I had meant to get Rose's Christmas Cookies, because 's tomes on bread and cake are thorough and useful. Her cookie book is ruined by "These unsurpassable cookies were first served me by lovely Friend Cabot on her grandmother's gracious Sèvres", etc., a species of cookbook-filler I reprehend, especially when it causes page breaks in the actual recipes. On suspicious re-examination, the bread and cake tomes do have more personal-history fluff than I approve of, but the ratio of fluff to recipes is tolerable.
"Gracious" is as self-destructive an adjective as "classy".
One of the Christmas Cookies is a beautiful gingerbread model of Notre Dame Cathedral, with a remarkably detailed rose-window made of melted sugar candies.
Anyhow, so, Gillespie's cookbook is extremely dense: no single cookie recipe takes more than a quarter of a page, there are useful tables of adaptations and weights and measures, and the cookies are ordered by name and then indexed both by type (bar, drop, refrigerator) and by ingredients. Excellent principles.
Most of the cookies aren't very good, though. I thought perhaps it was because they called for margarine rather than butter, but changing that didn't help; I've fiddled with the protein-content of my flour, in case "all-purpose" varies coast to coast; but no, they're always too sweet and too gummy. We might just have fundamentally different tastes in cookies. (One of these recipes has artificial bacon bits in it, for instance. Genius or madness? It's even better than that: they are Breakfast Cookies and the other flavorings are orange juice concentrate and Grape-Nuts. Next: Sartre's cookbook.)
Find in a Library: Rose's Christmas Cookies
Find in a Library: 1001 Cookies
So wrote clew in Cookery.