Generations recall 'Papa Henry' with cookies by the hundreds

In an annual family tradition begun more than a century ago, the fifth generation of Verploegens mashed cookie dough into rosewood molds yesterday, filling a commercial kitchen in Bellevue with the same aroma that filled their great-great-grandfather's kitchen in Holland.

Kathy Doyle, of Redmond, scooped about 800 golden-brown Dutch speculas Christmas cookies onto parchment paper while her children and grandchildren formed and baked the dough at a professional kitchen they borrowed for the day. The family gathering happens every year — for the past five on the weekend that is the anniversary of Doyle's mother's death.

While everyone in the family agreed that Doyle does not take cookie baking as seriously as her mother did, Doyle is the matriarch of her family's Christmas tradition, and she presides over it in her mother's red apron.

The family recipe traveled to America from Holland in 1910 with Doyle's grandfather, a professional baker. He scrawled it on a piece of paper — half in English, half in Dutch — and passed it down. The amounts indicate he, too, made the cookies 800 at a time: 12 pounds of flour, 8 pounds of butter, 6 pounds of sugar and 12 eggs make up the base, along with baking soda, sour cream and spices.

The family got together the Saturday after Thanksgiving to dump those ingredients in the middle of a plastic-lined kitchen table and take to the messy task by hand, mixing the dough for about 40 minutes into a giant mound.

The dough is reborn every year, but the key ingredient came along with Doyle's grandfather — "Papa Henry" — from Holland. The long, skinny "cookie boards" are carved with intricate molds — a dog, a windmill, a woman standing next to a well. Doyle has the original, a banged-up piece of rosewood that has been passed down to the eldest daughter of each generation. In 1991, the family hired a Montana woodworker to carve several copies to speed up the cookie-baking.

The copies also spread the task around. Branches of Doyle's family in Spokane and Havre, Mont., have similar traditions.

Even with three boards, making the cookies by hand is a big job. With practiced ease, about 20 family members chit-chatted as they worked, tossing stray pieces of dough in their mouths. Children too young to help make cookies stayed out of the way in an adjacent room, working on Christmas crafts. The adults took shifts pressing and cutting cookies because mashing the dough into molds is not only tiring, but difficult.

"Your hands get tired, your knuckles get sore, and it doesn't always come out," said Cheryl Williamson, Doyle's eldest daughter, who eventually will inherit the cookie board.

Williamson spent part of yesterday afternoon coaching her frustrated son, Sam Newcomb, 16, as he pressed dough onto a board. The cookies stuck, they broke, they came out too thin and bent into unrecognizable lumps as his mother tried to explain the right amount of flour and the angle of the knife.

When Williamson was young, her grandmother used to mail a Folgers coffee can full of speculas cookies for Christmas.

"She'd save her coffee cans all year, and then she'd put the Dutch cookies in it and that was her present," Doyle said yesterday.

Now the cookies go into tins to be passed out as gifts and eaten with cold milk or hot coffee. The irreplaceable board will go back to Doyle's home until next year. The Dutch have produced more modern methods for punching out the same cookies. "But," Doyle said, "they're not nearly as good."

Emily Heffter: 425-783-0624 or eheffter@seattletimes.com