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Stepping Aboard a Famine Ship

The Dunbrody.   Whenever we travel, especially if we are within striking distance of an ancestral locale, the Hubs and I like to visit historical sites to get a better understanding of where and how our ancestors lived.  It was no different on our recent trip to Ireland. Besides visiting many ancient sites, we also took in several folk parks featuring recreations of past ways of life, a deserted Famine-era village Slievemore on Achill Island, the Dunfanaghy Workhouse , and the Irish Wake Museum (awesome!).  I was particularly interested in sites which told the story of the Great Famine, as I have documented members of my Kilbride kin leaving Ireland between 1846 and 1850, in the midst of what was known as An Gorta Mór—The Great Hunger. 1 Ireland's west was particularly hard hit during this time, and given that some of my Kelly and Ryan records state their County Mayo origins, I know that these families likely suffered greatly before making that heartbreaking ...
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BUTTER COOKIES

Mom's Butter Cookies, displayed on a poinsettia plate which she hand-painted in 1958.

By Nancy Gilbride Casey

For as long as I can remember, there have been Mom's Butter Cookies for Christmas. Sometime in the late 1960s or early 1970s, my mom, Ann Gilbride, purchased an aluminum cookie press, and began to make dozen upon dozen of butter cookies each holiday. Grandparents, siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles and so many of her friends and co-workers enjoyed those cookies over the years, either at our home or in cookie packets made up to be taken home. Everyone knows what you're talking about when you mention the Butter Cookies.

They would fill cookie tins and plates, row upon row of them: little Christmas trees decorated with green sugar sprinkles, star-shaped ones with not one, but exactly two chocolate chips pressed together in the center (Mom was pretty particular that they look that way), and of course, the little gingerbread-man shaped ones, with a cinnamon heart in the center.

The smell of those butter cookies baking is one of my favorite memories of Christmas, and one, luckily, I have been able to continue. Mom gave me a plastic cookie press at one point, so the kids got to make the cookies too.

After Mom passed in 2010, I asked for her cookie gun when we were going through her house. But the next holiday, one piece of it slipped down into the garbage disposal and bent, making it unusable. I still had the plastic cookie press she had given me, so we still had cookies. But it wasn't quite the same. Last year, the plastic press gave out—its discs cracking, the press mechanism stripped.

But this year, I found the same vintage aluminum model as hers on eBay and bought it. So, I will make the butter cookies again in a tradition which has been ongoing for about 50 years now. My kids Anne and James will help decorate.

If you have a cookie press, and want to recreate Mom's Butter Cookies, here's her recipe:

MOM'S BUTTER COOKIES
1 lb. unsalted butter, softened
1 c. sugar
2 eggs
5 c. pre-sifted flour.

1. Cream butter and eggs well
2. Add eggs and mix
3. Add flour 1 cup at a time (dough will be really thick)
4. Separate dough into 4 equal parts. Using food coloring, dye each batch of dough a different color. Mom used yellow. blue, green and red, to make pastel-colored cookies. (You will have to work color into dough with your hands, and yes, having your hands streaked with dye for a few days is part of the tradition!).
5. Using cookie press, press out a variety of shapes onto ungreased cookie sheets. Decorate as desired.
6. Bake at 350F degree for 10-15 minutes.


Merry Christmas to all!



Until next time... 





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