Jessica Wright of Ellicott City, Maryland, was in search of the recipe for a peanut butter cookie like the one she remembers from her school days in the Harford County, Maryland, public schools. She said that when she was a student there in the late 1970s and early ’80s, the cafeteria served the best peanut butter cookies.

The cookies were very large, and each came in a waxed paper bag, Wright said. Over the years she has tried many peanut butter cookie recipes, but they just are not as good as those cafeteria cookies.

Leslie Heiderman-Schell of Severn, Maryland, sent in a cookie recipe she has had for many years. When she was a young teacher in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, the faculty put together a cookbook, and the head cafeteria cook, Ruth Blockinger, contributed the peanut butter cookie recipe for the collection.

Heiderman-Schell thought because the recipe was served in a school cafeteria and is likely the same vintage as the one Wright was looking for, it might produce a similar cookie.

This is a basic but deliciously wholesome-tasting, old-fashioned peanut butter cookie.

Sadly, the days of finding homemade cookies like these in any public school cafeterias are long gone. So bake up a batch and take yourself back to those good old school days.

Requests

Katie Haines, of New York City, is looking for the recipe for the “amazing” lemon vinaigrette salad dressing that was served on the arugula and endive salad she had at Earth Wood and Fire when visiting Baltimore recently.

Valerie Serao of Stony Point, New York, is looking for a recipe she has lost for carrot cake that might have come from The New York Times sometime in the late ’70s or early ’80s. The one thing she remembers is that the raisins were soaked in dark rum to plump them up. The cake also contained walnuts.