Every Christmas Eve I drive to my grandparents’ house, say a quick hello, and power walk through the living room — where National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation plays on loop — to the kitchen. On the counter sits the real reason I’m here: a tin printed with snowflakes and snowmen and filled with stacks of stout and sparkly sugar-coated peanut butter cookies. They’re in the same tin, in the same spot, every year, and each one is always uniformly soft and perfect. The only inconsistency is which kind of cookie I reach for first: one with a Hershey’s Kiss pressed into it, or a plain cookie wearing nothing but its crisscross pattern. (The Hershey’s Kiss version always wins: The sweet, milky chocolate center and salty peanut butter dough are an irresistible combo.)
It’s my grandma who lovingly measures, mixes, and bakes dozens of these peanut butter cookies for my family every year. Although there are some things she lets me make with her — I learned how to roll stromboli when I was a child and have been spooning rich, eggy pizzelle dough onto her vintage Vitantonio iron since I was a teenager — these cookies are not one of them. Whenever I’d ask her for the recipe, or to walk me through baking them, she would shoo me away, saying, “They’re just Jif! Go get a jar of Jif and follow the recipe.” So I finally decided to follow her instructions and get a jar of Jif — only to find that there was no recipe on the label, lid, or anywhere else.
Desperate for a warm peanut butter cookie, I turned to the internet. It led me to a recipe that does indeed come from a Jif jar, but also calls for shortening, something I’ve never bought in my life. Instead of crossing that ingredient off my bucket list, I made the executive decision to substitute it with softened butter. It seemed to pay off: The cookies came out of the oven soft, salty, and a little cakey. But they were missing the signature indentations I’d pressed into them with a fork before baking, and they did not even slightly resemble the ones my grandma makes. Hers are tinier and thicker, and each and every one has distinct crisscross marks. Mine were adequate, but hers are impeccable: sweet, chewy, and impossible to stop eating.
Did I mismeasure an ingredient? Did my grandma chill her dough to prevent spreading? Was the shortening non-negotiable? I swallowed my pride and called my grandma for answers, hoping she’d help me get to the bottom of what went wrong. I let her know I’d baked her Jif jar peanut butter cookie recipe, but admitted mine turned out saltier than hers and had a much more distinct peanut butter taste. That they were super soft but not very chewy, probably because they spread in the oven, something I don’t remember hers ever doing. “Did you use evaporated milk or condensed milk?” she asked. I paused. I did not use any milk. As it turns out, the recipe on her Jif jar 25 years ago was not the same as the much more recent one I had followed.
My grandma’s recipe calls for a bit more peanut butter, and in place of brown sugar, an entire can of sweetened condensed milk. I thought about testing a batch right then and there to compare the two cookies side by side, until I noticed her recipe also substitutes “biscuit baking mix” for flour. I’ve had bad, and well-documented, experiences baking with Bisquick in the past, so needless to say, I didn’t start a batch of the condensed milk-Bisquick cookies. And that’s fine, because I’ve eaten so many of them in my life that I’ll never forget their intense peanut butter smell or the way their delicate, sugary crust cracks under my teeth. My cookies certainly weren’t those, but the recipe I found online still left me with a tall plate of buttery peanut butter cookies that required no chilling, rolling in sugar, or special ingredients. They come together easily and quickly enough to justify a weeknight batch and stay soft for days. If my grandma’s are the perfect holiday cookie, these are the perfect weeknight cookie.
