It’s been a busy few weeks and that’s cut into cookie testing, but to be entirely honest the delay also comes from my perpetual fidgeting with a new recipe for the Ultimate Butter Cookie. Another batch or two and I’ll have it out… but all of that is just an explanation for why I’m now publishing something totally different. [Talk about a teaser!]
That butter cookie comes from the Middle East, so I wanted to go back to Europe for a break. Clearing my head for the final assault on the ramparts, as it were. I keep an ongoing “cookies to test” list, so I pulled that out and asked Kate to choose one that caught her eye. She marked off a few possibilities and then paused.
“Frisian Thumbs? What in the world?”
I smiled. “Top 10 on the great names list, right? It’s a Kate Cookie too – they describe it as a dunker made with a lot of hazelnuts and some spice. Butter too, I’m afraid.”
She asked to see the initial recipe I’d downloaded, approved both the idea and the incursion into her monthly butter allowance, and then waved me away to work some magic. Magic done; mischief managed. This is a good one.
As usual, I’m about to run long with the full description of the whys, wherefores, and what-abouts. Skip to the bottom if you’re only here for the recipe.
Getting the process started
By this point I have a pretty well established pattern for working on new cookies. I usually find them in the first place by wandering through the Wide World of Google doing searches like, “regional cookies of [This Place]” or “local baking traditions of [That One].” E-tourism, cookie style. Potential targets pop up in various locations: regional promotion sites, historians looking through an oddball lens, memoirs from tourists, émigré groups sharing memories, other bakers, etc. I mark down the names, look up the recipes, pick an example for the files, and then put it on the “cookies to test” list with a brief description for later.
When it’s time to look deeper – now, in the case of Frisian Thumbs – I go to the next level in two different ways. First there’s the recipe. I start on that by searching out every possible version the Internet contains. This gives a firm idea of the parameters, from which I’ll write something up using round figures and my experience with other projects.
Then there’s the heritage part. That also begins with the Internet, but then moves on to a search for actual humans who know the cookie, and can provide some context. Those two steps provide the raw ingredients: a recipe to work from, and a heritage to explore. And the follow up question: How did these two meet and marry? Which is where the test batches come in, followed by gifts for my sources to sample, and adjustments to account for both my reactions and theirs.
ASIDE: There are few things more satisfying than developing my version of a beloved childhood treat for someone who knew it back in the Old Country. Life doesn’t have many perfect moments. Two strangers exploring a cookie together, on truly neutral ground? That is one.
STEP 1: Creating the initial test recipe
So, off I went and found no less than eleven (11) different recipes, most with photos and descriptions. These taught me a lot about the underlying issues. Here are my notes:
- Almost every recipe centered on anise, supported by a background of cinnamon and ginger in roughly equal amounts. What an odd combination! But it works. Taste it in your head and you’ll see.
- The hazelnuts bring it all together. Remember to toast them first. No two ways about it.
- The cookies bake low and long. 325° for 20 minutes. Interesting.
- The recipes are pretty close together after normalizing…
“Are you done yet?” I stop and look up. It’s Kate, back from her writing lair. “Those thumb cookies sounded really good, and I’m going to make a pot of coffee. Any chance you’ll have some ready for me to try?”
My friends, this never happens! Don’t get me wrong. Kate is a certified cookieholic. She’s at least as bad as I am. But her addiction gets triggered by proximity. See cookie; snitch cookie; savor cookie; repeat. I’m the one who gets entranced by recipes alone. But not this time, apparently. I wasn’t the only one getting hit in the, Oh that sounds good! spot.
I promised to get her something in the next day or two and then went back to my research.
- … normalizing to a single stick of butter (½ cup = 115 grams). Which is a surprisingly small amount; most cookies start with two sticks. Hmmm. One stick of butter yields three dozen cookies? Definitely on the small side.
- The big difference between the recipes comes down to the amount of flour. Anywhere from 130 grams all the way up to 250. What’s going on? Aha! The ones with more flour have some baking powder added, and the ones with very little look slumped in the photos.
- The flour also ties in with eggs. Most of the recipes include an egg on the inside, excluding only the ones with very little flour. The recipes with both an egg and some milk have the most flour. Got it.
- But there is not a lot of flour in any of these by the standard of other dunkers! Corsican Canistrelli have a good 50% more in the flour to fat ratio, plus a cup of chestnut flour to push the ratio even further. The hazelnuts in this recipe are chopped, not ground. They won’t act the same. So Frisian Thumbs may be dense, but they shouldn’t be hard, dry, or crispy.
- And that flavor profile! Hazelnut, hazelnut, spice, and hazelnut. That’s what we’re after here! No extract, either. Very elegant even if they are kind of plain to look at. One for bakers rather than bakeries.
Time to check in on the heritage part of the equation.
STEP 2: What’s the story behind all this?
I knew going in that the Frisians were a big deal back in the Viking Age. Why would someone name a cookie after their thumbs? It turns out there’s a string of small islands off that coastline called – look at that! – the Frisian Islands, with the modern Netherlands province of Friesland right in the sheltered area behind them. The name “Frisia” goes back to Roman times, but modern Frisians descended from a Viking tribe who settled in the region after a series of environmental disasters had emptied out most of the original inhabitants. These new Frisians (they adopted the name) were closely related to the Angles and the Saxons who settled in England, only to be conquered in 1066 by the even fiercer Norman Vikings who had settled 400 miles further south.
The Frisians who didn’t travel to England with their Anglo-Saxon cousins settled down and became famous for breeding the finest warhorses on the continent. Including, ironically, the mount used by William the Conqueror. Cool! Their descendants maintain a fierce pride about their particular roots, with a regional dialect that is sort of like ancient English mixed with Dutch and German.
There’s no way I was going to find a group of Frisian émigrés here in Pittsburgh! But as it happens, I do know several Dutch bakers through a Facebook group devoted to the molded cookie Speculaas. Thanks go out to one and all. And to Google Translate, since the recipes they pointed me to were written in Dutch, with notes on particular Frisian words.
The material from my online friends brought me up to 14 versions, which led to a modified master recipe while also answering a lot of questions. First, Frisian Thumbs are a true specialty of modern day Friesland, and little known outside its borders. They are not an extension of other Dutch cookies. Second, Frisians are a lot more culturally distinct than Americans would tend to assume. So much so that road signs in the province appear in both Dutch and Fries. Thus it may be inevitable that Frisian bakers will start from normal Dutch ingredients when it comes to flour and sugar (see below), but they wouldn’t be caught dead using a standard spice mix from the store with some extra anise.
Third, the photos make it clear that these cookies are supposed to be small, thick rectangles, not oblong drop cookies. They must have enough flour to more or less hold their initial shape. That evocative description about, “the size of a child’s thumb” actually makes a good deal of sense. Pull out the ruler and… ½” thick x ¾” wide x 1¾” long.
Fourth, not a single one of the Dutch photos contain the thumbprint mark. They’re all plain old rectangles. But I did see several others that had the dent, and you know what? It creates an effect that looks a lot like a thumbnail! I like it.
Next, I wanted a chewy and somewhat dense texture, but not excessively so. Too much flour, especially with no leavening, would make little bricks. Balance is everything.
Speaking of which, those websites convinced me that balancing the spices had to be job one. Spice cookies are normal for the Netherlands, and don’t raise eyebrows over there like they often do in the U.S. On the other hand, Dutch cooking incorporates a very particular sense of poise and restraint. It shows up on the savory side too. Any cookie that Amsterdam writers would praise as “well rounded” had to be exactly that. So my target was clear: a nut cookie enhanced by anise, rounded out with cinnamon and ginger, chewy but not dense, and ideal when paired with a cup of coffee.
DIGRESSION: A primer on Dutch ingredients
Dutch ingredients can differ a bit from their counterparts here in America. To start with, bakers in the Netherlands have a different type of flour than you find in the U.S. Here in America we grade our flour according to protein content, going from low protein cake flour all the way up to high protein bread flour. On the Continent they grade their flour more by grind size. The best Speculaas, e.g., use something called TIP-00 flour, an Italian product that is ground to a spectacularly fine level “similar to baby powder.” That doesn’t matter for the recipe at hand, but it makes a real difference for a molded cookie where the features are a key difference between good and better.
In this case we need to look at the sugar. U.S. sugar is made by grinding sugar cane to a pulp, extracting the sweet syrup, and then removing the impurities to leave only pure sucrose. Those impurities are sold separately as “molasses.” Mix a generous tablespoon of molasses back into a cup of white sugar, and you get “light brown sugar.” Mix in two tablespoons and you’ll have “dark brown sugar.” Half a tablespoon yields “turbinado sugar.” [NOTE: you technically want to add a little bit more than just 1 tbsp. Hence the word “generous.”]
Not so in the Netherlands. Their basic ingredient comes from sugar beets rather than sugar cane, which creates some differences you’d notice if the two were used side by side. Speculaas use something called “Belgian Brown Sugar,” which is made by taking regular sugar, gently caramelizing a small portion, and then mixing it back in with the white kind. Stella Parks published a great essay and recipe on this at SeriousEats.com if you want to learn more. This goes to the second part. Then there’s a “brown sugar” made by mixing some actual cane molasses into beet sugar; and another “brown sugar” that’s made by mixing in a cooked sugar syrup that Dutch families use on pancakes instead of the U.S. maple syrup. And…
You get the point. The recipes all used “brown sugar,” but those words don’t mean the same thing in the Netherlands as they do in America. Fortunately enough, I’m told by people who have lived on both sides of the pond that these differences are real, but subtle, and not enough to alter the cookie’s character. The recipe you’ll find below starts with white sugar and adds just enough molasses to turn it into turbinado (i.e., identical to splitting the total 50/50 between white sugar and light brown sugar). Add more molasses to taste. That’s a great spot to customize.
STEP 3: Putting it all together to reveal a Heritage Cookie
After all that research, and a second “are we there yet?” episode from my beloved, the final test recipe came together quickly. I stayed up late to make a batch for the morning coffee, went out of the kitchen to head upstairs… and discovered She Who Must Be Obeyed waiting on her reading chair, drawn from her aerie by aromas of cooking hazelnuts, butter, and spice.
“They smell fantastic. Are they ready for testing?”
“It’s a dunker. They’ll be all soft and warm fresh out of the oven. It won’t be a fair way to judge.”
She cocked her head and gave me a look. “How many are there in a recipe?”
“Almost 40 for this batch. They’re actually kind of small.”
“Then there will be plenty left for tomorrow, won’t there?”
“I don’t know. My photographer gets awfully picky…”
“I’m the photographer! If you want to see picky, keep standing there in the way and you’ll learn about picky!”
I am a man. A mere man. I can’t even translate that sentence. I certainly didn’t want to experience it. So I stepped aside. But I spoke up even as I deferred. “I do want to press in the thumbprints, at least on some. Then we can sample any ugly ones.”
And so we did. I burned my thumb. She did not. I will make my thumbprints with the tip of a spoon next time. She will laugh when I do. We both think it’s a great look. And yes, we both had a taste. And then another. They were goooooood.
FOLLOW UP NOTE: This batch produced 39 cookies. We ate two that evening, and Kate put ten aside for the photography. There were exactly 20 left when I put them in a tin for my “get thee out of the house” sharing trip. Cookie gremlins are a thing in this house, and I can’t exactly blame them. Frisian Thumbs are goooooood.
NOTE FROM KATE: Scott is a talented writer of fiction. I categorically deny all of the above. Except the part about Frisian Thumbs being good. No one can deny that.
Final touches
Some cookies take a ton of fidgeting. Others just slide together all on their own. This was one of the latter. They were great warm, and the ones that survived our gremlins were even better the next morning. I’m noshing on some of the rapidly vanishing leftovers even as I type. So there weren’t a lot of changes in this one. But there are a few decision points beyond the recipe that our readers should know about in advance. Knowledge is power, and this way so you can make your own choices.
- About the flavor. The first thing you taste is a combination of butter and hazelnut, which changes as the ground spices kick in, and then changes again when you crunch through one of the whole anise seeds. It’s definitely a spice cookie, and definitely a hazelnut cookie, and definitely unique, but at the same time there’s nothing here that is “strange”. We’d have no problem serving this to kids of all ages with no warning other than, “Here’s a cookie you’ve never had before…”
- About the anise. No warning unless you dislike anise, that is. Some people don’t. My Dad hated licorice flavor, and our younger daughter is lukewarm at best. This isn’t a cookie for them. No, it isn’t an “anise cookie.” Anise is just a component flavor. But it is a clear and distinct component.
- About the whole anise seeds. Whole seeds can get annoying when a hull gets caught in your teeth. It isn’t a big issue, and the whole seeds add a late-hitting pop of flavor that both of us enjoy. Kate would keep them buried inside the dough for the sake of simplicity, but you’ll see that I wrote the recipe in a way that sets half of the seeds aside to be placed on top. I only did it to remind people that the seeds are there, and to expect the occasional chewy bit. Don’t bother if you don’t care.
- About the salt. Using the full ½ teaspoon of salt gives this cookie a noticeable kick that I enjoyed, but I also prefer salted nuts over plain for eating out of hand. The salt level might have been a tad too much on some other day. The cookie definitely wants some salt to bring out the nutty flavors, but we recommend that you start at the ¼ teaspoon level and then add more as desired. Make a note of your preference on the recipe.
- About the coffee, and the dunking. I have never come across a cookie that pairs better with a cup of coffee. Not ever, anywhere, in any form. It’s almost stunning to write those words, but they are true. At the same time, it really is a “pairing” rather than a case where one side needs the other. Together, they are more than the sum of their parts. But separated they’re still darned good on their own. Frisian Thumbs have enough texture to hold up well as a dunker, but they also have enough moisture and suppleness to eat out of hand. Frisian Thumbs are goooooood.
That’s about it. Sorry to run on so long. This is an easy cookie to fall in love with, and both of us have. Head over heels. Let us know if you feel the same.
Enjoy!
