Saturday, October 17, 2009

Ginger Cookie, Colonial Style

OK, no complaining. No matter what I do, the image above comes out up-down rather than side-to-side. So rotate your laptop or turn your head or something. It's a cookie.

I have a student whose father is the pastry chef at Colonial Williamsburg.

[Yes, let's do take a moment to imagine what that must be like. I'll give you some time to think about it. Ok, back to our story.]

She's taking her last class with me (she graduates in December) and last weekend she went home for Fall Break. Apparently, her dad decided to do some mass baking for the class. He sent back about 3 dozen enormous ginger cookies, made with a colonial recipe. They sort of look like half of a whoopie pie, but they're much denser and dryer. You can imagine that they would last a nice long time in a period with no refrigeration.

The ingredients include molasses and ginger, and when you open the packages (did I mention that her dad individually wrapped each one in its own little sealed package?) the scent of ginger wafts across the room at you.

My student warned me and her classmates not to attempt to eat one of these without a drink, and she was right. But with a nice cup of tea, they are lovely. Last night Charles experimented with eating one as the base for coffee ice cream, and I'm thinking they would be fun to make ice cream sandwiches with.

In any case: historical cookies! What fun for my students and a nice treat for us, too. Who says history's boring?

3 comments:

Chris Bray said...

Dude, the effing "pastry chef at Colonial Williamsburg." Never once did the guidance counselor mention that there were jobs like this.

Fiona said...

Dude. We were robbed, dude.

Unknown said...

We were TOTALLY robbed. and drooling at my desk....