Eat Pie, Love Life

February 10, 2014 by Leave a Comment

Right after Christmas I read a wonderful story in the Detroit Free Press about a woman who loves to make pies.

Linda Hundt, a Michigan State grad, spent the 1990s and more working full-time as an aide to former Michigan governor John Engler. She liked her job–but her passion wasn’t in politics, it was in pies.

While still working for the governor, Linda found the time to bake 60 pies a week in her church’s kitchen. She sold them from a refurbished food case on the front porch of her farmhouse.

She finally left politics in 2002 and a few years later, with the help of a home equity loan, Linda opened the Sweetie-Licious Bakery Cafe, an almost-too-cute pink-drenched shop in DeWitt, a small mid-Michigan town. There’s another branch in Grand Rapids and one coming soon in the Detroit area.

A national pie champ

Over the years Linda managed to win 16 first-place ribbons and one Best of Show in the Crisco National Pie Baking Contest, a 100-Year Anniversary Innovation award from Crisco and the Food Network Pie Challenge. She’s been written up in dozens of local and national publications.

I smelled a good Feed the Spirit topic, but it got even better when I went to Linda’s website. There I learned that she had also published a cookbook called–surprise!–Sweetie-licious Pies: Eat Pie, Love Life. I had to have it. And I love it!

A Valentine of a book

I decided to write about Sweetie-Licious this week because Valentine’s Day is upon us. Linda’s book is like a hardback Valentine, all pink and frothy, full of super-saturated color photos and gushing with love. If the recipes don’t make you yearn to sink your teeth into one of those pies, Clarissa Westmeyer’s gorgous photos will.

My daughter took one look at the book and burst out laughing, saying it looks like something from the 1950s. It’s true: just look at this photo of Linda and her mom, Joan McComb, opposite the book’s foreward. In the book at least, Linda always wears shirtwaist dresses (usually pink or red) with poufy crinolines and a June Cleaver-style apron. But that’s part of the fun of the book.

In her introduction, Linda, 50, describes how she got her start in baking with a Kenner Easy-Bake Oven. It was her favorite Christmas gift when she was 6.

The Easy-Bake was destroyed in a house fire when Linda was a young adult. Years later, Linda’s husband bought her another one for Christmas. When she opened the package, she said, “all the joy and love I’d felt from cooking and baking throughout my life came rushing back. I realized that my mission in life, my dream of changing the world one pie at a time and loving people through my food, all started from that little oven.”

While in high school, Linda made her first pie, coconut cream, for her boyfriend, John Hundt, who is now her husband.

Recipes and values to live by

After telling her personal story, Linda launches into the recipes. First there are recipes for crusts and toppings. One surprising detail: Linda recommends freezing the pie crust before filling and baking it. Another surprise: Linda doesn’t make double-crust pies. Many of her recipes call for a crumb topping. Other pies are topped with caramel, whipped cream or meringue or simple garnishes.

Then come more than 50 recipes for pies, each with a beautiful photo, and each with a story – about a person who made that particular pie or a person who really loved it.

The recipes are divided into chapters – not divided by the type of pie but by values Linda holds dear, qualities like Character, Faith, Gratitude and Joy.

All about love

In honor of Valentine’s Day, I’ll tell you what Linda has to say about Love, in her final chapter:

Finding love in all things in life is, I believe, truly life’s purpose. A heart bursting with love brings happiness to all who encounter it. Love fuels us, and when we find the “loveliness” in everyone, the world is simply sweeter. Hugs, deeds words, and kind gestures are all expressions of this most powerful virtue.

But baking a pie for someone may be the ultimate testament to love, as the love you bake in it will be crimped into every corner of the crust and suffused in every bite of filling!

So if you haven’t already bought that overpriced heart-shaped box of chocolates or ordered a dozen red roses, consider baking a pie for your sweetie this week. He or she will taste the love.

A true honey pie

I chose Linda’s West Virginia Honey Pie for this week’s recipe because the title is so appropriate for Valentine’s Day and because I’d never seen a honey pie before.

She created this recipe in memory of pleasant summer days spent with her grandparents at their farm in West Virginia. Her grandfather, a retired coal miner, enjoyed hunting, vegetable gardening and caring for bees.

Her grandmother would make pans of cornbread that Linda would drown with Grandpa’s golden wildflower honey. “My daddy always claimed that we all should work as hard as honeybees, as he too kept bees as a teenager during World War II,” Linda said.

(Come back next week for another Sweetie-Licious recipe in honor of President’s Day.)

An appreciation of Pete Seeger – and a ’60s recipe

February 2, 2014 by 1 Comment

I knew it would happen sooner rather than later. After all, he was 94 and increasingly frail. Still, I was very sad when I learned that Pete Seeger had died January 27.

Even though his career spanned more than seven decades, to me he always epitomized the 1960s, the era when I came of age. He was one of my personal heroes. From him I learned that music has the power to bring people together for good.

I met my best teenage friends at an art and music camp in Pennsylvania. Many of us were kind of misfits at our high schools, happy dorks when we were with each other. At our gatherings we didn’t listen to rock n’ roll, we  sang folk music, often while one or more of us played guitar.

Our favorites included several songs written by Pete Seeger: “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” (popularized by the Kingston Trio), “If I Had a Hammer,” (made famous by Peter, Paul and Mary) and “Turn, Turn, Turn,” (which became a No. 1 hit for the Byrds). Pete himself popularized “We Shall Overcome,” which originated with striking tobacco workers in the South and became the anthem of the civil rights movement. Pete sang everything from pro-labor and anti-war anthems to children’s songs to folk songs in a dozen languages. “My job is to show people there’s a lot of good music in this world, and if used right, it may help to save the planet,” he said.

Blacklisted by anti-Communists

From my lefty parents I learned that Pete had been a member of the Weavers, a quartet that led the folk music revival of the 1950s. I promptly bought a couple of LPs by the Weavers to complement my Pete Seeger records.

The Weavers’ career as a group tanked in the early 1950s during the McCarthyite anti-Communist witch hunts. After the Weavers broke up, Pete went out on his own. He played at folk festivals (including the granddaddy Newport Folk Festival, which he helped found), coffeehouses, union halls and college campuses, especially small, liberal schools like Reed, Oberlin and my alma mater, Antioch. He was the living embodiment of Antioch’s motto: Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.

Here’s an excellent obituary of Pete from Huffington Post. From another great obit, this one in the New York Times, I was shocked to learn that “Hootenanny,” a television show that featured folk singers, refused to allow Pete to appear on the program.

When I was a sophomore in high school, I loved “Hootenanny.” Once I made a poor date sit in my living room for a half hour before going out so I could catch Chad Mitchell’s appearance on the show. Because of the network’s mistreatment of Pete, many other performers – including Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Peter, Paul and Mary – boycotted the show. If I had known all this at the age of 15, I would have boycotted it too! “Hootenanny” finally offered to let Pete on the show if he signed a loyalty oath; he refused.

A hero for a generation

I’m far from alone in my generation in my admiration of Pete Seeger. I asked friends for their thoughts and theirs echoed mine.

“In my parents’ house we had all the Weavers albums, we knew all the songs,” said Nancy Federman Kaplan of West Bloomfield, Mich. “He and his fellow Weavers were heroes to us for their steadfast commitment to principles of racial and economic justice, which got them into hot water with ‘The Government’ (the House Un-American Activities Committee – how many people remember what that was?),” she said.

Mike Corbin of Huntington Woods, Mich. remembers attending a concert with Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie in Detroit in 1969. George Crockett, a Recorder’s Court judge, was in the audience. He had just released a group of 150 black people, including juveniles, who had been arrested after someone shot a police officer and ran into the church where they had been meeting.

“Pete introduced the judge and led the audience in a truly rousing rendition of ‘We Shall Overcome,’” he said. “Then people danced the ‘Ring Around the Rosy Rag’ in the park across the street. What a night!”

Pete always engaged the audience like that. This video is a good example – it’s from a concert in honor of his 90th birthday at Madison Square Garden. Everyone in the hall joined in as he and his folksinger friends sang the wonderful Woody Guthrie anthem, “This Land is Your Land.”

Jo Ann Dollard of Chicago also became a Pete Seeger fan as a teen but says she  came to appreciate him  more  as an adult and to understand the meaning of his music on a deeper level.

“He felt the music and he lived social justice and combined the two like no one else,” she said. “I felt inspired by his boundless energy, integrity, intelligence, strength, courage and all-out joy. He inspired me to become more engaged with caring, with making the world better and with life itself.”

Pete touched people across a wide spectrum, including many who never in a million years would describe themselves as politically left-wing.

“His folk songs gave us strength, hope, and assurance that we could stand up and be counted for the good, the just, the free. We truly could love one another in a way that changes everything in us and in our land,” said John Elmore of Grand Rapids, Mich., who is on the more conservative side.

As John points out, the 1960s were not only roiled by the Vietnam War, but racial and gender discrimination were the norm. The youth of America wanted something better.

“The line in Pete’s song ‘If I Had a Hammer’ that always hit me, choked me up, was ‘It’s the hammer of Justice, it’s the bell of Freedom, it’s the song about Love between my brothers and my sisters, all over this land.’” said John. “We sang this in our church youth group and we meant the words we sang. “We of that generation carry those words in our hearts and hope and pray and continue to work for this ideal today.”

A champion for clean water

Nancy Kaplan also cited Pete’s campaign for clean water. In the late 1960s he built a 106-foot sloop, the Clearwater, and sailed it up and down the Hudson River. He started a nonprofit environmental organization, the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater.

After decades of litigation, General Electric in 2009 finally began to dredge sediment containing pollutant PCBs that it had dumped into the Hudson. Thanks, Pete!

Folksinger extraordinaire, champion of the oppressed, anti-war activist, advocate for the planet…if anyone can rest in peace, knowing he left the world a better place, it’s Pete Seeger.

A recipe from the ’60s

As part of my nostalgic look back to the 1960s, here is a recipe for Ambrosia Salad, which was very popular at that time. In fact, Cool Whip, probably the world’s first fake whipped cream, first appeared in 1967. I doubt I would make it today, when we’re all trying to eat healthy – but I might serve it at a Sixties theme party or as a treat for my granddaughter (if her health-nut parents aren’t around). This recipe comes from a blog called Brown Eyed Baker (which also provided the Lebkuchen recipe I posted a couple of months ago).

Freedom Smells Like My Mother’s Kitchen

January 19, 2014 by 4 Comments

A Note from your host Bobbie Lewis: Today we welcome Desiree Cooper, who describes herself on her “Detroit Snob” website this way: “As the editor of the alternative newsweekly, the Metro Times, and a columnist with the Detroit Free Press for 11 years, Cooper was well-regarded as a compassionate writer who gave voice to the city’s everyday heroes. ​In 2009, she reinvented herself as a blogger, author and content specialist for non-profit organizations.” (And she has the cutest grandson in the world!)

By DESIREE COOPER

My mother’s mind is quickly slipping away. At 80, she’s often agitated and confused. She has problems executing simple tasks like showering and getting dressed in the morning. Her conversation is limited to a few repetitive topics, and now it’s dappled with confounding non-sequitors.

But there are moments when I can still glimpse the amazing woman she used to be. The memories that come spilling out as she looks at old photos. The smell of her perfume. The glint of the earrings she is never seen without. The way she lights up around her great-grandson.

And when she takes over the kitchen to bake her sweet potato pies.

A sacred ritual

For my mother—and now for me—cooking is a sacred ritual, a nod to our heritage, a practice of love. Her greens, skillet corn cakes, butter beans and fried chicken were staples of my childhood. Now those recipes feel like what tethers us to each other, to our history and to the generations yet to come.

My parents were so good at providing a wonderful home that I sometimes forget that, for them, “home” was not always a place of sanctity. In their day, black women cooked “high on the hog” for their employers but served scraps to their children. Black men swallowed the shame of not being able to protect their wives and children in their own living rooms. Black children were robbed of their dreams as they slept in their own beds.

But if there was one thing that spoke of prosperity, hope and human dignity, it was the smell of food wafting from a warm kitchen. It was the sound of pots clanking and catfish frying. It was the ancient scents of cinnamon and nutmeg. It was the African worship of the yam.

A fight for peace in the home

I risk simplifying one of history’s seminal movements by saying it was all about a pie browning in the oven. But I will stand by this contention: The Civil Rights Movement was not only a fight for equality in public spaces, it also was about the ability to live peacefully at home. And nothing symbolizes the sanctity of home more than sharing a prayer and a meal around the dinner table.

It is said that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s favorite dessert was pecan pie. But there are stories on the Internet about the role that the sweet potato pie played in sustaining him during the struggle.  His sister-in-law claims to have baked him a sweet potato pie to speed his convalescence after he was stabbed in Harlem in 1958. A family friend had purportedly prepared King a soul food dinner including a sweet potato pie for the evening of April 4, 1968—the day he was assassinated.

This Martin Luther King Day, I will remember the courage of all of those who fought for my human dignity. And I will taste the gratitude in each delectable bite of my mother’s sweet potato pie.

Christmas Cookies 2: Lebkuchen

December 15, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Soon after I started this blog in June, a reader asked about Lebkuchen, a traditional German Christmas cookie.

Nuremburg is Ground Zero for Lebkuchen (in deference to German style, I’m capitalizing it wherever it is used in the sentence–and note that the word can be singular or plural.)

We were in Nuremberg for a short visit in May of 2012, and even so far removed from Christmas, Lebkuchen were all over the place, from stalls in the market to bakeries and gift stores in the town.

First made in 1296

According to Wikipedia, the first record of Lebkuchen comes from the city of Ulm in 1296. Nuremberg lore tells that Emperor Friedrich II held a Reichstag there in 1487 and invited the city’s children to a special event where he gave out almost 4,000 Lebkuchen imprinted with his portrait.

No one really knows what the word means, though “kuchen” is “cake” in German. Says Wikipedia, “Derivations from the Latin libum (flat bread) and from the Germanic word Laib (loaf) have been proposed. Another likely possibility is that comes from the old term Leb-Honig, the rather solid crystallized honey taken from the hive that cannot be used for much beside baking. Folk etymology often associates the name with Leben (life), Leib (body), or Leibspeise (favorite food).”

Large cookies (or cakes)

“Cake” may be a more descriptive word for this confection than “cookie,” because they are usually quite large – in Germany, they’re usually at least five inches in diameter if round and even larger if rectangular, though minis are also available.

Lebkuchen are often packed in decorative tins, chests and boxes, some of which become collectors’ items. Some are shaped like hearts, or horses, or other special shapes.

Lots of varieties

Recipes differ, but Lebkuchen usually include honey, nuts or candied fruit, and a variety of spices such as ginger, aniseed, coriander, cloves, cardamom and allspice.

Historically, and due to differences in the ingredients, Lebkuchen is also known as honey cake (Honigkuchen) or pepper cake (Pfefferkuchen).

Most Lebkuchen are soft, but there are harder varieties as well, including the type used to make gingerbread houses and gingerbread men.

Here are some of the various types of Lebkuchen, as described by the German Food Guide.

Oblaten Lebkuchen
“Oblaten” are thin wafers. Oblaten Lebkuchen are cookies in which the dough is baked on a thin wafer. Historically, this was done to prevent the cookie from sticking to the cookie sheet.

Elisen Lebkuchen
These are the highest quality Oblaten Lebkuchen available. They must have at least 25 percent almonds, hazelnuts, and/or walnuts (no other kinds of nuts are allowed). Likewise, they must contain no more than 10 percent flour.

Nürnberger Lebkuchen
These are Lebkuchen that are baked in the city of Nürnberg, and are worldwide the most well-known. They are often baked on Oblaten (thin wafers), and they are known for their light, soft texture. Marzipan is often an ingredient of these cookies.

Kaiserlein
These are Lebkuchen onto which a picture is drawn or imprinted.

Brown (Braune) Lebkuchen
These cookies are made from a honey or syrup dough. The dough is either molded, cut, or formed and it is baked without Oblaten (thin wafers—see “Oblaten Lebkuchen” above). The baked cookies are often covered with a sugar glaze or chocolate.

White (Weisse) Lebkuchen 
These cookies get their name from their very light color. They get this color from a high amount of whole eggs and/or egg whites in the dough. They are usually decorated with almonds and/or candied lemon and orange peels.

Trader Joe is selling chocolate covered Oblaten, but if you want some, get ‘em now—they’re a seasonal treat and when they’re gone, that’s it till next year.

Here is a recipe I got from a blog called Brown-Eyed Baker. I chose it because it looked relatively easy to make. It has no fat and lots of spice flavor. You can easily add chopped nuts or dried or candied fruit if you like.

Some people commenting on the blog said these cookies came out hard, so try not to work in too much extra flour when you knead and roll out the dough. Also do not overbake them. Most of mine were fairly soft. I overbaked a few—by only a few minutes—and they were indeed very hard though still tasty. If you like very crunchy cookies, you won’t have to worry. If your baked cookies are too hard for your taste, put them in a storage container with a few slices of apple and they should soften up in a few days.

Memories of Christmas Cookies Past

December 9, 2013 by 1 Comment

(Please note: We have updated the caption on a photo in last week’s story, Working for Food to correct an error. The photo shows author Jean Alicia Elster’s grandmother, ‘May’ Ford, with her oldest grandchild in her grandfather’s wood yard.)

As a Jewish girl, I never celebrated Christmas, but when I was around 11, my best friend Carol and I started a new Christmas ritual. Every year on the day after Christmas I would go over to Carol’s house to look at her gifts and eat her mother’s Christmas cookies.

I always asked her mother how she got her money that year. Carol’s father had a Christmas tradition of giving his wife a couple hundred dollars every year for Christmas, but he would do it in a different creative way each year. One year he rolled up $10 or $20 bills into tubes and used them to spell “I love you” on a piece of cardboard, which he then framed. Another year, he bought a child’s top and plastered the bottom with bills; he gave them to his wife with a note that read, “You’re tops with me!”

My own mother sniffed at this. She didn’t think much of men who gave their wives spending money. Maybe this was because, although my dad was the sole breadwinner in the family, my mother was the one who managed the family finances. In fact, it was she who gave him an allowance!

Scrumptious cookies

But I was charmed by Carol’s dad’s money gifts, almost as much as I was by her mom’s Christmas cookies, which were truly scrumptious. There were pecan-studded butterballs; little green Christmas trees with colored sprinkles; Rice Krispies wreaths, also tinted green, with little red cinnamon berries; jam thumbprints; red-and-white striped candy cane cookies; meringues with chocolate chips; and more. I think I envied Carol’s Christmas cookies more than the gifts.

As a child I thought there was something inherently wonderful about these “Christmas” cookies. That notion was dispelled many years later when the people I worked with decided to have a Christmas cookie exchange. Each participant would bake one kind of cookie and create packages containing a half-dozen cookies each. They’d all be laid out on a table, and then everyone would go around and collect one package of each cookie.

I was excited to be part of the exchange, but if I was expecting to be transported back to Carol’s mom’s kitchen, I was sorely disappointed. Most of the cookies were terrible!

A circle of friends who bake

In an effort to help you avoid that fate, I wanted to offer a good recipe for Christmas cookies.

But while the recipe below is terrific, I can’t say it’s for Christmas cookies, because it was developed by a little Russian Jewish lady named Klara who is a member of my synagogue, Congregation Beth Shalom in Oak Park, Michigan.

Klara belongs to a synagogue group of refugees from the former Soviet Union called Circle of Friends. The group was started in 1998 to help the newcomers acculturate to life in America and learn about Judaism, which they had been unable to practice in the USSR.

Fifteen years later, the group still meets weekly. We usually call the Circle of Friends members “Russian” just because it’s easier. Klara, 84, actually comes from Moldova, which was part of the Soviet Union but is now independent. She arrived in Michigan in 1991.

Circle of Friends members have become famous in our congregation for their baking skills. A few years ago, several of the women got together and baked a tray of rugelach, cookies similar to today’s recipe in taste if not in shape, for a silent auction. It sold for more than $100.

Intergenerational baking

Recently, some of the younger women said they wanted to learn to bake from the older women.

So a few weeks ago, on a chilly Sunday morning, Klara and some of her Circle of Friends buddies gathered in the synagogue kitchen with a half-dozen women in their 30s and 40s. They rolled up their sleeves and churned out a few hundred of these Russian Rose Cookies.

While there’s nothing “Christmas” about them, they will work well as a holiday dessert, as part of a cookie tray or cookie exchange or even as a gift. I think Carol’s mom would love them.

Get ready for “Thanksgivukkah”

November 18, 2013 by 1 Comment

The Jewish holiday of Chanukah usually falls in December, often close to Christmas. This leads to what some Jews call “the December dilemma” – how to celebrate our holiday in a meaningful and fun way without making it seem like “the Jewish Christmas,” because the two celebrations have absolutely nothing in common.

This year, due to a quirk of the calendar, the first day of Chanukah coincides with Thanksgiving. It’s not much of a problem to celebrate the two in tandem, because Thanksgiving, though it has spiritual overtones, is not a religious holiday and there’s nothing about it that makes Jews uneasy about celebrating it. Writers who think they’re clever have taken to adopting the term “Thanksgivukkah.”

A rare congruence

I think everyone is going so crazy about it because it is so exceedingly rare. Data crunchers have discovered that the first time the two holidays would have coincided was 1861–but there was no all-American Thanksgiving then; President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed the first Thanksgiving in 1863. Until 1942, Thanksgiving was the last Thursday in November; now it’s the fourth Thursday in November (sometimes there are five). In 1888, Chanukah started on Thanksgiving Day because it was the last Thursday of November, November 29. The next time the start of Chanukah and Thanksgiving will coincide will be–well, maybe never! From now on, due to the way the Jewish calendar is organized, the earliest Chanukah can start will be November 29, which is too late to ever be Thanksgiving.

But wait, there’s more! The Jewish calendar is slowly getting out of sync with the Gregorian calendar, by a few days per thousand years. This calendar drift means the Jewish calendar will slowly loop through the Gregorian calendar until it’s back where it is now. But that won’t happen until the year 79811 – and the most prestigious rabbis will probably get together before then to correct it so that the fall holidays will remain in the fall and the spring holidays will remain in the spring.

Then again, Jewish holidays always start at sundown, so even though the first day of Chanukah is on Thanksgiving this year, we’ll begin lighting Chanukah candles the night before Thanksgiving.  In 2070 and 2165, the first day of Chanukah will fall on the day after Thanksgiving; in those years, the first candle will be lit on Thanksgiving Day after sundown. Maybe that will count as another “Thanksgivukkah,” maybe it won’t.

For some interesting charts comparing the Jewish and Gregorian calendars, see this blog by Jonathan Mizrahi (where I got a lot of this information).

Newspapers, magazines and websites are having a heyday with articles about how to combine the celebration of Thanksgiving and Chanukah. One enterprising retailer is even selling a turkey-shaped Chanukah menorah called a Menurkey.

Some clergy are looking for ways to combine the Thanksgiving message of gratitude with the Chanukah message of dedication (the literal meaning of the word, for the rededication of the Temple after the Jewish victory over the Assyrians). One who does it well is Rabbi Yael Levy in this table blessing.

A Thanksgivukkah grinch

Grinches are usually associated with Christmas. If there’s a Thanksgivukkah version, it’s probably Rabbi David Brenner who wrote “Why I Will Not Be Celebrating ‘Thanksgivukkah’”  for the Huffington Post. He says mash-ups dilute the message of both holidays. Thanksgiving helps all Americans overcome the divisions that separate us, he says.

In the rituals celebrating this fall harvest festival, we Americans are united in connecting to our land and the good things it produces. Chanukah is the opposite. Rather than celebrating the coming together of disparate parties, like the Native Americans and the Pilgrims, it commemorates a military victory in second century BCE Judea. The Maccabees were not a tolerant lot, but they triumphed over a much larger force. Rabbi Brenner says Chanukah could better be compared with Independence Day.

(See a cute anti-Thanksgivukkah video by Rabbi Brenner on the Heeb Magazine website.)

Cook New World foods in oil!

Most of the “whee-it’s Thanksgivukkah” articles are food-related, because that seems to be the easiest way to combine the traditions of Thanksgiving and Chanukah. As I pointed out last week, traditional Chanukah foods are fried or baked in oil, to symbolize the Chanukah miracle: when the Maccabees overcame the Assyrians and reclaimed the Temple in Jerusalem, they could find only one tiny cruse of pure oil for the Eternal Light, enough for one day. They lit the lamp, and the oil lasted for eight days, until more oil could be procured.

So for “Thanksgivukkah,” just combine a harvest-y and New World food (e.g. cranberries, sweet potatoes, pumpkin) with an oily preparation and you’re all set: potato latkes (pancakes) with cranberry sauce, or latkes made from sweet potatoes or squash, or pumpkin doughnuts.  Or if you’re adventurous, deep fry your turkey! There are some good recipes on the MyJewishDetroit website.

Personally, I’m very much looking forward to celebrating the two holidays together. Thanksgiving is a big deal in my family, the one time of year when my siblings and I all get together. My brother in New Jersey and my sister outside Washington, DC take turns hosting. When our children were little we would deliver Chanukah gifts at Thanksgiving because it was easier than shipping them later, but we were never able to celebrate Chanukah together. This year will be a first.

In the spirit of Chanukah, with a bit of a fall-harvest-Thanksgiving flavor, I offer this recipe for Cinnamon-Apple Latkes. They can be served as a side dish or a dessert. Whenever I’ve made them I’ve gotten rave reviews and requests for the recipe. This recipe makes about 16 latkes. Happy holidays, everyone! 

Shirley Showalter’s famous family cookies: an unbroken chain

September 28, 2013 by 5 Comments

Hospitality is inextricably tied to food. We often measure the worth of a host’s welcome by the bounty of the table at which we are fed. I wrote these words, last week, in a column about the Jewish harvest festival of Sukkot—and a yummy recipe for Trailside Oatmeal Cookies.

Today, we welcome Mennonite author Shirley Showalter with a column about another kind of cookie that may seem simple—but is also a tasty tradition that connects generations of women in her family. Shirley’s story also points out how these cookies were connection points with a larger world.

AN UNBROKEN CHAIN OF COOKIES

By SHIRLEY SHOWALTER

In my new memoir, Blush: A Mennonite Girl Meets a Glittering World, one of the photos from the 1950s shows my sister Sue, my brother Henry and me at the roadside stand where we tried to sell our produce. When I look at that photo now, I smile because Henry is holding a bag of the family cookies over his shoulder. As children, we couldn’t travel all the way to a farmer’s market to sell our wares, so we tried it along the roadside.

I share about a dozen recipes at the end of my book, but the most important to me is the first one: my great-grandmother’s sugar cookie recipe that we still make from a 100-year-old notebook of family recipes. We always called them “Sugar Cakes.” If you get my book and look at the family chart in the opening pages, this recipe comes from the Barbara Hess (1866-1941) branch of my family tree.

Every week, through the generations, the women in my family would bake dozens and dozens of these cookies. They were simple, but were not found in most other cookbooks.

This has brought the women in my family together over a long, long period of time. My family always was part of the Lancaster Central Market, which is now the oldest continuously operated farmer’s market in the United States. Every Tuesday and Friday, they had a stand at the market and would bring in whatever produce and poultry they had prepared the day before—and, of course, baked goods, too. These cookies always were the featured item among the baked goods.

Many times as a girl, I helped to bake the cookies. My mother didn’t continue selling things at the market, but my grandmother did until her death in 1951.

This has brought the women in my family together over a long, long period of time. Recently, my daughter and I got together at my sister’s farm in Lancaster County and we made these cookies to serve guests at some of the book-launch events for Blush. I’ve now passed the recipe to my children, forming an unbroken chain of people who’ve made these cookies over more than a century.

Now, I’m passing this tradition along to readers, too.

Care to read more about Shirley Showalter?

You’re sure to enjoy our in-depth interview with Shirley about her life, her work as an author and her new book, Blush.

AND SPECIAL THANKS TODAY: Our Holidays and Festivals columnist Stephanie Fenton also is an accomplished food photographer. She carried out our Read The Spirit recipe testing, this week, and provided the photo that accompanies today’s recipe.