Last month's Newsletter is Here.

December 1999

CHRISTMAS BAKING

I remember the baking of Christmastime, back to when I was a toddler, my nose still below table level. I would pull myself up to see what was cooling there, what smelled so good. On Christmas Eve, I was just about eye-level with the sideboard where platters rested, piled with decorated pierniki, fragile, powdered chrust, and elegant loaves of strucla, sliced and fanned out to show their black and gold spirals.

This was a Polish immigrant world, rich in tradition as well as in butter. Pierniki were small honey-spice cookies, cut out in shapes and painted with a sugar glaze. Chrust actually means frost; these cookies were made of paper-thin dough, pulled into fantastic, spiky shapes, and deep fried to a delicate crispness before being dusted with powdered sugar. Strucla might sound more familiar to you if I said strudel - ours was a buttery yeast dough rolled up with a sweet poppy-seed filling.

Many of us have such memories. They pierce us with the first whiff of cinnammon and cloves. For me, it's the fragrance of spices baking with honey, and the taste of poppy seeds ground into a paste with sugar, almonds and raisins. I watched my mother grind it three times over in the heavy, cast iron food mill; this only happened once a year.

Everybody baked. My mother did her share, and the aunts and godmothers came in carrying their special things, all laid out on trays. After the ritual Christmas Eve supper, we all went into the living room, where the cookies and cakes, dried fruits and confections were brought in and arranged on the low coffee table near the Christmas tree, and I could get a good look at last.

Then the presents were opened, and in the general hubbub, we children could eat all we wanted of these sweet and delicious things. The bounty was so great that the plates and trays seemed always full, no matter how much we took.

When I was ten, my family moved to California, leaving the Polish clan in Michigan behind. This only spurred my mother on to greater efforts. Now she had to bake everything. As I grew to be a teenager, one of the few things I did willingly in the kitchen was to participate in the Christmas work. And with me, the new world began to enter into our baking.

I saw a recipe for tiny, bon-bon sized fruitcakes in Seventeen magazine. They struck me as unutterably sophisticated; I had to make them. I glanced at the baking time - fifteen minutes. Good, I thought, they were fast. I alotted about half an hour and set to. Four or five hours later, when I was putting them in the oven, I had learned something.

The mini fruitcakes became part of the tradition, and stuck for years. Big fruitcakes followed. Other Americanisms crept in - my mother discovered rum balls. My sister made gingerbread men, and peppermint patties.

Things were added to the must-bake list, but nothing ever seemed to drop off. For weeks before Christmas, the kitchen was warm and filled with heady fragrances. Every evening, something was cooling on the counter. A cupboard under the breakfast bar was dedicated for storage. We wrapped fruitcakes in rum-soaked clothes. We nested confections into candy boxes that had been saved for the purpose. We filled large tins with cookies, and sealed them up. The arsenal grew.

It was inevitable that we would start shipping things out. Even we, with our very sweet teeth, sensed that it was too much. So another tradition took hold. We packed boxes carefully, like puzzles, and mailed them to relatives in Michigan. For neighbors and nearby friends, we made trays: lavish assortments, ready for admiration and consumption.

To haul out and open all that had been cached under the breakfast bar was a production, so we began to assemble these trays all at one time. Every available surface was covered with opened containers, spilling forth their sugary contents. Trays lined with doilies marched down the middle of the long table, and I swooped around it all like a madwoman, arranging jewel-like slices of Dundee cake, rum balls, traditional Polish spice cookies, American fudge, candied orange rind and Russian teacakes. The deluxe trays, for very good friends, each had a slender, decorated strucla as a centerpiece. The finished trays had to be delivered at once, and my dad would go out and add to the holiday traffic.

For years after I went away to college, I would come home for Christmas, and this always remained my job. It never failed to amaze me how much of all this baking we could give away, and still have so much left for Christmas Eve, and all the days that followed. Enough, in fact, to gain a few pounds every year, and do the traditional January diet with the rest of the world.

Now, I stay at my house for the holidays, making a home for my own kids, but some time in the week before Christmas, a big box arrives on my doorstep. My sister unfailingly sends her spectacular Russian teacakes, and her favorite fresh ginger cookies. My mother, who lives near her, adds a fruitcake, still wrapped in its rummy cloth, and maybe pierniki, not yet decorated, because that job is saved for my boys. A day or so before Christmas, another box arrives. It's the strucla, in its solitary, express-mail glory, because it is a yeast cake and must be very fresh.

Sometimes I send out a few boxes of my own. And every Christmas Eve, I arrange the large platters for my party, and I make trays for my guests to take home. As I write this, I am working on my list. This year I'll make pierniki, as always, and spicy pfeffernüsse. I'll make gingerbread men and Swedish butter cookies, and I plan to add some biscotti, a new favorite. I will also make persimmon cookies, because my son has been begging for them. I'm counting on my sister for the Russian teacakes - and so is everyone who comes to my house.

Now, I'd love to stay and chat, but I've got to go clean out a cupboard and find my tins...

Looking for recipes?

In The Vegetarian Epicure, you'll find recipes for pierniki and strucla, as well as leckerli, a pannetone, and a very nice stollen. In The New Vegetarian Epicure, there is an excellent guide to biscotti, and recipes for anise cookies, brownies, and my sister's Russian tea cakes (in case you're not on her list).

In the New Recipes section this month, you will find the latest addition to my Christmas baking spree - the persimmon cookies that we can only make at this time of year, while the Hachiya persimmons ripen.

December 1999 recipe