I recently came across an old NPR post—via its zine, The Salt—called “Smør Bullar: The Classic Danish Christmas Cookie No One Has Heard Of.” The photo looked familiar, and—as I read on—it struck me that I knew those cookies.
My mother made these short crumbly cookies every Christmas, but she called them “Pecan Tidbits.” She said that her mother—née May Lucille Parks—always made them at Christmas, too. She passed the recipe on to her three daughters, and my mother passed it on to me.
My grandmother’s ancestors left England for America in 1630, but she married into a Danish family in 1915. She certainly didn’t learn how to make them from her husband—who was a gardener and a fisherman, but not a baker. I suspect that she got the recipe from her mother-in-law, who was born, in Denmark, back in 1853. That great-grandmother—née Mette Kjerstine Christiansen—probably brought the recipe when she sailed to the New World in 1882 (just in time to give birth to my grandfather). She lived near my grandparents, in Connecticut, and had plenty of opportunities to share recipes with her non-Scandinavian daughter-in-law.
The cookie recipe from the NPR story’s photo of a 1949 church cookbook:
Smør Bullar (Butter Balls)
Ingredients
1 cup butter
½ cup confectioner's sugar
2½ cup sifted cake flour
¼ tsp, salt
1 tsp. vanilla
¾ cup nuts, chopped fine (pecans preferred)
Method
Heat oven to 400°F.
Cream butter and sugar thoroughly.
Add the rest of the ingredients and thoroughly blend.
Chill dough. Roll into balls.
Place two inches apart on ungreased baking sheet and bake until set (10-12 minutes), but do not brown.
Roll in powdered sugar while warm. When cold roll again in powdered sugar.
My mother’s recipe:
Pecan Tidbits
Ingredients
1/2 lb. butter
2 cups flour
3 Tbsp. confectioner’s sugar
1 cup pecans, finely chopped
2 tsp. vanilla
Method
Heat oven to 325°F.
Combine all ingredients. Roll into balls.
Place on ungreased baking sheet and bake about 20 minutes.
Roll in fine sugar while still hot.
The recipes are so similar, it’s hard to believe they’re not connected.
My mother was proud of the fact that her mother had what she called “a League of Nations kitchen;” whenever someone new moved into the neighborhood, no matter what their nationality, my grandmother went out of her way to collect recipes from their ancestral lands. She definitely would not have missed a chance to get them from her own mother-in-law.
All of those bakers are gone now, so I’ll never have a chance to ask. It’s small consolation that neither the author of the NPR story nor the Scandinavian expert she consulted for the story were more successful in tracking down the origins of Smør Bullar, either.
We do know that similar recipes are found all over Europe and even Mexico (there’s a long article on the cookies, also called “Snowballs,” at Epicurious). I’m just curious to know what kind of nuts were used, in the old country, originally. If the recipe is as old as that article suggests, the Danish cookies would have been made before their bakers had access to American pecans. Perhaps walnuts? Almonds? Hazelnuts?
This Christmas cookie—whose origins are tangled in my DNA—is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma, and rolled in sugar.
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Indeed!
Gary, these buttery shortbread cookies are very similar to a cookie that's prepared throughout the Eastern Mediterranean, called in Greece kourambiedes, in Arabic variations on ghourayabeh, ghraibeh, etc. (Can you hear ghouraibeh in kourambiedes?) In the US they're sometimes called, for unclear reasons, Mexican wedding cookies and even Russian tea cookies. It's amazing how a simple recipe can reach across continents and time and generations.