Proust had his madelines, and Wall Street Journal reporter Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan has her grandmother's pineapple tarts. "The salty, buttery, bite-size circles topped with quarter-size dollops of dense, homemade pineapple jam were an obsession for me," she says.

She always assumed that one day her grandmother would teach her how to make the tarts, using her secret family recipe. Sadly, her grandmother died when Lu-Lien Tan was 11 years old, leaving her to attempt making the tarts on her own.

Lu-Lien Tan found that cooking was more difficult than her grandmother made it seem. "My failures were legion." On a recent trip to Singapore, she managed to gather together a troop of "aunties," elderly relatives who knew The Secret Of The Cookies. They walked her through the process, which was arduous and labor-intensive. (For one thing, the recipe begins with the production of pineapple jam, which requires quite a lot of prep work.)

Lu-Lien Tan's article is an homage to family recipes, and a poignant tale of remembering a woman through her heritage of cooking. She reports that people still talk about her grandmother's favorite recipes, and the way that she would sometimes wake up at 3 A.M. to start baking the family's lunch.

Her article is wonderful, and delicious, and a little bit sad. And it includes the recipe for the famous pineapple tart cookies, such as she was able to gather from the informal cooking session she attended. The recipe itself was never written down - no good family recipe ever is! Click here for the article.