Butter, Sugar, Flour, Salt
Avengers; Bucky; g; 535 words
The cookies are a pale golden brown, flat and round and crusted with sugar, and one bite brings him back to long days in the kitchen with his mother, beating the butter and sugar until his arms were sore.

innie_darling asked for Bucky baking holiday treats for More Joy Day. This is not quite that, but there are cookies. *g*

Or read it on AO3.

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Butter, Sugar, Flour, Salt

Bucky's memories come back in fits and starts. Steve is first—even when he'd been mind-wiped a hundred times, he'd still remembered Steve somehow. The things he did for Hydra are next—shadowy, blood-spattered nightmares that play like disintegrating film while he sleeps. He usually spends a couple of hours on the internet afterwards, all the lights in his shitty apartment on to keep the darkness at bay, researching to find out what's real and what's not.

It takes a while longer for him to recall his family: the scent of lavender reminds him of tucking his sisters into bed; a whiff of cigar smoke is his father slouched in an arm chair after a long day at work; the briny ocean air is a day on the boardwalk at the beach and tumbling in the surf as the waves knock him over.

His landlady in Bucharest likes to bake, and one day she brings him a chipped plate full of cookies. They're a pale golden brown, flat and round and crusted with sugar, and one bite brings him back to long days in the kitchen with his mother, beating the butter and sugar until his arms were sore. His mother would take back the bowl and laugh indulgently at his complaints. He'd never appreciated her strength before, and now it's much too late to let her know.

The old woman's eyes light up when he asks her to show him how to make them, and she leads him down into her bright, cluttered kitchen and walks him through the recipe.

He can't say if it's exactly the same—he doesn't remember having to separate eggs, but then, he also didn't remember his own name for sixty years, so what does he know? But the taste—the taste is familiar. There were always a couple cookies in his lunchbox, along with a mealy apple and a thin ham sandwich, and a few more after school with a tall, cold glass of milk. He might not remember the details, but he doesn't need to, with the taste of childhood on his tongue.

She teaches him to make a few other things—basic bread, lentil soup, and honey and spice cookies that taste like Christmas—but he always comes back to the butter cookies.

Later, when his memory is less full of holes, he bakes the cookies for Shuri in thanks she won't accept any other way, and then for the children who cluster around his tent in wide-eyed curiosity. The kids call them grandpa cookies, because they're so basic, with none of the spices, nuts, or decorations they're used to, but they eat them all the same. Usually while ignoring his warning not to ruin their dinners. (He's apologized to their parents more than once, but it doesn't stop him from pulling out the cookie jar whenever the kids visit.)

Now he uses a fancy stand mixer instead of elbow grease, and some kind of fancy future oven Shuri assures him is environmentally sound and also won't burn down his hut, and he knows the farmer who churned the milk and he's collected the eggs himself from his own hens, but the cookies still taste like home.

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The recipes I was thinking of are here and here, though both contain nuts, I just figured you could easily leave them out. And here is a recipe for Romanian honey and spice cookies.

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