I’ve done almost no baking this year. There have been years I’ve used four, five, even seven pounds of butter making sugar cookies, molasses crinkles, toffee bars, almond crescents, and a whole list of other Christmas favorites. This year I tried some new recipes like the grasshopper brownies I found over at the Smitten Kitchen, and some gingerbread caramels from Martha Stewart, and I made a batch of candied walnuts, and so far that’s been it.
(On a related note, I remembered why I usually make cookies instead of candy. The caramels, some sprinkled with pink Hawaiian sea salt, are delicious but too hard to cut (and tough to chew!) The walnuts, normally foolproof, came out sticky. I blame the weather.)
The one cookie I don’t think we can do Christmas without is gingerbread. The recipe I have is old, maybe three generations. It doesn’t just say gingerbread at the top, but gingerbread pigs.
Gingerbread Pigs
1 c. soft butter
1/2 c. brown sugar
1/4 c. dark molasses
1 egg yolk
2 t. cinnamon
1/2 t. ground cardamom
1/2 t. nutmeg
1/4 t. salt (I’m sure I add at least 1/2 t. plus I use salted butter)
1/4 t. ginger (I definitely use more ginger…more like 1 t. or so, freshly grated)
1/8 t. black pepper
3 c. sifted flourCream together butter and sugar. Stir in remaining ingredients except the flour and mix until smooth. Stir in flour to make a stiff dough, shape into a ball, and chill an hour. Roll to 1/4″ thickness, cut with a pig-shaped cookie cutter, and bake at 350° for 10 minutes.
Why pigs? Well, I didn’t find a good explanation for the gingerbread pigs specifically, but my Finnish friend Henri told us they were a Finnish tradition, and Rachel Ray apparently heard that somewhere too. Pigs do make many appearances in Christmas traditions including marzipan pigs, peppermint pigs, and even a tradition of slaughtering a pig on Christmas in Romania. Most explanations attribute this porcine focus to a sense of abundance or prosperity associated with having a pig, though Snopes mentions the tradition of eating pork on New Year’s Day is attributed to the pigs’ habit of rooting forward (unlike chickens or other poultry which move backwards as they scratch for bugs) symbolizing forward motion in the new year.
The recipe turns out equally good if you cut out ginger people, hearts, or even mooses (we gave out Christmoose cookies in lieu of cards a few years ago, back before it was a political statement) but I always enjoy the stacks of spicy piggies, whatever they symbolize.
