Mom's Springerlies by Sally Crosiar

When I was growing up, baking cookies was a very big part of holiday preparations. Mom would make a batch of chocolate-chip- oatmeal-raisin one day, butterballs the next, and her famous melt-in-your-mouth sugar cookies on the day after that. And then she’d repeat the whole process with thumbprints, Brazil-nut cookies, something with candied fruit, and seven-layer bars whose coconut (yuck!) made them safe from my marauding appetite.

As she finished each batch, she’d leave a dozen or so in the cookie jar and pack all the rest away in whatever freezer containers she could find. Her favorite containers were gallon-sized buckets that had held ice cream and which were not at all hard to collect since we all liked ice cream just as much as we liked cookies.

Mom was definitely in charge of baking, but for one cookie, the whole family was enlisted. The recipe for springerlies had been handed down to Mom from her mother and hers before that, stretching back through generations of German women – hard-working German women because making springerlies is a complicated and arduous process.

One of the very first stumbling blocks is to locate a key ingredient.
Once available at the local grocery, hartshorn or baking ammonia became more and more difficult to find. In the last ten years or so that Mom made springerlies, she could find it only at select pharmacies.

Hartshorn is nasty stuff. It comes in hard white lumps that have to be ground using a mortar and pestle – my father’s job. But that doesn’t mean that curious kids didn’t lean over his hands to watch. But here’s a warning. Whether you’re grinding or watching, you’d better not take any deep breaths or you’ll clean out your sinus cavities and probably fry a few other vital organs. I know of which I speak!

In fact, the pharmacies that supplied us also gave us a warning. Hartshorn, they said, is poisonous until baked at a certain temperature. Hmmm...so now we find out that we shouldn’t have been eating springerlie dough? Too late. If we hadn’t keeled over by now, we sure weren’t going to give up licking the bowl and filching a scrap of dough in this once-a-year ritual.

The remaining springerlie ingredients were straight-forward – flour, sugar, anise flavoring and seeds, and eggs – a lot of eggs. I’ve seen recipes on the internet that call for anywhere from 4-8 eggs, but I’m pretty sure that Mom’s recipe called for a full dozen! Breaking all those eggs – that would have been one of my jobs.

Mom used the electric mixer to begin with, but as she added the flour, the springerlie dough got so stiff that it had to be kneaded by hand. This was physical work! And we were far from a finished cookie.

We took turns rolling out the dough with a regular rolling pin – but truthfully, none of us were good at that except for Mom. She made it look easy to get uniform slabs of dough down to maybe an eighth of an inch in thickness.

And then, she’d reclaim the special springerlie rolling pin that we’d all been examining, spinning, and trying to decipher. Its roller was about six inches long on cream-colored enamel handles and embossed with mysterious and intriguing designs. There were squares of small animals, a pineapple, and a flower basket, along with other faintly exotic shapes.

Every one of us watched and held our breath as Mom pressed and rolled this special implement, leaving a trail of little rectangles resembling an old-fashioned patchwork quilt. It was oddly mesmerizing and certainly magic. Pop or one of the older kids carefully applied a big butcher knife along the lines and the little rectangles started to look like a cookie!

But looking like a cookie and being a cookie are two different things – at least when you’re talking about springerlies. These cookie-like pieces of dough now needed to be scooped up onto cookie sheets and laid out on the dining room table (covered with dish towels) to rise overnight. Kids’ job – moving raw cookies to the dining room table – without eating them (or only a few so they wouldn’t be missed!)

The next morning, Mom was up early to bake the first batch so each of us could top off our breakfast with a warm, soft springerlie. That’s an important memory. Springerlies can be warm and soft – if you eat them within minutes after they emerge from the oven. And then they start to harden. The longer you store them, the harder they get. Springerlies are good for dunking, but eat them straight and you might risk breaking a tooth.

In all truth, springerlies are an acquired taste. You either love them – or you hate them. And if you’re at all ambivalent, you certainly won’t go through the labor of making springerlies.

My mom was the only one in her generation of seven siblings that made springerlies every year. Only one of my generation has made them – and likely won’t do it again. And only one of the next generation continues the tradition – when he can find a source of hartshorn via the world wide web. Springerlies are no longer a cookie in our family. They are a memory.

My mother died in 1997, and in the ten years before that became less and less able. So I’d guess that Mom made her last batch of springerlies somewhere around 1988 or even before.

Undoubtedly she sent me home with a tin of cookies after my holiday visit, and I’m willing to bet that most of those cookies were gone within a few days. But not the springerlies. I loved them as a kid, but for me they became an un-acquired taste. So I put off eating the springerlies. And then, for some unknown reason, I put these four remaining cookies into a pint-sized blue glass canning jar, and forgot about them.

Now, over twenty years later, those same four springerlies are still in that same glass jar. I didn’t set out to keep them for twenty years. I didn’t know it would be Mom’s last batch. There’s no hermetical seal on the jar. I didn’t varnish the springerlies. I didn’t put them in the freezer or protect them from sunlight. I took no special measures to preserve them.

And yet they are preserved. They look just like springerlies always look – white, smooth, and hard. Probably petrified. I wouldn’t recommend anyone try and bite into one, but preserved they are.

Mom's Springerlies, circa 1988 still preserved today!

I have many family treasures – antique chests of drawers, end tables, photographs, and springerlies. I know that some people hand down heirloom recipes, but me – I handed down heirloom cookies to my nephew David.  And now each year at Christmas, he ships a tin of springerlies to me from his home in Virginia.  I hope as he’s rolling them out with his grandmother’s special rolling pin, he glances up at the small glass jar with her heirloom cookies and smiles.