This is baking week in our house.
In our family, one of the ways we celebrate Christmas is by baking cookies and similar treats. Both my wife and I bake items that we inherited from our own family traditions. In her case the main contribution are kolacky (pronounced, at least by Chicagoans, "kuh-lotch-key"). These are conceptually simple cookies with a dough made of flour, butter and cream cheese, and a jammy fruit filling. The bakery department at our local grocery store sells kolacky, but they are not nearly as good as the homemade. This recipe, which includes step-by-step photos, is pretty close to what she does. The recipe describes this cookie as of Czech origin, and perhaps it is, but my wife's heritage is Slovak. It is just four ingredients, but there is a certain art to making it so they come out perfect. We've been married for 30+ years, and there have been years when I've contributed or even did all the mixing and baking myself, and if I may say so I am not a complete boob in the kitchen, but I've never quite mastered the knack as well as she has. She learned it as a girl from her mom.
I don't have the same strong sense of ethnic heritage that my wife has. My main contribution to Christmas is gingerbread cookies. These are sort of an adaptation of what my mom does - or did; she doesn't really bake for the holiday anymore. She used to make so-called Merry Christmas cookies, which are sugar cookies cut into a variety of Christmas-themed shapes (wreaths, Santas, bells, etc.) and frosted and decorated. In our house, we do the same but with gingerbread dough. They come out reasonably well, and when the kids were young they had a blast with the cookie cutters and the decorating. (Now that they're grown, they still enjoy it; on Tuesday, I will try to bamboozle them into doing it for me again this year.)
In addition to the kolacky and gingerbread cookies, we'll have chocolate crinkles (chocolate cookies sprinkled with powder sugar), peanut butter blossoms (a sort of peanut butter cookie, not criss-crossed with a fork, but with a Hershey's Kiss pressed into the middle of the cookie when it comes out of the oven); and fudge. And in recent years I've started making Rice Krispy Treats, not because they are particularly holiday-ish, but they are fast and easy and another variety of sweet. And one of my daughters has started making Mexican wedding cakes (which my mom calls Russian tea cakes).
Do you have any similar baking or food traditions for Christmas in your household?
We have a variation of kolacky here, spelled kolache. These have yeast-raised sweet roll dough instead of the pastry-cookie type that you describe. The baked product is supposed to be very light and tender. I have never been successful in getting it exactly right. Fortunately a church friend gave us some, and hers are perfect. My favorite are the cherry filled ones.
ReplyDeleteWith cookies, there seems to be two schools of thought. One is that there is only one kind of cookies, chocolate chip. One of my brothers in law was of that school. Chocolate chip ones are fine, but they are cookies in ordinary time. Not Christmas cookies.
Our family had bazillion kinds of Christmas cookies. We didn't bake them all every year. I usually just do a couple or three. The one we can't do without are the cut out sugar cookies. Our older son was talking about those the other day, the ones with the holly leaf cookie cutter. And green frosting, with red M&Ms for berries.
I love gingerbread cookies, my grandma used to make them but I am the only one now in our immediate family who likes them, so I don't make them. I'd have to eat them all mysrlf, which could be done, but probably not a good idea!
ReplyDeleteFrom my mother's hand-written cookbook:
ReplyDeleteThumb cookies
Rolled oats chocolate bit cookies
Stone crock cookies
Jubilee jumbles
Chocolate drop cookies
Walnut cookies
Creme rolls
Poor boys cookies
Peach scones
Snow balls
Apricot Rolls
Easter Nut Rolls
Sour cream cookies
Orange rolls
Chocolate Bon Bons
Mom started baking Christmas cookies around Thanksgiving putting them in the freezer. After she died, I continued the custom, starting baking them here at home and then continuing when I joined Dad for Christmas. After he died, I would bake some to bring to his sister when I visited at Christmas
Some of those recipe names are quite intriguing: stone crock cookies and poor boys cookies.
DeleteOur youngest son and his family are in Poland at my d-I- law’s late grandparents home with her parents and sibs.They just sent photos of the gingerbread house they made with the kids, cut out cookies, and pierogis that the kids cut out but grownups filled.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was growing up we didn’t have any baking traditions - no cookies etc. Neither my mom nor my grandmother were cooks or bakers. When our kids were growing up we did make decorated sugar cookies - with Christmas cookie cutters AND Hanukah cookie cutters because of the neighborhood kids. (Btw- the first day of Hanukah is tomorrow - late this year FYI just in case you meet up with any Jewish people during the next week) We also made box brownies dusted with powdered sugar and Russian Tea Cakes. Not very impressive. We all especially loved the sugar cookies.But I’m a lot like my mother domestically except that before my husbands fall I did more cooking than my mom, who relied heavily on three recipes and her beloved TV dinners. I usually cooked from s ranch and had a wider range of recipes.
Our eldest son is here with his family which has cheered up our Christmas immensely. But I am not making Christmas cookies with the kids.
It is truly a blessing to be celebrating Christmas this year - in our own home. I don’t remember much about Christmas last year except that my husband wasn’t doing well and we were all a bit worried - unspoken - that it might be his last Christmas.
A blessed Christmas to you all. 🙏
Anne, so glad you have made it home, and I hope being home will be a bit of comfort during this trying period of your life.
DeleteWishing you, your family, and all and their families a blessed Christmas. I'll be singing in the choir for "midnight" mass tonight (which begins at 10 pm), and then will be a deacon at one of the morning masses tomorrow.
I find the meaning of the season burrows itself a bit more deeply into my heart every year. I can't read some of the passages of this time of year - especially the Annunciation, and the Nativity - without tearing up a bit.
Don’t know anything about making cookies. My expertise lies solely in the consumption of them. And I am not a specialist. I eat and enjoy all sorts of cookies, gingerbread included.
ReplyDeleteAnne, what part of Poland is your son’s family visiting? Talking to my mother’s caregiver, I found out she was born in a Białystok hospital and grew up in Radziłow, close to my mother’s parents’ home towns, Słucz and Poryte. Very happy you are having another Christmas with your husband and family. A Merry Christmas to everyone here. Wesołych Swiąt Bożego Narodzenia!
Stanley, I love cookies but I would much rather eat them than make them! Although it was fun to make them when our sons were young. I don’t have the energy now. I’m still recovering from a very traumatic year. Just so happy to be home this year.
DeleteThe Polish family home is in Kazimierz Dolny in the Lublin district , on the Vistula River. My d-I- laws mother grew up there, and that’s where my son and his wife got married in 2015. It’s a charming town about 2 hours from Warsaw, now very popular with artists and as a weekend getaway for the city folk. After both grandparents passed away, the house went to their daughter (our son’s mother in law) and son, who lives in Warsaw. The son in Warsaw wanted to sell the house - I don’t know if it’s been sold. My daughter in law, her sibs, and her mother wanted to keep it. My son’s mother in law might have bought out her brother’s share, because it’s been a few years since the grandparents passed away. My son and family generally spend 2 weeks of every summer in France, where his wife grew up with her French father and family. Then they go to Poland for a month. They now spend every other Christmas in Poland also. The problem is maintaining it at a very long distance. The brother in Warsaw doesn’t want to maintain it. He’s a college professor as is our son’s mother in law. (His wife is Russian. I met her at the wedding. They both spoke English well. .He did a year teaching at Syracuse University. Our son’s mom in law and her brother grew up under Russian rule and both speak fluent Russian, as well as Polish, English and French!) But she’s retiring in June from the University of Nantes in France. Her husband has already retired so they might spend more time in Poland going forward.
Wiki entry on KD. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazimierz_Dolny
DeleteWow. Beautiful town. Might put it on my itinerary if I visit Poland again. Polish houses looked built to last. No ticky-tacky there. Multilinguality in Europe is always amazing. Growing up in the Tzar-dominated part of Poland, my grandmother spoke Russian well. One of my cousins had a husband who learned Russian in the USAF to monitor their military broadcasts. At family gatherings, my grandmother and he would speak in Russian.
DeleteIt looks like it’s about 3 1/2 hours south of where your grandparents were from.
DeleteThere are some traditional Christmas recipes which haven't time -traveled very much. My mom used to made plum pudding sometimes. It didn't have plums, and wasn't pudding. It was more like a spiced cake with raisins which was steamed. She also made a pioneer era mincemeat pie. It actually did have meat, and a bunch of other stuff. And a batch of the filling required a fifth of brandy and a fifth of Madeira. It was well preserved. And quite a heavy dessert. I have made a more modern vegan mincemeat recipe which is good. My mother in law made green tomato mincemeat, also with no meat.
ReplyDeleteFruitcake is another one which isn't as common now. I used to make fruitcakes when I was home from college on Thanksgiving break, and wrap them in a tea towel soaked in brandy to age in a cool place until Christmas.
One thing I do sometimes make is my great-grandma's cream candy recipe. I didn't do it this year. It is very sweet and rich , a piece or two will do. And then you have a lot of it that eventually dries up and gets thrown away.
I have to admit, I usually enjoy fruit cake. I don't think I've ever had the occasion to try mincemeat pie, but I've always been sort of interested in it. They sell jars of the filling at some of the grocery stores around town, but I don't doubt one could make the filling from scratch?
DeleteA steamed cake with raisins sounds wonderful! I think that is considered a pudding by the English? Maybe a distant cousin of a souffle.
Jim, you would probably like the made from scratch mincemeat (the kind without meat) better than the kind in a jar. It mainly consists of apples and dried fruit, primarily raisins, and spices. The recipe I use also has orange peel zest, molasses, and brown sugar. It can be cooked in a slow cooker.
DeleteWhat kind of meat did your mom's recipe call for? Guessing pork or chicken, because those sound kind of pioneer-y?
DeleteActually was beef. The pioneer ancestors were cattle ranchers.
DeleteDad and the uncles always bagged deer before Christmas, and my gramma made venison mincemeat, canned it, and then used it in Christmas pies. Those were the days before the everybody got those big chest freezers for their fish, turkeys, venison, and wild huckleberries. I never got any mincemeat pie because it was something Dad, Grampa, and the uncles scarfed up first.
DeleteAfter Christmas gramma made venison pasties with leftover carrots, rutabega, and onion. Wish I had one now!
My mom always thought my gramma's cooking was "old fashioned" and used recipes from magazines. Gramma never used a recipe, so I've had to cobble up approximations from scrounging old timey cookbooks.