They’re Not Pizelles, They’re GALETTES!
by Cheryl McLaughlin. 2007

These are words I utter – or mutter – at Christmas time, almost as often as I say the words “I love Christmas!” Everyone wants to call my cookies “pizelles” – but they are galettes, they are not pizelles!

I say these words because the buttery and delicious waffle like cookies that the women in my family have made for at least 4 generations are called galettes. Like pizelles, they are baked in a little iron with tiny hills and valleys, and yes, they are also delicious and delicate and calorie laden, but my cookies and my family are French, not Italian.

I’ve been known to delight in a huge plate of lasagna, to sip a glass of chiante, and even to cook an excellent pot of pasta fazoole – all masterpieces made and enjoyed by my Italian in-laws and friends. But pizelles? Maybe I’ll nibble at one from a cookie table at a June wedding, but at Christmas, there are no pizelles on MY plate, just galettes!

I savor them because they are soft, sweet and delicious — but more than that, I treasure the memory of time spent in the kitchen with my mom, my great-Aunt Jessie, and my mom’s best friend, Mae. Each from a Eastern European family, the 3 women married men whose parents came from France. I imagine that their wedding vows contained a clause that involved learning how to make galettes before their first married Christmas.

Making galettes is no small commitment – the recipe calls for a dozen eggs, 2 lbs of butter, 2 lbs of brown sugar, 12 cups of flour and vanilla – always REAL vanilla, never the imitation kind that might be good enough for a cake, or banana nut bread. The mound of dough produced by this recipe requires a HUGE bowl. One of the first things my mom did when preparing for her galette making day was to pull out one of the produce drawers in the fridge – usually tossing out a few withered carrots and a stalk of wilted celery, and scraping away any traces of dried-on parsley specks. She’d fill the metal bin with hot sudsy water , then carefully wash and dry it to transform it into a mixing bowl large enough for mixing the dough.

There were also logistics to be negotiated with her Aunt Jesse, or one of her several friends who also each owned one of the heavy cast iron rectangular grilles with a 2 foot long double handle – a galette iron. The irons only made 2 cookies at a time, so having a second iron cut the work in half. If she borrowed an iron this Tuesday, she’d then be able to loan hers out on Saturday or next week to another friend, if Aunt Jesse could wait until the week before Christmas to make her galettes.

Some Christmases our kitchen was filled not only with the fragrance created by the baking buttery dough but also with the chatter and hum of a couple friends who gathered to drink tea and gossip together while keeping my mom company as she performed the monotanous task of baking the cookies on the stove burners. The completed cookies were lined up in a single layer to cool, then piled, always 6 to a stack, ready to be packed into a cookie tin (a large Charles Chips can) for storage, later to be shared with family and friends (and packed in my dad’s and my lunches for the next few weeks).
I learned from my mom – watching the beautiful choreography of her cookie making dance – scoop out 2 spoonsful of dough, place them an inch apart on one side of the iron, close the iron and place it on a stove burner, then quickly flip the other iron over to insure that the cookies in THAT iron were evenly browned on both sides, then flip the second iron over and go back to the first to check for that perfect shade of golden tan, then carefully swing that long heavy implement toward the table, Open the iron and tap it, letting both cookies fall gently to the paper covered table, then quickly scoop two more balls of dough onto the now empty iron, and then start the steps all over again.

When I was 9 or 10, I was drafted to put in a shift of an hour or so to give my mom a break, and by the time I was a teen, I took over the baking part all together. But it was always my mom who hand mixed the dough.

After I got married, each T-giving day, before the dinner table was cleared, my mom and I had negotiated a date that would be good for both of us, when I could drive out with my husband and baby daughter Megan, and we could spend the day making our galettes. My dad and husband would roam into the kitchen occasionally to snatch a cookie while claiming that keeping a baby busy worked up a big hunger (at least for galettes!) By the Christmas when Megan was two and a half, we let her put her tiny hands into the dough, grab a chunk and roll it into a ball — to help her mommy and her gramma make galettes. We promised her that NEXT Christmas, she’d be big enough to help Gramma mix the dough.
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But the next year at Christmas time, my mom was in the hospital with a shocking diagnosis of bone cancer and a plan for chemotherapy to begin immediately. Who would made the galettes that year? I imagine that we were given some by one of my mom’s friends, but I don’t remember – Who could even think of enjoying cookies at a time like that?

By the next Thanksgiving, the galette iron had been passed to me – my dad didn’t like seeing it in the kitchen broom closet – it reminded him of Christmases past – when his wife was still alive. He was mourning her deeply. But I believed that I’d done my mourning as I felt each small and not so small loss during my mom’s 6 months of chemo, surgeries, radiation, and horrific pain. I watched and mourned daily while she was losing her dignity and losing herself. I cried every day after I visited her and I truly believed that I had no more tears to shed. I didn’t cry when she breathed her last breath – I was SO happy to see her free of pain and I didn’t cry at her funeral. It hurt too much to cry because I couldn’t find any more tears.

My dad mentioned during Thanksgiving dinner that next year that he’d sure like to have some galettes at Christmas. I had the iron, but I didn’t know what to do to get ready to use it! I didn’t even have the RECIPE for galettes – my mom had it memorized and not written down. I called my mom’s best friend, Mae, for the recipe and she gave it to me from her memory.

I mixed the dough, but it seemed oddly sticky. When I opened the hot iron, the dough had just formed a gooey mess inside. I felt so frustrated, but I WAS determined. I scraped the sticky mess out of the iron and scrubbed it with a stiff brush. I angrily threw the dough into the garbage can and started the recipe all over again. But the dough was again rather sticky, so I added more flour – and more flour and more flour. This time, the cookies DID take shape in the iron and I was making progress. After making 3 or 4 dozen, I ate one. It was dry and tough and floury tasting.

That was it, I lost it! After all, I’d lost 4 lbs of butter, 4 lbs of sugar, I’d lost a lot of time, I’d lost my temper and I’d lost MY MOTHER. It had been a full 6 months since her funeral and I’d not cried. But that day, I cried. I ranted. I threw myself on the bed and wailed. I sobbed myself to sleep – and woke the next day to know that I’d entered a new phase of acceptance of my mom’s death. I called Mae and we went over the recipe again to see what I might have done wrong. Let’s see, a cup of canned milk, 12 cups of flour, a dozen egg yolks ….. Egg YOLKS????????? Does that mean just the YELLOW part of the egg? My God! I’d used the whole egg! Then I mixed up my THIRD recipe using only the yolks, and the dough looked perfect – it looked like my mom’s dough. And the cookies passed my dad’s and my husband’s inspections, and most importantly, they met my own expectations for what Christmas tastes like.

I now use an electric iron to create 5 galettes at a time. They brown evenly because the heat is uniform on both sides. I can sit at the table to use it rather than stand at the stove, and I have a 26 year history of drafting two daughters to help with the galette baking – and my husband is the first male in the family to help. But I am the only one who makes the dough – and I still use the same recipe, with the word “YOLKS” underlined on the recipe card. When we moved recently, I realized that the old blackend galette iron was just taking up space in a kitchen cabinet and I’d most likely never use it again – but it traveled with us to our new home, and I expect it will travel one day (along with the electric galette iron) to the homes of my daughters who know that galettes are THE Christmas cookie in OUR family.

They’re galettes, not pizelles.

2 lbs butter or margarine (I use 1 lb butter and 1 lb margarine)
2 lbs. brown sugar (I use 1 lb. light brown and 1 lb dark brown)
*12 egg YOLKS
1 cup canned milk (not Eagle Brand
1 t. vanilla
3 lbs (12 cups) flour
1 t. baking powder

blend margarine and sugar in large bowl with electric mixer. Beat in egg yolks and canned milk and vanilla.
Add flour and baking powder and mix into a dough with hands.
You know what to do after that!
* the yoke/whole egg issue plays quite a big part of the story I wrote (Use only the yolks is my advice – using the whites as well makes a “tougher” cookie.)

Oh yes. I would like your recipe. Please send to: eorrforever@gmail.com

I also grew up with these fabulous cookies. My grandmother made them on the same kind of iron. It’s been passed down over the years and my daughter and I still use it today. We love doing it the “old fashioned” way. Gram’s recipe also called for whiskey!

I have my aunties recipe but she didn’t write how much whiskey. How much brown sugar?