Maybe for some people the baking obsession spawned by the initial isolating impacts of COVID-19 has abated. For others, buying flour every time we go to the grocery is now a habit as ingrained as buying milk or eggs.
Of course, our grandmothers and great-grandmothers bought flour in 25-pound flour sacks (which, when empty, were often repurposed into clothing items), and many even had huge wooden flour bins in which to store larger amounts. Flour was the primary food staple back then.
If you’ve given up or scaled back your coronavirus baking blitz – or, heaven forbid, have not indulged that practically primal compulsion – we urge you to reconsider this holiday season.
In our opinion, baking is a top deterrent of holiday depression during any year, and even more so in 2020. Better than a stiff drink, an afternoon on the slopes or the bike – or (dare we say it?) even a winning Broncos game on TV. And baking cookies has been proven to be most effective at boosting holiday spirits.
Almost all Americans have some kind of holiday memories associated with family and cookie-baking. Maybe Grandma or Mom taught you to bake. Maybe you had a baking Papa or Dad. Maybe you didn’t, but you sometimes got to join a friend’s family for a holiday baking party and the marvelous mess-making that went along with it.
Even if you didn’t have the privilege of holiday cookie-baking as a child, you can start now and bring that special joy into your current household.
Traditional holiday cookies are especially effective for making merry. And every culture bakes them.
Consider the humble sugar cookie: flour, sugar, salt, butter, egg, maybe a little milk. Something of this nature exists in nearly every country across the globe. Take those basic sugar cookie ingredients and add a few things, and voila! It’s an international food fest:
‰ Add a little anise seed and cinnamon and boom! It’s a biscochito, Mexican in origin and New Mexican by a few centuries’ tradition.
‰ Add molasses, cut dough into homunculi, and you’ve birthed gingerbread people (roots in Armenia, associated today with Sweden).
‰ Add almond extract and powdered sugar on top and you’ve got kourabiedes, a favorite Greek Christmas cookie.
‰ Add sesame seeds to transform the cookies into Libyan kaak malih.
‰ Add peanuts and peanut butter to create tiny little cinq centimes (five-cent) cookies from Senegal.
‰ Add fruit filling to little tricornered hats of dough and you’ve got hamantaschen, a classic Jewish Purim treat.
See? There can be no excuse not to make cookies, because doing so can double as a gastronomical history lesson for children and adults. (“Get out the Wikipedia, will you, honey?”)
You can bake alone or with household members, or bake with family or friends on Zoom, or even just with the phone on speaker mode. Play Christmas music if that’s your thing, or stream favorite old holiday movies in the background. (Warning: If chatting while baking, double-check recipe before popping cookies in the oven.)
And when the cookies are cooling, and you and your cohabitants have had a few, make a few plates of cookies for isolated seniors in your neighborhood, or the homeless couple you see regularly sitting in the grocery parking lot, or for someone you really appreciate but can’t interact with right now. Deliver them Secret Santa-style, dropping them on doorsteps or handing them out car windows.
Don’t let the craziness of coronavirus dim your inner light during the holidays. We absolutely guarantee that baking cookies will make your spirit – and someone else’s – bright.
