Excerpted from <strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Gourmet-Cookie-Book-1941-2009/dp/0547328168?tag=food52-20 ">The Gourmet Cookie Book</a></strong> (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010) and slightly adapted. <br /> <br />"Preparing for Christmas, Gourmet's editors suggested a few mail-order gifts. These included: 6 live Maine lobsters, packed in seaweed and shipped in a free kettle ($9.92); a brace of Texas pheasants ($9); three 2-foot-long Louisiana sugarcanes ($1.19); a dozen sweet, stringless Colorado Pascal celery stalks "in a gay box" ($5.75); 3 Cornish pullets from the Danish humorist and musician Victor Borge, who bragged that his birds ate better than he did ($12.50); and 8 dozen fresh Long Island oysters in the shell ($5.50). If you wanted to offer your friends sweet benne wafers from South Carolina however, the only option was to make them yourself. A tin of the thin, chewy, caramelized sesame-seed cookies ("benne" is an African word for "sesame"), with their stark nutty goodness, is a truly wonderful gift."

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