Forgive me as I reveal a slice of my cloying (literally) Rockwellian childhood Christmas memories: At my grandmother’s house at Christmas, you were never more than five feet away from a tray of cookies. And that’scookies, plural. Sugar cookies andcowboy cookiesandRussian tea cakesand those little chocolate-covered peanut clusters. My grandma’s house had cookieseverywhereduring the holidays—little trays of them laid out all over the house, like some delightfully evil Sephora mascara cross-merchandising scheme, enticing you to eat them even if you were just on your way to do laundry. My favorite fixture of the bountiful holiday cookie spread were always the Hello Dolly bars.
A Hello Dolly by any other name would taste as sweet as anydessertthat’s doused with an entire can of sweetened condensed milk. And the Hello Dollydoeshave many other names. The bar cookie, composed of layers of graham cracker, coconut, chocolate, butterscotch, and nuts, appears on many Americanholiday cookietrays, but you can find the same recipe under the name Seven Layer Bars, Magic Bars, and Coconut Dream Bars these days.
According to a little internetresearch, the dessert floated around local newspapers and small magazines nebulously before the 1960s, called even more names, such as Graham Chip Squares, Chocolate Graham Squares, Washington Cookies, Chewy Delights, and Seven-Layer Cookies. Then, in 1964, the Broadway MusicalHello! Dollyopened on Broadway. A year later,The Weekmagazinefeatured a recipefor a Hello Dolly cake, submitted by 11-year-old Alecia Leigh Couch of Dallas, Texas. (She, like me, learned the recipe from her grandmother.) That same year, the Ada, OklahomaEvening Newsalsopublished a recipefor Hello Dolly cookies. Both the cake and the cookies featured that crucial combo of condensed milk, graham crackers, and coconut.
There’s a dinner scene inHello! Dolly, but as far as I can tell from watching too many YouTube clips of local theater productions, it features no real reference to a dessert of this nature. The bottom line seems relatively simple. The recipe really took off in popularity in the 1960s, a time that coincided with the popularity of the Broadway musical, and thus their names became linked.Hello! Dollywas the longest running musical on Broadway for a while, and the cookie has its own enduring legacy: a place on grandmas’ cookie trays the country over. The recipe, under the name Magic Cookie Bars, has even appeared on the back of theEagle Brand condensed milk can.
不管你怎么称呼它们,真正的奇迹this bar lies in its texture. The pressed graham cracker-butter crust and the nuts (which are crucial in my opinion, though some recipes omit them) add crunch. The sweetened flaked coconut and condensed milk add chew and richness. The combination is a textural marvel—or maybe not that, but the exact combination oftexturesthat I want out of a dessert, at least. There’s nuttiness—from the nuts, yes, but also from the caramel flavor of the butterscotch. Semi-sweet chocolate adds depth.
And all of this comes with so little effort. Making Hello Dolly Bars involves not much more than opening bags of delicious stuff and spreading and pressing and sprinkling them into a square cake pan before baking. This also means that unlike mostbaking, the recipe is endlessly riffable. In fact, no two Hello Dolly recipes ever appear the same, really. Some omit the butterscotch, some omit the nuts. Some call for a specific kind of nut, while others say you can use whatever. (I prefer pecans because they enhance the toffee notes, for what it’s worth.) It’s the quintessential recipe scribbled on a notecard, translated and altered by generations to suit their tastes. The “best” name to call it and the “best” way to make it are inevitably just...whatever your family did.
I have just one suggestion upon tasting these cookies now, for the first time in years. They’re a little too sweet. I founda recipethat uses Ritz crackers, which appeases my broken every-dessert-needs-Maldon palate. I may make these cookies with that slight alteration from here on out. After all, it’s in the nature and history of the whole thing to riff. Then again, as Norman Rockwell proved, there’s an obvious delight in the cloying. And on that note, I’ll give you this: My grandma’s house belongs to someone else now, and the pretty trays that housed so many cookies have gone to some lucky estate-sale scorers, but the nostalgic taste of a too-sweet cookie lives on.
