Last December, feeling forlorn for lack of family holiday cookie recipes, I sent a plea to readers of our weekly Bite Club newsletter. Several responded with recipes for s’mores cookies, a homemade version of Thin Mints and a chocolate-hearted nugget called a Secret Kiss. They sounded good but didn’t quite scratch the old-timey baking itch.
My own family had yielded zilch. My mother is gone, and she was not much of a baker anyway — more of the Julia Child-influenced, chocolate-mousse generation. My mother-in-law was a fine pie baker who taught me the secrets to the flakiest crust. She grew up in practical New England kitchens where her mother and grandmother collected bacon fat in an old soup can on the stove. They sometimes used it in cookies, especially peanut butter ones, but when I asked about holiday cookies, my mother-in-law came up blank.
Right around the time of my cookie quest, I received a cryptic message on Instagram from a stranger. It read simply, “Delmonico Potatoes recipe of Polly Pasanen?”
My mother-in-law’s name is Polly, though she hasn’t gone by Pasanen for more than 35 years, and I have never eaten her Delmonico potatoes.
My correspondent, Barb Kleh of Colchester, explained that she had found an old but undated ring-bound cookbook in a box of family mementos. Titled Kitchen Prescriptions: The Medical Wives’ Practical Guide to Cooking, it was sponsored by the University of Vermont Medical Students’ Wives Club and dedicated to “Our husbands, who, true to the spirit of the scientific method, have allowed us to experiment upon their stomachs.”
Times have changed, thankfully, since the days when medical school students were almost exclusively male and molded salads had their own cookbook section.
While flipping through recipes for such salads and “Continental Specialties,” Kleh noticed several attributed to a Polly Pasanen and wondered if she might be related to a local food writer with the same surname.
We narrowed the book’s vintage to 1967 to 1971, when my father-in-law, Polly’s ex-husband, attended medical school in Burlington and Kleh’s father-in-law was a local ophthalmologist.
Kleh sent me photographs of Polly’s recipes — including the cheese-and-white-sauce-smothered Delmonico potatoes — along with a shot of the hand-drawn cookbook cover of a dapper young doctor-in-training smiling at the thought of the meal awaiting him at home.
I beamed similarly when I saw that one of the recipes was for the cookie bars called hermits, flavored with ginger, clove and molasses.
When I excitedly told Polly about the rediscovery of her old recipes and the answer to my heirloom holiday cookie prayers, she noted that hermits were more of an everyday treat. Despite that, their gingerbread-spiced chewy bite tasted holiday-worthy to me, and her version’s call for “nutmeats” and “a handful of raisins” makes them just the kind of old-school recipe I yearned for.
I might even try using a little bacon fat in the batter next time.
Hermits
Adapted from Polly Hakala as published in Kitchen Prescriptions: The Medical Wives’ Practical Guide to Cooking. Makes 18 large bars
Ingredients
- 3/4 cup shortening
- 1 1/2 cups sugar
- 1/4 cup dark molasses
- 2 tablespoons water
- 2 large eggs
- 3 cups all-purpose flour
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- 1 teaspoon ground ginger
- 1 teaspoon ground cloves
- 1/2 teaspoon fine salt
- 1/2 cup nutmeats (Polly said this meant walnuts, the only nut they ever had in the house.)
- A handful of raisins
Directions
- Heat the oven to 350ºF and generously grease a jelly roll pan (typically 10 x 15 inches).
- Using an electric mixer, cream together the shortening and sugar until fluffy, then beat in the molasses and water.
- Break the eggs into a cup and beat with a fork. Pull off 1 tablespoon of the egg for later use and beat the remaining egg into the above mixture.
- Sift together the flour, baking soda, ginger, cloves and salt and add them to the bowl along with the nuts and raisins. Mix well to combine.
- Press the batter into the prepared pan. Brush with the remaining egg.
- Bake 20 to 25 minutes, until the bars just pull away from the side of the pan. Cool completely before cutting into squares.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Cookie Quest | A search for sweet holiday recipes coincides with the discovery of a family treasure”
This article appears in Dec 10-16 2025.
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