Gam's Slivered Almond Cookies

Above: Gam's Recipe for Slivered Almond Cookies.

My meanderings down memory lane have inspired me to find my grandmother's recipe for Slivered Almond Cookies... which I had photographed from her hand-written mini-cookbook sometime last spring or summer. Then I put the cookbook away with other memorabilia - which meant it would be easier to find as a jpeg in my files!

Here is her recipe - mind you, neither of my two sisters nor I have managed to make them taste the way they used to when Gam and Pop made them. So there are no promises, should you decide to try the recipe. Besides, Gam neglected to mention the time and temperature for baking them!

The following photos show my progress in making the dough tonight...

We three gals all decided that it must be the lard that makes the difference - so I used Crisco (solid) for that part of the recipe. I was feeling super-confident that these cookies are going to turn out wonderfully well so I made a double batch! I also decided that hand-mixing was required since Gam and Pop would not have used an electric mixer. They did have one, but it was never used on cookies, or any other dessert items that I can recall. And, as it turned out, the hand-mixing was quite easy. After all, there's all that butter & Crisco with the sugar, and then there are 6 eggs so the doubled flour was relatively easy to mix in. As bar cookies, they were a bit mushy, as the photos show - hence the importance of refrigerating overnight!

As to the success of the cookies, that remains to be seen since they just went into the fridge. I'll be bringing them to Pennsylvania tomorrow to bake them there at our daughter & son-in-laws home. But I'll tell you this much, the cookie dough was marvelous! I licked every utensil clean...