According to Wikipedia, spritz is actually short for spritzgebäck. I’ve never known them by any name other than spritz, but I’m willing to take their word for it. The article goes on to mention that spritz are traditionally made in Germany during the Christmas season, when parents spend chilly December afternoons baking with their children. That sounds more like the spritz I know! Spritz always reminds me of cooking with mom, and making them was a family affair. Mom pressed out the dough and the rest of us decorated the raw cookies with sugar, silver balls, sprinkles, etc. Fresh from the oven, the crisp buttery cookies have been an important part of Christmas as long as I can remember.
Now, the wikipedia article also states that parents bake spritzgebäck using their own special recipes, which are passed down through the generations. Let me tell you a bit about our “family recipes.” I’d always assumed that our own traditional holiday recipes – cranberry relish, pumpkin bread and pie – came from similarly hallowed roots. My Freshman year of college, I was invited to spend Thanksgiving with some friends in the area, so I promptly called home to ask mom whether I could have the sacred recipes so that I could take some family tradition to share.
“Hi mom, I was wondering if it would be ok to take the secret family cranberry relish with me for Thanksgiving. Could I have the recipe?”
“Oh, that? It’s printed on the back of the cranberry bag.”
“…what?”
“Yeah, just buy a bag of cranberries and use the direction on the bag.”
“Our family cranberry relish is from…Ocean Spray?”
“Well of course, where did you think it came from?”
“Ok, well I want to take pumpkin pie, too. Maybe you could just give me the recipe for that instead?”
“Oh, sure. It’s on the can of Libby’s Pureed Pumpkin.”
“What! Do you mean to tell me that our ‘family’ recipes just come off the container from the grocery store?”
“Yes. They taste pretty good, don’t they?”
Hanging up the phone, I felt terribly disillusioned. Our traditional family recipes were the same exact ones everyone else used, too?
“Our” spritz recipe is pretty popular, too. It comes from the famed Betty Crocker Cooky Book, a copy of which is still floating around from when mom was little. Unlike the pie and cranberry relish, I sort of knew where they came from. Every year, the recipe book would come out, we’d turn the colorful pages and look through the photos of delicate cookies. It was a tradition, and it didn’t matter that the recipe was preserved in typeset in a book rather than in handwriting on a yellowed recipe card. Traditions are made into traditions by repetition, not originality.
One of the first things to go on our wedding registry was our own cookie press. Last year, our flight home for Christmas was cancelled due to weather. We were stranded at home without festive food, decorations or gifts, because we hadn’t planned to be here for the holiday. It was cold and sort of sad…so I did the only thing I could think of as I puttered around the house waiting for the house to warm back up from the pre-set vacation temperature. I mixed up a batch of spritz cookies as the snow flew outside. The bare bones of the recipe are all common enough that we had all of the ingredients on hand. We didn’t have any cookie decorations, so I dusted them with a bit of cinnamon and plain sugar for sparkle and made them anyway. As with most holiday foods, taste is the most important thing – at least it tasted like Christmas! The source mattered much less than the tradition.
Spritz (from the Betty Crocker Cooky book, with tips from mom)
Use good quality flour…cheap or old flour can have a funny taste that doesn’t get masked in these. Your mileage may vary.
1 cup butter
2/3 cup sugar
3 egg yolks
1 tsp flavoring (almond or vanilla)
2 1/2 cups flour
Heat oven to 400 degress. Mix butter, sugar, egg yolks and flavoring thoroughly. Work in flour. Color dough if desired.
If you have to stop here and refrigerate the dough, let it come back up to near room temperature before using cookie press…stiff dough will wreck the press. Ask me how I know.
Using 1/4 of the dough at a time, force dough through cookie press on ungreased baking sheet in desired shapes. Decorate with candied fruit, sprinkles, silver dragees, colored sugar, etc.
Bake 7-19 minutes, or until set but not brown.
