake or boiled cookies in the northwest and northeast. These aren’t your mama’s cookies, although they just might be your grandmother’s.

For my family, they’re a Christmas tradition that has been passed down from mother to daughter. While my great-grandmother originally had the recipe labeled “boiled cookies,” it was my grandmother who started the family tradition of making them at Christmas and setting them out for Santa, assuring my mother that they were his favorite cookie. As they were also my mother’s favorite and part of her favorite holiday, she called them Santa cookies, making them each Christmas Eve for my siblings and I to eagerly leave for Santa.

The name stuck and now the entire family fondly refers to them as Santa cookies. Even though most of us are too old to make cookies for Santa, my mama and nana still make them every Christmas Eve, instantly turning us all into children again as we hurry to the kitchen to grab one. It’s a bite of magic that I hope to share and pass down to my own children one day because, like my mother and grandmother, these cookies are my favorite and I hear they’re Santa’s favorite too.