![]() ![]() She was able to read person's dreams and fortunes by the way they tilted their head and closed their eyes, while munching on a cookie. She was able to sum up every person by the way they ate her vanilice. They measure them only in weight and volume, they count the pieces and count 50 of them, but the depth of their cookies is always greater than their weight, volume and count, and there can be a pound or even a ton of flavor in one cookie alone."Ĭookies were Cica's destiny. "Grandma Cica," I asked her once, "is there a secret to your recipe for vanilice?" Mom turned positively red, while Cica answered in her usual cryptic way, "Most people do not know how to measure their cookies. We might have a gift for turning words into poetry, graffiti into art, or serve into an ace we might be endowed with curiosity, be clever with formulas, good at cracking jokes, or blessed with a big heart. We are all meant for one kind of greatness or another, like playing a violin, or chess, or being brave, or skilled with a brush. It's that simple, you either have it in you or you don't. It was not the jam, or the recipe, or the pot, or the pantry - it was Cica's magic and love of cookies. We pondered the secret of Cica's cookies often, but deep inside, we all knew the truth. Mom's other (desperate) theories involved: 1) a (deliberate) omission in the recipe 2) special atmospheric conditions in Cica's pantry where she stored her vanilice for two days before letting anyone touch them and 3) "super-natural-qualities" of a pot she kept them in. They never did, no matter how hard we tried. Making rose hip jam is one big royal pain in the behind, yet we did it on a quest for cookie excellence, but at the end of the day the cookies still did not taste like Cica's. ![]() I bet it's the jam." To prove Mom's theory, we ran to the market, sourced piles of rose hips and spent the entire weekend making the jam. "Cica uses rose hip jam, while everyone else uses apricot. "It must be the jam," my mom proclaimed once, determined to get to the bottom of the issue. Three generations of cooks in my family made vanilice from Cica's recipe, but, even though she personally supervised each and every member of the clan and even though we tried hard and practiced often, our vanilice never tasted like the ones Cica made. Cica was the guardian and the champion of our family recipe for vanilice - given how passionate we were on the subject of small cookies, this was a role of utmost importance. They were the Sisterhood of Cookies and the high priestesses of fine baking. I grew up in a family where every lady had a rolling pin and spatula surgically attached to their bodies: my mom, aunts, grandmothers and grandaunts, my close and not-so-close female relatives. Vanilice, which means “little vanillas”, are bite-sized walnut cookie sandwiches with jam and vanilla scented powder sugar. Vanilice (pronounced vah-ny-ly-tseh) are tiny Serbian cookies made for holidays and special occasions. ![]() She has vanilla hidden in her pockets and walnuts stashed in her purse," my grandfather Vasilije often joked lovingly about his sister, because these were the key ingredients in vanilice, Cica's signature cookies. "My sister grows wheat in her right sleeve and hiprose in her left. ![]() Sometimes she looked like her brother, my grandfather sometimes she looked like her other siblings but most of the time, she looked like no one else in our family. In reality, she probably was not more that five and a half feet, but her personality made for the lack of inches. She was six feet tall, at least in my memory. Moreover, Cica adored her sister-in-law, my maternal grandmother Persida the two of them were inseparable and thus, I never knew the difference.Ĭica always wore black and spoke in short, cryptic sentences. But in the Serbian language, the term applies broadly to all siblings and relatives, and that is how I remember her. Strictly speaking, she was not really my grandmother, given that she was my grandfather's sister. "One can tell a lot about a person from the type of cookie they like to eat," my grandmother Cica used to say. ![]()
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