I don't know where my grandmother got this recipe, but she used to make these cookies all the time when I was a kid.
My grandmother was a spitfire. Even her name, Eddie (her real first name, by the way, and not a diminution of something more feminine) made her the scrappy girl equivalent of a boy named Sue. It only occurs to me now that she was one of my best friends during my college years. On Friday nights I used to go to her house and watch The X-Files with her, and I took her to see the movie when it came out. She had always loved that weird sci-fi stuff. In fact, when my dad was a kid, the two of them had likewise been avid viewers of eerie movies and episodes of The Twilight Zone.
By the time she was in her seventies, she was spending most of her days watching inflammatory political news shows and C-Span, and these topics comprised the majority of her conversation starters when I came by to see her. Unfortunately, she and I had, shall we say, divergent political leanings. I say "unfortunately" because I'm the kind of person who tends to avoid conflict whenever I can. But I learned something important from knowing her: sometimes the best way to love someone is to give her what she actually wants, and not what you would want if you were in her shoes.
