Calling Aunt Win

Who is Aunt Win and how long has she been making Dream Bars?

I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw the recipe in Kristian Hoffman’s article (“The Rift of the Magi”; Dec. 19). I’ve been making this cookie since 1934, having acquired it in my home economics class, and this is the first time I’ve seen it in print. What’s more, it’s one of the cookies I include in my “cookies to friends” each Christmas--and not one of my friends had ever tasted a Dream Bar until I gave them one.

I grew up in the Midwest. Did Aunt Win?

--HELEN TYMAC, La Mirada

Editor’s Note: Aunt Win actually grew up in Tennessee. In 1907 she moved to Los Angeles, where she lived above a grocery store on Hoover. Hoffman says no one in the family remembers where Aunt Win found her Dream Bar recipe, but she passed it on to his grandmother who later gave it to his mother. Still, in the Hoffman family, the cookies remain Aunt Win’s.