The Monogram Shop in East Hampton has always been a family affair. Valerie Smith opened the store with her daughter, Hadley, 27 years ago. And when her late mother, Constance Hoagland, was well into her 90s, she would be there, too, presiding over the desk and getting to know the customers.
“She loved coming into the shop,” Ms. Smith said. “She was a great asset in the store and I think lots and lots of people remember her being there.”
And while Mrs. Hoagland almost never baked, she did so for the customers, but only at Christmastime, when she offered samples of her thin, crisp, almost caramel-like cookies to holiday shoppers. Though she has been gone for two and a half years, she remains a tangible part of the Monogram Shop through these treats, which are now sold there under the label Mrs. Hoagland’s Cookies.
“The — pardon the pun — delicious irony of this whole thing is that my mother, whose recipe is responsible for the cookies, was herself a terrible cook,” Ms. Smith said last Thursday at her house in East Hampton, where she and her granddaughter Sophie Menges shared the story of how they came to package the confection.
Mrs. Hoagland “was sort of a legend in our family for burning anything she tried to roast or put in the oven or whatever, but something came over her at Christmastime,” Ms. Smith said. “It was just a very sweet, good-will thing, which was charming and adorable, and that was it. She never opened the oven again after Christmastime.”
The recipe had been closely guarded, and after Mrs. Hoagland died her daughter went looking for her recipe box, “which I kind of wanted to find because of the joke of it, but I also guessed that maybe the cookie recipe was held within the recipe box.” Sadly, the recipe box and anything held within it had been thrown away before Ms. Smith could get to it.
Mrs. Hoagland would have carried the secret recipe to her grave but for its brief moment in the spotlight in one of Laura Donnelly’s “Seasons by the Sea” columns in this newspaper a decade or so earlier. “She was just delighted” by Ms. Donnelly’s interest, and was quick to share her vague description of the recipe.
“She said, ‘It’s just the Nestle Toll House cookie recipe without the chocolate chips,’ “ Ms. Donnelly recalled on Monday. A professional pastry chef herself, Ms. Donnelly was dubious. She tried to reproduce the cookies at home according to Mrs. Hoagland’s directions, and when the recipe failed to replicate the “crispy, caramelly, almost butterscotchy” qualities of the original, she went back to the source. “I stood over her and she recited it to me and I wrote it down on Monogram Shop notepaper, which I still have, and they were exactly the way she baked them.”
Turns out, not only was the recipe preserved in the pages of The Star, but Ms. Donnelly, also a good friend of Ms. Smith’s, had kept it in her personal collection and was all too happy to share it back. “We have been making the cookies for the shop ever since,” Ms. Smith said.
They are baked by Laurie Mamay (check out her other creations on social media at Hamptons Foodie). Ms. Mamay produces about 20 packages a week of eight large cookies each, and they generally sell out every time.
The consummate saleswoman, Ms. Smith offers samples to customers. “The exercise goes like this: I will say to a customer, ‘Please do try a sample of my mother’s cookies.’ And that sort of gets at the heart strings. . . . And they immediately assume that this is going to be a pretty bad experience . . . ‘But hey, look, she seems like a nice lady and after all it’s her mother’s recipe and her mother’s dead, so I’m going to try a cookie.’ “ They try, they like, they usually buy. “It’s the identical scenario with each person. It’s very funny.”
Ms. Menges works with her grandmother in the shop and is helping with the social media side of things, promoting both the shop and the cookies. “Val and I talk about this all the time, about Nonnie and really having her legacy live on in the shop through our customers, through us.”
There had been much debate about what to name the cookies. “Mrs. Hoagland’s” won out in the end because “the properness of it” best spoke to her character. She always introduced herself as Mrs. Hoagland, and “until the day she died” always had her hair done perfectly, wore pearls, and had a fresh manicure, Ms. Menges said.
As uninterested as she was in the kitchen, Mrs. Hoagland “was a champion in many other areas of her life,” Ms. Smith said. She was a championship golfer at the Maidstone Club, a “crack bridge player,” and “a wildly successful real estate broker” both in Greenwich, Conn., and East Hampton.
“I’m very sad not to have my mother any longer, but she’s kind of with me every day.”
A package of Mrs. Hoagland’s Cookies sells for $20. They can be savored as is, but Ms. Menges also suggests crumbling them over ice cream or using them to make ice cream sandwiches.
“And you can have one little piece at a time . . . which doesn’t feel so sinful,” Ms. Smith said.
