French Lace Cookies: Lovely to look at, lousy to eat

I didn't expect Betty Crocker of all "people" to print a cookie recipe that is worse after baking.

French Lace Cookies ½ cup light corn syrup ½ cup shortening ⅔ cup packed brown sugar 1 cup all-purpose flour 1 cup finely chopped pecans Heat oven to 375°. Have cookie sheets lined with parchment paper. Heat corn syrup, shortening, and brown sugar to boiling in 2-quart saucepan over medium heat, stirring constantly. Remove from heat and gradually stir in flour. Then mix in the pecans. Drop batter by teaspoonfuls about 3 to 4 inches apart onto cookie sheet. To keep the batter from hardening between batches, perch the saucepan over a smaller pot of simmering water. Or, place a sheet of parchment paper onto the counter and drop teaspoon-size portions of dough onto it until you've used up all the batter-- don't worry about giving them room to spread. Let them sit for a minute or two to firm up. Then lift them off the paper and place them onto (paper-lined!) pans to bake, one batch at a time. Bake about 5 minutes or until set (they will still be bubbly on the pan-- you may not think they look done). Cool 3 to 5 minutes on the pan. Then slide the pan out from under the cookies, letting the whole paper sheet land on the countertop. Then allow to cool completely. Drizzle with melted chocolate when cooled, if desired. If you wish, you can roll these cookies up instead of serving them flat. Roll them around a wooden spoon handle (or other object of choice) as soon as they're barely cooled enough to handle (they need to be very hot). If they crack, put them back in the oven to re-soften and try again. Betty Crocker's 40th Anniversary Edition Cookbook, 1991

Betty Crocker's 40^th Anniversary Edition Cookbook, 1991

Today we're making another recipe I always saw when flipping through Mom's Betty Crocker book, always thought would be really nice, but never actually tried. Don't they look almost as pretty as the pizzelles?

As it happens, I've made the pizzelles too.

Like all good American things, these cookies start with shortening and corn syrup. I didn't know whether to turn on the burner or recite the Pledge of Allegiance.

It's never a good sign when your cookie dough (or whatever this is) has a slick of melted fat on top. But I figured that since following the directions got us in this mess, following the rest of the directions should get us out of it.

The recipe tells us to "gradually" add the flour and the pecans to the boiling-hot mixture. Usually, flour siezes into gummy clumps when you add it to something this hot, but I gave it a try anyway. It worked, which shouldn't surprise me. Say what you will about Betty Crocker's taste (especially from the fifties to the seventies), her recipes always work. 

As we noted a few recipes ago, I've come to appreciate nonstick pots after years of resenting that you're not supposed to use an electric mixer in one. I think this is another recipe that really makes you appreciate nonstick pots, even if you have to fret about scratching them.

When I added the pecans and tried a test spoonful, our dough (or whatever it is) tasted like half-decent pralines. And it looked like pralines when I dropped spoonfuls onto the pan.

The cookies spread a lot, which I understand is how they're supposed to turn out.

You can tell they printed this recipe before every supermarket had parchment paper. In the early nineties, you had to grease a pan and carefully get a spatula under the still-molten cookies. These days, you can just slide the pan out from under the paper and let it land on the counter.

After they had cooled, I could see why they call them French lace cookies. They had a sort of wispy, lacy look to them.

I'm glad I tried one before drizzling any chocolate on them. They are great for looking at, but not good to eat. I thought they'd be super-delicate and crisp, but they were more like forgotten hard candy that melted and then re-hardened in a hot car. They tasted really bland and got stuck in your teeth. The unbaked cookies were decent (ish) brown-sugar fudge balls (or something like that), but I don't recommend putting them in an oven.

I'll give the Betty Crocker people credit: The recipe does exactly what it promises. It just isn't very good. And it made me want to make pralines because the raw dough was so close to being good ones.