Messages From Carrie
It’s Gonna Take a Miracle
December 8th, 2009
I spent today making rosettes. Rosettes are a type of traditional Italian Christmas cookie that my grandmother, Sarah, taught me to make when I was a young woman. This skill has been passed from mother to daughter to granddaughter for as far back as anyone in the family can remember. Every holiday my grandmother would make hundreds of these cookies. She would carefully place them in cardboard shirt boxes lined with paper napkins to be taken to holiday parties and given away as gifts. Most of the recipients had no idea of the time and care it took to make them. It was her private ritual and a secret extravagance of love. Every holiday season I continue the tradition of making hundreds of rosettes to give away to family and friends.
To make a rosette cookie one needs vegetable oil, a cast iron skillet, milk, eggs, flour, vanilla, a dash of sugar and salt, and a special rosette iron. The irons consist of a rosette mold that screws onto a 7-inch long metal rod fitted with a wooden handle. The irons I use are in the shape of butterflies and snowflakes. The first step is to heat the vegetable oil, used to deep fry the cookies, to nearly 400 degrees. I use the modern marvel of an electric wok, which keeps the temperature steady and allows me fry up to eight cookies at a time. But my grand mother always used a small cast iron skillet that was barely big enough for one rosette. While the oil is warming the eggs, milk, flour, sugar, salt and vanilla are beat together until the mixture is the smooth consistency of a thick pancake batter. The rosette iron is dipped into the batter and plunged gently but deliberately into the hot oil. If all factors are perfect, if the batter is the right consistency, If the batter and iron are properly warmed, if the oil is not too hot or too cold, if the iron is not dipped in the batter too deeply, if the iron is bounced in the hot oil just so, then the batter will blossom off the iron like a beautiful cream colored flower. After the cookie blossoms into the oil, it is fried until golden on one side, turned with a fork and browned on the other side. When both sides are golden, the delicate cookie is lifted carefully from the oil and placed on paper towels or a clean newspaper to dry. The hot crisp cookie is allowed to cool and then dusted with a touch of powdered sugar.
Everything must be just so. If the batter is too thin it will not hold together. If the oil is too hot, it will burn the batter immediately to the iron, causing the cookie maker to scrape the iron clean with a knife before trying again. If the irons are too cool then the batter slides off. If the irons are too hot, the batter bakes onto the metal before it has a chance to blossom. As the batter gets used up, it’s temperature and consistency changes, which must be taken into account. The same can be said about the oil. So many things can go wrong in the process. My grandmother told me that rosette cookies cannot be made quickly. You must lay out everything carefully and keep track of the temperatures. You must be relaxed as you dip the irons in and out of the oil, as if you didn’t care whether they blossomed or burned. She said to make rosettes you must be patient and while you are creating the cookies it is good to think of all the people you love, and all the shirt boxes you will give them. She told me it helped to sing and that humming made the batter sweeter. She told me all these things in great seriousness. Then she said if you burn the batter it doesn’t help to swear, and if you must swear, do it in Italian.
It is a wonder that anyone of sound mind would devise such a simple confection that required so many things to all go right in the process. It is a miracle that these cookies happen at all.
So every year, I take a day and faithfully make the rosettes. It has become for me a ritual as deep and powerful as counting the beads of a rosary.
Crack an egg, hum a tune.
Pour the milk, say a prayer.
Dip the iron, breathe deep.
Turn the blossom, breathe again.
Think of someone I love.
Smile.
Lay the cookie in the shirtbox.
That first afternoon making cookies with my grandmother was a rite of passage. I was home from college for the holidays. I was young and reaching and full of unlined possibility. But, to my grandmother’s reckoning I was old enough to learn the good graces of hot oil and patience employed for a purpose. We stood together at my mother’s GE electric stove in cotton aprons, with the strings wrapped around and tied in front in a small bow. My grandmother led me patiently through the ritual steps, showing me with a graceful turn of her wrist how the whole process, when working perfectly, resulted in a blossom of batter that expanded to the edges of the small skillet. She showed me with the patience of age how to make one cookie at a time, not thinking about laundry or student loans or anything but the matter and batter at hand. She showed me how rosettes are made with a few simple ingredients and yet they are rich and extravagant. Rosettes are like love in that way. They are so simple: flour, milk, eggs, salt, vanilla and a dash of sugar. They are made almost entirely of air as light as an unguarded kindness. They are so simple and yet the result of a perfect combination of time, temperature and patience.
We can choose to see the world as if nothing is a miracle or as if everything is a miracle.
We can choose to live on store bought cookies, which are serviceable enough, packaged attractively and made sweet with the addition of too much sugar. We can believe in cookies dipped by hand and composed almost entirely of air, made by time and patience, and laid out with love in shirt boxes lined with paper napkins. We can see the leaves of a tree unfurl each spring like shy and tender fingers, watch them grow thick and green and lean out into world. We can watch these same leaves become weary of blooming, burst into bright color and finally slip quietly to the earth, floating this way that until coming to rest on the damp autumn ground. We can see the cycle of a leaf as ordinary, the result of sunlight, season, carbon and oxygen. Or we can see it as a stunning complexity, a joyous interactive dance that only could have happened with exactly the perfect combination of time, temperature, patience and purpose.
That first afternoon making rosettes with my grandmother I had to scrape off many a failed attempt at blossoming. I remember asking my grandmother, “Will I ever get the hang of this?” She said, “Honey, it’s gonna take a miracle.”