December 2000 Letter

TRADITION

Christmas is upon us again and, like many others, I'll be in the kitchen, honoring customs.

After all, tradition is what holidays are about: the shared, repeated acts that bind us together. We celebrate the fact that we belong to something - a family, a group, a culture, a history.

Children are intuitive and fierce traditionalists. As soon as my boys could talk, they were dictating what had to happen. We had to have big gingerbread men and spicy, decorated pierniki, because we always had them (when you're three or four, last Christmas constitutes always) We had to have a thirteen foot tree because we always had one. Useless for me to point out that we had once had a house with only an eight foot ceiling and Christmas still happened.

Admittedly, I'm in cahoots with them. I love ritual, I cherish tradition. It is satisfying to experience all the familiar events as they unfold in their appointed order, and they can be charted by the aromas wafting through the house.

In early December, on successive nights, the kitchen is redolent with smells of cloves and cinnamon as spicy pierniki are made, then butter and vanilla when tender spritz cookies bake. In the middle of the month, the tree is wrangled into the living room. It's a mess for days, as cartons disgorge tissue-wrapped ornaments, but the whole house smells like a forest.

Nearing Christmas Eve, the aromas build in a sort of winter fugue - forest greenery, spice, woodsmoke, sugar and butter, and finally - for me, the culminating perfume of Christmas - wild mushrooms.

People have strong attachments to the foods they eat on special holidays. In my Polish family, wild mushrooms were always part of the festive Christmas Eve supper. They were cooked down with butter and onions and chopped to a fine-textured filling for uszki, the small, wrapped dumplings that went into the clear beet barszcz. Many other things were part of Christmas Eve, but those mushrooms were the most precious part to me.

For years, unable to get fresh porcini, my mother would buy a lavish supply of dried ones. The moment when we plunged those dark, wrinkled porcini into boiling water to start cooking them was bliss. I held my face to the steam and inhaled the irreplaceable essence of true forest mushrooms, something that spoke to me from generations in an unknown past.

Over the years, I've used wild mushrooms in special menus for Christmas, for Thanksgiving, and even for New Year's Eve, as anyone who reads this letter knows by now. I've made splendid soups, I've roasted mushrooms with reductions of wine, I've stuffed them and stirred them into risotto and wrapped them in pasta. They never disappoint. Their rich, earthy depth of flavor pairs with the greatest red wines in a way that makes celebration almost unavoidable.

Those of us who cook without meat give special thought to tradition at the holidays, because we're finding ways to connect our history with a new way of eating. Making a menu can sometimes be tricky. But tradition, like everything human, is not static. It evolves. (There was a time when there was no chocolate in Switzerland, no tea in England.) And I'm happy with the evolution of mine. I tinker with my menus and try things, but as long as my wild mushrooms are part of it, it feels like Christmas.

This year, I've designed a simple, elegant dinner menu for Christmas Day. It would work well for any dinner party in the cold season.

This meal uses my favorite winter ingredients. A creamy soup of roasted chestnuts and leeks starts the meal (see New Recipes), and what could be more evocative of the season? Then, a crisp, golden brown strudel of wild mushrooms. Strudel is not an everyday dish. It makes a nice showpiece, and fine eating - but is a lot easier to make than you think. As accompaniment, I'll serve a garnet-colored beet relish, and a salad bright with oranges, olives, and slices of fennel. For dessert, I'm making something that could easily become a new tradition: a snowy-white panna cotta in a pool of brilliant red cranberry-wine sauce. I'll have thin ginger cookies along with it.

It's an easy meal to serve, because the work is done well in advance, so dinnertime can find you looking good, a glass of champagne in your hand and a strudel in the oven. It works beautifully for six or eight people, and can easily be doubled for a larger group. Open your best bottle of wine, and have a wonderful Christmas.

December 2000 recipe