Coronation Grape, Rosemary, and Anise Seed Linzer Cookies
I have to credit my pastry-chef-friend, Michelle Beausoleil, for introducing me to the timeless pairing of rosemary and coronation grapes back in 2010. Anise seeds turn them into a glorious trifecta.
I fell in love in Vancouver.
I did not expect to fall head over heels in love here. Vancouver started out as the city where I got my heart broken. Fourteen years ago, Vancouver was only a brief stint in my life’s journey. My life was still very much rooted in Toronto. I chose to nurse my broken heart here for a few months before deciding to head back home. I took some time to explore a city that—for me—felt more like a small town than it did a big city. Still, I found the quality of produce, markets, and food here to be far more superior; there was so much emphasis on locally-grown produce. Farm-to-table was not a trend; it was a way of life here. It would be a few more years until I would first discover our year-round farmers’ markets—ultimately, the markets are how Vancouver finally won me over.
I knew only one person; I had met her online. She pretty much made up my entire social circle in Vancouver back then—she and her then surf-rock-guitarist boyfriend. I was friendly with her more than I was with her boyfriend, but he was also a far more accomplished photographer than I was back in 2009; that piqued my interest and forced me to try and get to know him. I was a recent contemporary art graduate, and I had absolutely no idea where and how to use my degree in Visual Arts. He was actually making a living doing photography, which is something I aspired to do. Back then, I wanted to be a music photographer. My friend’s boyfriend knew this, and in an effort to get me indoctrinated into the indie music scene in Vancouver, he invited me to take photographs of his band during one of their gigs at a dive bar downtown.
It was in that dive bar where I met my now-husband. He was their band’s brand-new bassist. There were immediate sparks between us from the very beginning. And the rest, as they say, is history—thirteen years so far.
In November 2010, I said goodbye to Toronto and made the permanent move to Vancouver to be with my now-husband, though if you were to ask me thirteen years ago, I thought this move wouldn’t be so permanent. I had imagined the both of us moving first to Montreal, and then back to Toronto after a few years in Vancouver, but when I was rejected from the MFA program in my post-undergrad art school of choice—Concordia University—here I continued to stay. Vancouver is where my husband’s work connections lay, and because my career choice—photographer—did not tie me down to any one specific city, Vancouver became my new home.
I secured my first full-time job in Vancouver as a retail sales associate for a loose-leaf tea company that had a fairly sizeable brick-and-mortar shop and cafe in South Granville. It was a cute place filled with the most amazing people working there. Some of these women were my first-ever friends in Vancouver! One of them, a trained pastry chef, made all the tea cafe’s scones and desserts in-house. Michelle Beausoleil—then Michelle Fattore—first introduced me to the magical pairing of coronation grapes and rosemary through her seasonal scone menu. When I arrived that November, coronation grapes were no longer in season, but after reading the cafe’s past seasonal menus, I asked her what a coronation grape tasted like. I had never heard of coronation grape before! Michelle described the grapes’ flavour to me as the most pure, most idealized flavour for a grape that ever existed. This Torontonian-slash-newbie-to-BC’s-epic-produce-gifts did not quite understand what she meant by that until my very first taste of coronation grapes in the fall of 2011. Michelle was totally on the nose there; coronation grapes were nothing like the sweet, one-dimensional grocery store grapes I was used to eating back home in Toronto! Coronation grapes have the most beautiful, deep, dark, blue-violet colour, and are simultaneously sweet and tart with complex liquorice and rosemary-like notes, which make them a natural pairing with rosemary, of course!
By late 2011, that same brick-and-mortar store had since closed down, but Michelle and I remained friends for a long time after the rest of the women all parted ways and moved to various other cities. She made me her coronation grape and rosemary scones once because I personally requested them… and let me tell you… they were beyond heavenly.
When I started planning out the recipes in Amalgam, I thought about Vancouver’s influence on the way I approach food today, which then led me to recall my first memories of the coronation grape and rosemary combo. I had wanted to recreate Michelle’s scones and give credit to the recipe idea entirely to her, but all my previous attempts to reverse-engineer her most perfect scone recipe were epic failures. Still, I wanted to include a coronation grape-and-rosemary-flavoured thing in my cookbook project somehow, so I played with all sorts of dishes. I made agrodolce. I made focaccia. I made drinking shrubs. I think I made a few more valiant attempts at a scone. They were all ok, but none of them felt like they were written with my culinary voice. Then, while planning my holiday baking one year, it hit me: linzer cookies!!! I can make linzer cookies out of coronation grapes and rosemary!
Cookies were not a food I consumed regularly as a child growing up in Quezon City; we ate mangoes, bananas, various other tropical fruits, and coconut milk-based desserts for our sweet fixes. Every year come December, during our massive family holiday celebrations in the Philippines, there would always somehow be an imported tin of Danish butter cookies and linzer cookies. I ate those with much gusto. But consumption of linzer cookies promptly stopped after we immigrated to Canada. I had all but forgotten my love of this classic Austrian sandwich cookie until a few years ago. This long-forgotten childhood memory of my eating linzer cookies for our Christmas festivities in the Philippines was suddenly unearthed, somehow, while I was racking my brain trying to figure out what to make out of coronation grapes and rosemary.
The addition of anise is entirely my own doing. I had wanted to add a spice or maybe even a spice blend to complement the rosemary and coronation grape, and at first, I thought… cardamom! I have used cardamom in my rosemary and coronation grape focaccia before! But… I have way too many cardamom-scented recipes in my notebooks and phone notes that I even considered dedicating an entire chapter to cardamom—my absolute favourite spice. So… no, I did not want to use cardamom again. But those delicate liquorice flavour profiles that I detected when I first tasted coronation grapes came to mind, so I set out to do a little taste test first. I had some coronation grapes in my fridge for me to play with, so I ate a few with a sprinkling of fennel powder. Delicious, elegant… but… not quite the thing I was after. I wanted something with a bit more of a punch. I dug out my tin of anise seeds and sprinkled them over my grapes. DING DING DING DING DING! We have a winner!
While I can most certainly start making this cookie anywhere between the late summer to about mid-autumn when coronation grapes are in peak season here in BC, linzer cookies belong squarely in the holiday baking list for me, so I really only make these cookies in December. Because coronation grapes are no longer in season during this time, I stock up on coronation grape jam from my favourite jam makers and producers here in Vancouver. Yes, I can make my own, and I have made my own, but I never make enough for when it is truly time to make this cookie, so I rely on other people’s culinary talents for this ingredient. For this recipe, I used Livia’s Coronation Grape Jam; it’s my favourite coronation grape jam in Vancouver. But… by all means, use a really good-quality grape jam if you cannot find coronation grape jam where you are; the cookies will still make for good eats!
This is a great cookie to make ahead in December because the dough freezes really well, and so do the ready-made cookies! I like to make the dough, roll it out, cut them into shapes, and freeze them around the second week of December, and then I bake them off and assemble the sandwich cookies two days before Christmas Eve or just before Christmas Cookie gifting! If I happen to make too much to give away or to eat, I freeze the already-assembled cookies and simply defrost them in the fridge overnight for when I want a cookie fix the next day.
Anise seeds pack a more flavourful liquorice punch and are a lot sweeter than fennel seeds; this pungency makes for the perfect complement to the juicy complexity of the coronation grapes and the herbaceous, almost evergreen-like fragrance of the rosemary. The anise seeds really stand up to the punchiness of the coronation grape and rosemary here, so if you find some at your local green grocers, take a packet home and experiment with them.