You Can’t Be Too Thin or Too Crisp : Mrs. Travis Hanes’ Moravian Sugar Crisp Inc.; 431 Friedburg Church Road; Clemmons, N.C. 27012-9506, (910) 764-1402, <i> MasterCard, Visa </i>

A lack of money and a great recipe are what got Evva Hanes into the cookie business. Using an old family recipe, Hanes’ mother, Bertha Crouch Foltz, began baking sugar crisp cookies at Christmastime to supplement the income from the family’s small North Carolina dairy farm. Hanes took over the cookie business in 1960, and it’s been steadily growing ever since. So far, 30,000 people have sent away for the paper-thin Moravian cookies. Pretty amazing, considering the small, family-run company doesn’t advertise or wholesale its products.

Hanes is a seventh-generation Moravian-American. The Moravians, persecuted for their religious beliefs throughout their history, first settled in this country more than 250 years ago. Today there are large Moravian communities in Pennsylvania and North Carolina.

True paper-thin Moravian cookies are difficult to roll, yet the women who bake cookies for Moravian Sugar Crisp hand-make each batch, which is then cut into rounds, hearts and scallops.

You can tell that the company is a serious operation when your first order arrives: It comes in a no-frills tin, without a fancy label or pretty tissue. The delicate cookies are stacked and cushioned in plain paper napkins, yet very few of the fragile cookies are broken.

The original sugar crisps are still the company’s best seller, but we prefer the spicy ginger crisps--the cookie has an astonishing gingery bite. Both are worth trying. Hanes makes chocolate, lemon, butterscotch and black walnut versions too. A one-pound tin costs $14, plus $1.50 postage and handling.