A Recipe for Christmas Magic

Hanging on my kitchen wall is a handwritten recipe for chili sauce. I've never made this recipe, nor have I eaten this sauce. I found the recipe scrawled on and old slip of office stationary. The heading reads Pacific Elevator Company, Kansas City, Missouri. It fell out of an old cookbook I was looking through with my Auntie M one day.

I love old cookbooks. The terminology and techniques fascinate me. For example, this particular chili sauce recipe calls for "eight teacups of good vinegar".

So when my Auntie M decided we must have a Christmas cookie backing day this year, I scoured my old cookbooks. No way was I gonna grab pre-fab, refrigerated cookie dough from the grocery store. But I wasn't looking for something printed in those cookbooks. I was looking for a handwritten index card I had used as a bookmark for decades. If I could only remember in what book.

After nearly a half-hour, I found it. The Dieker vanilla wafer recipe.  Mr. Dieker was my fourth grade math teacher. His wife was this lovely woman whose house I remember was always filled with something good to eat and a lot of laughter. Their children were living, breathing recreations of every sweet-faced, blonde-haired cherub painted on old-fashioned Christmas cards or Gerber baby food ads. I remember summers at the swimming pool with them and snapping green beans and sucking on strawberries from a big garden we helped plant in their backyard. And I remember those sugar cookies.

Yesterday, my Auntie M arrived with festive aprons and a basket full of Christmas shaped cookie cutters. She opened a sparkly tin to reveal a dozen different kinds of sprinkles and toppings and edible glitter. I rolled out the Dieker dough. My kids, home from college, slipped into baker mode, and for the next six hours we cut and baked and frosted and decorated and sang and laughed.

As I mixed up a second batch, I marveled that there must be something magic in that dough, for I was transported back forty years to a snowy day in a small town where a little girl rolled up a giant ball of snow to make the bottom of a six-foot tall snowman that would have its picture in the paper the next day. I fell back to a Christmas eve when Santa, himself, knocked on our door and delivered our most desired toys right into our hands. Then, in a flash, it was Christmas morning and my little ones (whose college versions now joked over whose gingerbread man most resembled a muddy alien) chased their Jesse and Woody dolls around the living room. At the end of the day, we had created this beautiful mess and mess of merry memories, too. In my mind, the laughter and stories and disasters and secrets we shared with Auntie M around a table full of Christmas cookies emblazoned their love right into that faded little index card.


Yes, there is something magical about an old recipe. The terminology and techniques are quaint and quirky, but woven into the handwritten instructions is a secret code.

I've often wondered about that old chili sauce recipe--the one that calls for "a heaping peck of large, round tomatoes" and "one grated nutmeg". What special occasions and traditions happened around this pot of chili sauce? It's code will never be deciphered. It will remain a fun mystery hanging on my kitchen wall. The amazing magic in the Dieker Dough, however, has been revealed. I've promised myself to keep it that way.

In fact, I've done some digging. Dieker Dough isn't the only magic card in my kitchen. It seems I've got a whole deck. Watergate cake. Peanut Butter Pie, Grandpa's Steak Stew. Aunt Polly's Pink Champagne Punch. I have a feeling 2019 will have us picking a card, any card. I can't wait to see the magic unfold.