No two Grandma Cookies look alike. In some, walnut clusters pile atop gooey blobs of chocolate, while others look more like a collection of oats held together by thin sheets of cookie dough. All of them are chewy, almost fold-‘em-around-your-finger chewy, and carry a hint of maple flavor.
Grandma Cookies got their name because my grandma made them. Unlike any other cookie I’d previously eaten, Grandma Cookies had a gummy hardness, often because my grandma had refrigerated them before I arrived at her house in Springfield, New Hampshire to devour them five at a time. Eating them was fun. They were like toys for my mouth, perfectly complimented by my grandparents’ collection of windup animals that could accompany you in the bath.
As a kid, I wasn’t interested in the ingredients of Grandma Cookies other than the clearly visible parts — the thick chocolate cubes, walnuts that my grandma cracked herself because “she was too cheap to buy them shelled,” according to my father. Only recently did I learn of the key role of maple syrup in the recipe.
In the 1960s through ‘70s, my grandparents tapped the many sugar maples that dotted their property. They lived at the end of Sugar House Road in a home they built themselves, with the help of my father, uncle and aunt. Their neighbors, a couple, lived in the sugar house on Sugar House Road and ran a small commercial sugaring operation. In their spare time, my grandparents worked for the couple, letting them tap trees on their property, putting up tap lines for collecting sap and gathering wood for the fire that would evaporate the sap’s water, leaving the syrup behind.
In return, the couple paid my grandparents in Grade C syrup. Back then, syrup came in four grades. “Fancy syrup,” Grade A, and Grade B were both commercial. Grade C, the darkest brown with the strongest maple flavor, was not. My grandparents’ many jars of Grade C syrup lasted them well beyond the end of tapping season in late March/early April, and they needed something to do with the excess. So my grandma came up with recipes — for “pecan pie” (that was actually filled with walnuts, not pecans), sweet salmon glaze and Grandma Cookies.
Since then, Grade C syrup has come into vogue. Now known as “Grade A: Very Dark & Strong Flavor” and boiled toward the end of sugaring season, it has found its place in the Master Cleanse besides lemon juice, cayenne pepper, water and laxatives. Many drizzle it on their pancakes.
Previously, “fancy” syrup had earned its place at the top of the maple pyramid because its light color and mild flavor most closely resembled cane sugar, an expensive product that people in the Northern U.S. and Canada had to import from the South. “Fancy” maple syrup was the poor woman’s sugar. Now people desire darker syrup’s maple-heavy flavor because it’s strong and distinct.
My grandparents stopped sugaring in the 1970s because the couple who operated the sugar house got divorced. The trees on my grandparents’ Springfield property remained untapped for decades, until my brother Alexander, a tall, skinny arborist with an aquiline nose, decided to give it a go this past sugaring season.
With his friend Ben, who towers over my brother and wears colorful sweaters, Alexander traveled from Massachusetts to Springfield during the third week of February. The temperature had just climbed above freezing, the perfect time to set up for tapping season.
“First, we went out on a walk and scoped out all the sugar maples,” Alexander told me, noting their Latin name, Acer saccharum (meaning sugary, like saccharine). Behind my grandparents’ old house, now owned by father, there’s a large swath of woods with a hill on their property. Alexander and Ben climbed through mud and snow to pick out which maples they would tap. Then they drilled holes in the chosen sugar maples and hammered in the taps, or spiles. From the spiles, they hung what looked like colostomy bags but were designed specifically for collecting sap. At the top of each two-gallon bag was a metal ring with a hole slotted neatly into the dripping spiles. When it was warm enough, a bit above freezing, the sap ran freely into the bags.
In mid-March, I traveled from New York to Springfield to help with the sugaring. It was warm (over 40 degrees) and sunny when I arrived, and the bags were heavy with clear sap. My father and a friend of Ben’s, who bakes bread in Vermont, also joined us to collect the bags, pour them into five-gallon jugs, and lug them down the hill and over to a shed by the house where they’d set up the evaporator. An approximately four-foot-long, two-foot-wide metal vat with a partition in the middle and drains on either side, the evaporator houses the sap over a wood fire for hours until it boils down to a light brown liquid.
For every 40 gallons of sap, you yield one gallon of syrup. The boiling process takes hours. Thus, the bulk of my syrup-making time took place in a wooden shed with a newly gouged hole in the roof (to let the steam out), drinking beer and playing Up and Down the River, a card game involving bidding and trumping. At one point, we ventured back up the hill and into the woods to grab more firewood from a house my aunt built with a Buddhist monk several decades ago, dragging the wood back down to the evaporator on a rickety, old Flexible Flyer.
Once most of the water had evaporated, we drained the remaining, light brown sap into a couple of large pots to finish boiling on the stove indoors. We boiled it for too long. That batch of sap produced a honey-like mixture that crystallized over time, which Alexander remedied by adding more water and re-boiling.
While in “honey” form, the batch served us well. It stayed firmly in the grooves of our waffles and, easily spreadable, proved a welcome addition to a peanut butter sandwich. We also learned firsthand how longer boiling leads to thicker, sugary treats. When whisked, with the addition of a thin pat of butter, it formed the creamy-but-crumbly maple candies you’ll find in Vermont souvenir shops, often in the shape of tiny maple leaves. Alexander had purchased a rubber mold shaped like the state of New Hampshire. Amateur candy-makers, our confections ended up looking more like drip sand castles. Regardless, they melted on our tongues.
Darren, a New Hampshire neighbor from whom my brother bought his evaporator, uses vacuum tubing to maximize the amount of sap he gets from each tree. His commercial operation includes about 1,800 taps, connected through a network of lateral tubing lines that run into a black, plastic main line, which empties out into a single container. This eliminates the repeated lugging that Alexander and Ben had to perform throughout the season. In addition to boiling sap over a wood fire, Darren also uses a reverse osmosis (RO) machine to separate the water in the sap from the sugar. “Sugaring is the only industry that uses the waste product off an RO,” Darren told me over the phone. “We use the machine backwards to any other industry . . . but as the expression goes, that’s dumb farmers for ya.”
As a kid, Darren collected sap in a contraption he called a “scoop.” He hitched the scoop behind his family’s horses and oxen to ride around their sugar orchard, gathering buckets full of the barely sweet, transparent liquid one-by-one. Their evaporator was a “revamped” washtub.
Both technological innovations and climate change have increased the value of the U.S.’s maple sugaring industry. In 2016, U.S. maple syrup production value exceeded $147 million, up from around $125 million the year before. In most states, the average season length has increased. Nationwide, the average sugaring season lasted 26 days in 2015. It spanned 37 days last year.
“When I was younger, in the ‘70s, my folks wouldn’t start tapping until after town meeting, which was the second Tuesday in March,” said Darren. “This year, we boiled for the first time on the 21 of February . . . if you waited until town meeting time to tap, you missed two thirds of the season.” He harvested the rest of his crop during the end of March and the first couple weeks of April. “We ended up making just about 30 percent more this year than we normally make.”
My brother didn’t stick around for the last few weeks of the season. Right after I left New Hampshire, a snowstorm hit. Unable to tap the trees (the sap freezes when it’s below 32 degrees), they grew restless and drove down to New York to be around other people and eat good Chinese food. With them, they brought several bell jars and emptied beer bottles full of syrup. Three of them remain in my fridge. Like my grandma decades earlier, I felt the need to get creative with my supply. Having grown tired of drenching my Eggo waffles, I called my uncle and got the recipe for Grandma Cookies.
Turns out, you can find the recipe for Grandma Cookies on the back of the Quaker Oats box. Just instead of using sugar, substitute maple syrup, and, of course, add ample chocolate chips and walnuts (preferably ones you crack yourself). These changes make all the difference, creating the exact, chewy consistency I remember from my grandma’s frequently made dessert.
Here’s the recipe. I kept the dark brown sugar because I love brown sugar, but substituted the ½ cup granulated sugar with a little over a ½ cup maple syrup — just a little. I’d recommend Grade A: Very Dark & Strong Flavor. Instead of using Quaker Oats, I used house brand “old fashioned rolled oats” from the regional grocery, Key Food, which are a dollar cheaper. Feel free to add chocolate chips and walnuts in liberal quantities — a couple big handfuls each should do it.
Ingredients
- 1/2 Cup (1 stick) plus 6 tablespoons butter, softened
- 3/4 Cup firmly packed brown sugar
- 1/2 Cup Grade A: Very Dark & Strong Flavor
- 2 Eggs
- 1 Teaspoon vanilla
- 1-1/2 Cups all-purpose flour
- 1 Teaspoon Baking Soda
- 1 Teaspoon ground cinnamon
- 1/2 Teaspoon salt (optional)
- 3 Cups old fashioned rolled oats
- 1 Cup (or more) chocolate chips and walnuts
Method
Heat oven to 350°F. In large bowl, beat butter and sugars on medium speed of electric mixer until creamy. Add eggs and vanilla; beat well. Add combined flour, baking soda, cinnamon and salt; mix well. Add oats and raisins; mix well. Drop dough by rounded tablespoonfuls onto ungreased cookie sheets. Bake 8 to 10 minutes or until light golden brown. Cool 1 minute on cookie sheets; remove to wire rack.
When placing the cookies on your baking sheet, avoid rolling them into neat, little balls. Instead, let the dough fall as it may. It’s important that every Grandma Cookie is a different shape and size. The recipe makes close to 40.
After baking and cooling, store in the refrigerator. When you take one out to eat it the next morning (I made mine at night), you should find that it’s sticky to the touch and can bend a bit before breaking. The cold exterior should give away easily to a soft inside full of textured surprises — the almost meaty crunch of a walnut, the silky peel of milk chocolate. Unlike I did as a child, pay attention to the maple flavor, and think about the work, the technology and the climate that went into making it.
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