Grab your Spatula, It’s Cookie Season

Cookies, those universal handheld baked treats, come in an endless variety of shapes, flavors and textures. In Germany, where sweet baked goods are deified to the point of having their own daily meal—kaffee und kuchen, or coffee and cake, eaten in late afternoon between lunch and dinner—there is also a strong tradition of cookies, most notably at Christmas. 

The Christmas cookie season is taken so seriously that people often start baking weeks (if not months) ahead of the holiday to begin creating their enormous stockpile of cookies which they will use to fill gift boxes for family and friends, as well as to serve on platters when visitors come calling during the holiday season. For Jews living in Germany over hundreds of years, there was adaptation of German cuisine, holiday cookies included. One of the primary categories of German Christmas cookies is spice cookies, which includes the well-known Lebkuchen—a spiced nut-based cakey confection that may be iced with a sugar icing or chocolate. But there are numerous others that may combine chocolate, sugared fruits or nuts. While researching The German-Jewish Cookbook: Recipes & History of a Cuisine, which I co-wrote with my mother, Gabrielle Rossmer Gropman, we discovered such a cookie. Krokerle, or Spiced Chocolate Hazelnut Cookies, are a Chanukah mainstay for the Blochs, a German-Jewish family that we interviewed. Former owners of Bloch & Falk, a much-loved sausage and cold cut store that served the German-Jewish community in Washington Heights from the late 1930s into the 1990s (and who, at the height of their success also had branches of their shop in Jackson Heights and Forest Hills). This cookie is clearly inspired by the German canon of cookies, but has no dairy, meaning it is “parve” (classified as neither “dairy” nor “meat,” meaning it can be eaten with any meal by Jews who observe kosher dietary law). These cookies do not contain any oil, giving them a dry texture similar to biscotti, meaning they will keep, covered in a cookie tin, for a good long while. A drizzle of a sweet-tart lemon glaze keeps them from being too austere. Their spicy, nutty, chocolatey goodness actually improves with time, and they are a perfect addition to a holiday cookie box, or with an afternoon cup of tea or coffee.