Cookies

One of the joys of getting older is that you get to see so many things change over the course of your life. Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. Nickel Cokes and candy bars are gone, but so are summer fears of catching polio. Radio dramas have faded, but we have hundreds of channels of television. (The golden age of TV, by the by, was supposedly the early fifties. Some of those years are better in memory than in truth. I recently got the old Superman series with George Reeves, on DVD, and most of those episodes don't hold up very well -- done on the cheap, awful EFX, talky, badly-written, and all of the actors should have died the first season from scenery-poisoning, given how much of it they chewed ...

We sent people to the moon, cured smallpox, and defeated the Evil Empire. The buggy whips of my youth are gone (unless I want to drop round Spartacus in Portland and check out their leather) and I can still find Brown's Velvet Pineapple Sherbet, if I want to fly back to Baton Rouge, and it still tastes as good as it did when I was a boy. Of course it would, being it is almost entirely unnatural ingredients and preservatives. A few years ago on a visit, I bought a half-gallon of it, and proceeded to eat it all over the course of two days ...

Jack's Cookie Company's Brown-Edge Lemon Thins are, however, no more.

Those favorite store-boughts of my childhood are as extinct as the dinosaurs. My mother went hunting them a few years back when I asked if the company was still in business, but there were none to be had.

The wonder of the world wide web is that it is a cornucopia of oddball information, and recently I went hunting for a clue to those cookies.

Apparently Jack's was bought up in the mid-sixties by the Murray Biscuit Company, which was in turn purchased by Beatrice Foods, and in the late nineties, Keebler, all now owned by Kellog's.

No brown-edge lemon thins, alas.

Apparently I wasn't the only person who remembered these treats fondly, and in answer to other queries, Gourmet Magazine published a recipe -- almost twenty years ago -- in which the need was addressed.

And some kind soul put it on the web where I found it.

The cookies feature Crisco, butter, sugar, various forms of lemon -- juice, extract, and zest -- and the other bakery things that icebox cookies have, flour, vanilla, baking powder and soda and salt and like that, and I can see why they went away. Nothing the least bit healthy about them, more fat than gravy-smothered pork chops ...

But, having found the recipe, I had to try them, so I went out and got the ingredients -- no Crisco in our house -- blended them together as instructed and after chilling the dough for a couple hours, popped them into the oven.

And the results?

Well, they came out pretty good. Great taste, nice texture, good flavor.

Not the same as the commercial ones, which had that preserved-uniformity and that were already-going-stale-in-the-package when you bought 'em. Are the home-baked ones better? Yeah, I'd have to say so.

Better. But they aren't the same ...