Kourabiedes

At this time of year, you can often find me kneeling by the printer, but this year I've been spending time around our new Thermador PRG 304 Professional hearth where it is warm and cozy. We have no tree, no twinkling lights and the only Christmas music is heard by me or Chaim singing "Happy Birthday Micky Jesus".

So I Baked Cookies: Kourabiedes (Greek sugar cookies) in fact. Unfortunately, I haven't moved all my books from the studio and thus, the recipe is still tucked into the piano music in a box, so I had to look it up. I remember it to be a pretty easy recipe, consisting of only flour, sugar and butter. The three or four recipes I looked up had completely different measurements for the proportions for the three ingredients, some of them off by 1/2 cup, so I'm just winging it this year. They turned out pretty good though, and the house smells fabulous!

Ingredients (for this batch):

about 4 cups of flour plus a few handfuls more.
about 1-1/2 lbs of butter
2 cups of powder sugar plus a few more cups for dusting
3 tbsp ground cloves
1tbsp Madagascar vanilla
1 tsp baking powder
3 egg yolks
1/4 cup Johnnie Walker Gold Label 18 year old Scotch (I couldn't find any brandy)
1-1/2 cup chopped almonds

Beat, mix, fold, all ingredients until the hand mixer starts to stall, and begins to smell like the motor is about to burn out. Then take over by hand, and knead to finish mixing. Roll into small balls the size of a grape, then smaller about the size of a frozen green pea, for the second batch when you realize they expand and will not fit into the small tins. Bake in a 350 degrees oven for 15 minutes. Let cool and dust with remaining powder sugar.


Excerpts from the following story was included in a Holiday card a few years ago. Here it is in it's entirety explaining why I love these cookies so much.

Bach Inventions with Sassa

Sassa Maniotis was my piano teacher when I was six. She went to Juilliard a long, long time ago. Her husband was an important geneticist who taught at Washington University, and they were the most interesting Greek couple who lived in a very large 3-story Tudor house behind the school. In the front room where most people had plushy upholstered couches and end tables, she had two Steinway Grand pianos. This is where I used to go for lessons once, then later twice a week. She always had a Pall Mall unfiltered cigarette hanging out of the corner of her mouth. She would keep time to my Bach by clapping loudly over my left shoulder. After each few measures, she would spit the stray tobacco from her mouth and shout “AGAIN!” When I got older and started wearing jewelry, big 1980’s bracelets and plastic rings, she would make me remove them at the door, so it would not hinder my practice. I once asked her what she thought of Liberace and she just grunted. Grand pianos were made to be a shiny jet black not a blinding white after all. She would inspect my overgrown nails before stepping up to the bench. If she found them to be more than an eighth of an inch in length, she would make me bite them down to the quick. She disliked the clicking of nails more than Liberace’s white pianos. I describe her as though she could be frightening and militaristic, but once you got past the fear, and became accustomed to her chain-smoking habits, she was a good woman, and a wonderful teacher.

I once sprained my right wrist playing softball and she composed a short piece, a left-handed invention for me to practice on during the two weeks my right hand was out of commission.
During the holiday season, when I arrived for my lessons, I could count on the haze of smoke mingling with the welcoming scent of cloves and cinnamon, and on the front foyer table, a tin of Kourabiedes, delicious traditional Greek cookies coated with ample powdered sugar that she had just baked. It was hard to sneak a handful of the treats. It’s as if the cookies were designed with so much powdered sugar that when I tried to take more than my share, I would be left with the incriminating dusting of white on my hands and clothes.

One year, the Thursday before Christmas, Sassa asked me to come early for my lesson. Not having practiced as much as I should have, I was sure I’d be lectured before we began the warm up scales. Instead she invited me into her kitchen and we kneaded dough, and mixed together a sprinkle of this and a dash of that. That lesson was one of the most memorable: as I played the repetitive exercises of Czerny for my teacher/baker, and as my fingers became more limber with the warm-up, the house too became warm with the aroma of the Kourabiedes. Later that evening I went home with a copy of the recipe tucked between the Adagio and Allegretto of Beethoven’s Sonata Op. 31, No22.

This thick volume, where the flour-dusted recipe still holds place to this day, was given to me on my 15th birthday. Inside the first page of the cover, Sassa wrote this inscription: To Micki On her 15th B’day Use Beethoven Well Love Sassa Maniotis. Sassa presented this book to me after the kitchen lesson and we started right away working through the first Sonata. It was composed and dedicated to Joseph Hayden. I love the piece for just that fact alone.
Three months after that lesson, I was playing that piece without a metronome, keeping speed and time in my brain. 4 months after that, skipping 16 works, Sassa had me playing the last piece: Sonata Op. 31, No2. And 8 weeks after that I quit piano lessons for good. I had become a bratty uncontrollable teenager, and piano was the last thing I wanted to be doing. By jumping to the last work, she almost knew that it would be the last piece I would play with her, and she probably wanted the both of us to feel that we had gotten through this daunting 341-page book together. On the pages of that last sonata, Sassa wrote a lot of demanding things with exclamation marks. Practice! Bring the metronome! There was a scolding tone in the pencil marks.

Recently, we visited Buffalo for one of Chaim's many cousins' Bat Mitzvah. His 9 year old nephew was there as well, a very good piano player. At our wedding he got right up with the band and played some keyboard. He is a fearless player. In Buffalo, he put on a concert for the family, making up programs and raffles, and even had a sing-along karaoke while he played back-up to our off key singing. He hit the notes, and was playing well, but I listened to him, remembering my practicing habits a year before I gave up the piano. I could hear that his heart was no longer in it; he played, just as I had, in quick ramming strokes, getting through the piece so that he could go on to the next song. When he missed notes, he didn't care, and kept going. I told Chaim that he will have retired his Suzuki books and quit by this time next year. Last time Chaim spoke to his sister, he found out that his nephew received a drum set for Chanukah, and we were sending him some wire drumming brushes wrapped with a bow.

Unlike the Suzuki method of teaching piano, Sassa did not rely on any one text, and would tailor a composer to each individual student, depending on many factors; their talent, their finger reach, basically what the student could handle. I have small hands, and could only reach one or two keys beyond an octave, but I loved Chopin. So probably against her discretion, Sassa changed the fingering as written and let me play Chopin. I was a mechanical player -- I could play anything when you put music in front of me, and I could sight read like nobody’s business. But…I could never play anything unless there was sheet music in front of me or I had the piece memorized.

I played everything by rote. I so envied the players who could improvise, just sit down and start playing random notes, jazz players especially. The first guy in art school that I had a crush on, in fact, had this talent. He was not very attractive, a cross between a camel and Harry Connick Jr. But he could play piano like Harry Connick, and in smoky dive bars no less, making it that much more appealing. We'd sneak into the school auditorium, or the church down the street and he’d teach me to do the base line, the simple repetitive 3 or 4 chords, so we could play together. He could go on for hours and riff.

I must have had talent though. Especially compared to another of Sassa’s students, Joshua Cohen. Poor Joshua, he really tried hard but somehow just couldn't get it. He was the older brother of my classmate Anna, and had been taking lessons 2 years longer, but it took him 3 times more time to get the fingering down, or to remember that the piece was in A major not B#. I used to come for my lessons following him, so on the days when my mother dropped me off early, I’d have to sit on the runner carpet in the foyer and listen to him struggling. We would pass each other in the hall each time; me with a look of compassion, and he with a look of defeat. Poor Joshua.

When you type in the words Piano and Prodigy in the Google search engine, 80 percent of your hits will refer you to a cute Asian girl or boy sitting at the piano or holding a tiny violin. This percentage was higher in the early eighties I imagine, and growing up in a part of the country where there were few Asians, somehow in the back of Sassa’s mind, I think perhaps this is what she wanted me to become. After all, I was already living the stereotypical child prodigy life; being two grades ahead in math skills, going to Saturday Japanese language schools, and taking piano lessons.

One year, to get me further prepped for a life of competitions, Sassa signed me up for theory classes at the music conservatory, five blocks from the Maniotis house and one block from the public library. This meant that on top of my lesson with Sassa, I would be going to the conservatory one day a week to learn about note reading, intervals and scales, pitch values, triad inversions among other theories I was already playing but not really understanding.

I had been playing piano for about 7 years by then, so they first had to test me to see what level of theory I should be taking. The testing process was brutal. I was blindfolded and led into a room and seated in the far corner of what I assumed, by the echoes, of a large room. I heard feet shuffling, lots of sniffles, and whispering giggles of kindergartners. After what seemed like 30 minutes, an adult male voice cleared his throat, and spoke.

“Miss Watanabe, I will first play a note, then from it, a chord. First I will play it, and then will play it as an arpeggio. Please tell me what note on the keyboard, then tell me the chord, and what key the chord is in”

You must be joking… Every time I got the answer wrong, I would hear giggles, and shuffling. I sat in the corner blindfolded giving incorrect response after another, for what felt like an eternity, and when the blinds were removed, I saw that it was worse than I thought. In a large recital room, I had been sitting about 20 feet from a Steinway, and in another corner, about 25 3-4 year-olds were sitting classroom style facing me, giggling and shifting, swinging their legs. I ran out crying…

My theory teacher turned out to be a man in his mid-forties, with really, really, really bad b.o. I couldn't bear to concentrate when he leaned over to point out something on the sheet music. Music Theory Classes lasted about a month. By then, I think that Sassa realized I would not begin competing and I believe I quit piano cold turkey.

Looking back at the sheet music, I get glimpses of those days with nostalgia and sadness. My mother was right after all, I should have practiced more. Looking over Sassa’s handwriting, and the endearing notes she wrote in the margins, I long to have a place to keep a grand piano (even a baby grand) if not to play, but in memory of my beloved piano teacher.

Now in our new house, in a few weeks we will have everything the two of us owns in one single place. This seems unbelievable. Currently my electronic weighted keyboard upright sits to the right of my computer desk unplugged. It is now temporarily being used as place to pile all the papers and school books.

My new year resolution is this:

Once all the books are unpacked, I will open up the Bach Inventions, practice the scales and begin where I left off ,over twenty years ago and begin again with Beethoven.