Book Fairs and Armenian Cookies

Posted by Debbie Kwiatoski Jun 24, 2007

One of my favorite past times is to wander through used books shops or to dive into the tables of books and other ephemera at a local library fair. You never know what you’re liable to find among the stacks of old books piled high on those tables under the tents. But I’m one of those people who take greater joy in acquiring wonderful hard cover books on the topics I stock my home library with (gardening, old cookbooks, history, biography, good photography, mainly) for a couple of dollars, than in dipping into the Barnes & Noble or some other giant bog box book outlet and paying a small fortune for a paperback.

This weekend, the twenty bucks in my pocket bought me a few real treasures. After buying a book on the history of herbals, the history of gardening and a book on the etymology of the plants commonly found in our flower beds and vegetable gardens (all great fodder for future Suite101 articles, by the way), I stumbled up two real treasures: an edition on North American wildlife produced by the Writer’s Project of the W.P.A. during the Great Depression – and a mimeographed sheath of Armenian recipes, most probably passed around by the Ladies Auxiliary in an ethnic Armenian Church many years ago – ie., before mimeographing gave way to that new-fangled Xerox machine!

Both were pretty beaten up, but both were real treasures, nonetheless.

The W.P.A. book is amazing. I’ve never seen an actual copy of any Writers’ Project book before. The Writers’ Project, for those readers who are not from the United States – or are too young to even have parents who lived through the Great Depression of the 1930s – was one of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s prescriptions for not allowing an entire generation of young American writers to starve to death. As with all the W.P.A. projects, the talented and unemployed of the U.S. were, quite literally, put on the government’s payroll and put to work. They built schools and libraries and other public buildings. They photographed the nation’s wildlife, landscapes and people to be published and archived. They painted murals on public walls – and they wrote plays, books and poetry and music – all supported by the government – until the Supreme Court closed the whole project down, claiming it was too “Socialist” in some way…But I digress. It may be beaten up, but I love having this book, both for its content – and as a reminder of a time when our country actually thought the arts were important enough to support in meaningful ways.

Paging through the Armenian recipes, though, I was really excited to find a cookie recipe that I believe my aunt used to make. I say excited, because it was a recipe that we all thought had pretty much been “lost,” when Aunt Rose became ill with Alzheimer’s Disease – and had not written any of her “trademark” recipes down.

We used to call them “Fish Cookies,” – not because there was anything “fishy” about them – but because each cookie, prior to baking had to be pricked down the longside with a tiny pair of scissors, the baked result resembling the scales on a fish. They took hours to make in any kind of quantity - and they were always her gift to our family for the Christmas and Easter meals, as well as for special family occasions.

In the pages of this sheath, they are called “Finger Cookies” (no scales indicated). My mother remembers that my grandmother also used to call them “Wedding Cookies.”

They are made from a shortbread sort of dough (basic – just flour, sugar, LOTS of shortening and some baking soda) that is wrapped around finely chopped walnuts, with sugar and cinnamon. The cookies are shaped and baked – and then dipped into a simple sugar syrup, while they are still hot from the oven. This method of a final syrup dipping is common in many Middle Eastern desserts – especially those coming from Turkey and Syria.

At any rate, I intend to give them a try this week – test out the recipe, and see if they really are Aunt Rose’s famous “Fish Cookies.” If they are – or even if they taste as good as the recipe reads – I promise I will do an article on them this week for the Middle Eastern Food section.