Keeper of the Cookies

How Yiayia holds the secret ingredient to her perfect Greek butter cookies.

My husband’s grandma, Yiayia (ya-ya), makes the best Greek cookies in New York. 

The traditional Greek bakeries and the other yiayias who take pride in baking for the masses at church festivals don’t even come close. Theirs is like eating sand. Our Yiayia’s cookies melt in your mouth.

Our favorite is her koulourakia (koo-loo-RAH-keea). They’re a puffy cookie, made with 75% butter, several bags of flour, a whole container of eggs, and sugar. The dough gets rolled into tubes and twisted into shapes, like circles and S’s. 

Yiayia’s koulourakia recipe has always been a mystery to the family and the local yiayia circuit. The original recipe lives in a worn scarlet notebook, handwritten in Greek, on a page dated November 1957. The page is in pristine condition. It’s a sacred family heirloom that must be preserved at all costs.

Yiayia shares her recipe with others. Neighbors, family members, and even myself have, at some point, taken a stab at making them on our own. But our attempts always miss the mark. What’s consistent among all our attempts, is that the cookies come out dry and bland. 

Yiayia’s secret is somewhere hidden in the flour. Yiayia doesn’t measure the flour, she feels it. The family, desperate to keep this recipe alive forever, has recently been devising ways to quantify the flour.

“Maybe we can bring a scale and weigh the bag of flour before and after the dough is made,” my husband’s cousin Sam once suggested. 

“Or we can count the scoops,” her sister Nina replied.

The next weekend, Nina, Sam and I spent the day baking Christmas koulourakia at Yiayia’s house. 

The first bag of flour goes within minutes as Sam quickly feeds mountainous scoops into the 3-foot wide bowl as Yiayia mixes the dough with her bare hands. 

Halfway through the second bag, Yiayia slows the pace, and Sam cautiously sprinkles small dustings of flour into Yiayia’s hands:

“A little more Sam… a little more… THAT’S enough!.”

We all watch Yiayia knead the last few flour particles into the dough, silently. She gently pushes her fist straight through the firm mass of raw cookie in her bowl. 

Watching Yiayia repeatedly fold and knead the dough was like watching a master sculptor work with clay. Yiayia paused before each move she made. She listened to the dough. Each knead became more and more gentle.

She stopped. 

Yiayia grabbed a glob of dough, rolled it in her hands and threw it back in the bowl. She stood tall and announced, “It’s ready.”

I picked up a small ball myself, hoping for the readiness of the dough to be obvious. It squished like fresh play-doh in my fingertips. A thin layer of butter coated my skin.

While Nina, Sam and I sat around the kitchen table shaping the dough into koulourakia, I remembered why I love baking so much: it’s a mystery. 

Baking is unpredictable. I’ve failed so many new bakes following recipes word-for-word. But then I try them again, change one small thing - like undermix the dough or take the tray out of the oven one minute earlier - and BAM, success. 

Baked recipes take years to master, but become second nature. Yiayia used to make hundreds of koulourakia at a time following the written recipe. Now she makes half the cookies from muscle memory. 

She can’t measure how much flour is enough in advance, she needs to feel it in the moment. She adds just enough flour that keeps the dough from being too wet. That feeling, that intuition, becomes the recipe’s secret ingredient. 

Right now, Yiayia is the only one who holds that secret knowledge of making tender koulourakia. I hope that one day - after many more years of baking with Yiayia - Nina, Sam and I will discover that secret knowledge, turn it into intuition, and become the keepers of the secret ingredient of our family’s magical koulourakia, so we can pass down this heirloom recipe for future generations to come.

Thanks for reading! Please share this post if you have a friend who’d like this piece.

Are you the keeper of a secret family recipe? Do you like to bake? I’d love to hear more.

If you enjoyed reading about baking, and want more, check out this piece below that I wrote exactly one year ago + one day.

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See you next time <3 E