December 23, 2008
Traditional Holiday Foods that Take Forever
Lefse, courtesy of Flickr user paige_eliz
Does your family have a traditional holiday dish that you eat at only one time of year—and for good reason? It’s not that the dish tastes bad. Maybe it requires obscure ingredients or specialized equipment, or maybe it takes an absurd amount of time or upper body strength to prepare. Is there some recipe you make that, in its disdain for modern conveniences, makes you feel sort of Amish for the day?
In my family it’s lefse, a Scandinavian potato tortilla (basically). You peel potatoes (get all the eyes or they’ll come back to haunt you), boil them, mash them, rice them, mix them with flour and cream and butter and sugar, press the mix into loaf pans, chill overnight (yes, it takes two days), cut into slices, roll VERY thin, use a lefse stick to drape one piece onto a lefse griddle, bake, flip, and fold. Then slather it with butter and sugar, roll it up, and eat. (Or follow the directions in poem form.)
Several people around Smithsonian.com HQ have similar stories. Sarah from Surprising Science says her mom makes Polish cookies: “Cruschiki are little knots of crispy fried dough covered in powdered sugar. The recipe has several steps, and the dough is hard to roll out.”
An associate editor’s parents make baccala, a fish soup. The hardest part is finding the main ingredient—salted, dried cod—and then you have to soak the cod until it’s plump and some of the salt has dissolved away.
Beth, from Around the Mall, brought in caramels the other day made according to her grandma’s recipe. Beth says that if the preparation goes really wrong, the burned caramel sticks to the pot and you have to throw the pot away.
A Venezuelan friend of Diane makes hallacas. You roll a complicated mixture of meats and spices up in a cornmeal dough, then wrap with plantain leaves and steam. A lot of work, but a great excuse for friends or family to sit around a table together getting their hands dirty.
Anika‘s mom makes Jalebi, “a fried funnel cake covered in sugary syrup. It requires saffron, cardamom, and a kadhai (the Indian version of a wok).”
Andrea, who used to live in Greece, says cookies called melomakarona appear there this time of year. They are made of honey, lemon juice, walnuts and semolina. She points out that the ingredients would have been available in ancient Greece, possibly traded by the Phoenicians, and an alternate name for the cookies is “Phoenikia.”
Jesse‘s dad’s side of the family makes fried oysters, which used to be readily available only around Christmas. His mom makes pizzelles—thin, waffle-like cookies that require a special iron, and are “supposed to be the culinary equivalent of catching snowflakes on your tongue.”
Aside from a few odd proteins (or, in Hugh’s case, ethanol), most of these family traditions seem to involve a lot of starch and sugar, nature’s two finest food groups. Everybody feeling nostalgic now? Or maybe just hungry? Let us know about your own quirky traditional dishes.
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Christmas Pudding
My husband’s family makes this every year according to a recipe that has not changed in generations. It is made a month before Christmas with dried fruit, butter sugar, eggs, breadcumbs, brandy and spices. It is then plopped onto flour covered calico cloth, boiled for six hours and then hung in a dry place until Christmas. Nothing can touch it for fear of getting moldy or breaking the ‘seal.’ It is heavy and requires two people to lift. On the day of serving it is boiled again for two hours and accompanied with cream or custard mixed with brandy.
http://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Record/4469461
My family’s traditional holiday food is potica (pronounced poe – TEE – tsa). This is a Slovenian rolled bread with a filling of honey and ground walnuts. Potica is a Christmas tradition on the Iron Range of northeastern Minnesota. The difficult part of making it is that the dough has to be first rolled and then gently stretched until it is thin enough to see through. This frustrating process often results in holes in the dough. Nevertheless, the end product is delicious and justifies the hard work that goes into making it. On ‘Da Range’ it just wouldn’t be Christmas without potica!
We have a couple — none of which are difficult, just incredibly fiddly, with lots of little steps.
Hubby’s family enjoys krumkaka – a Scandinavian equivalent of pizzelle, but made with cardamom instead of anise, and rolled into cones. Burned fingers are inevitable, and as you can only make two at a time in the iron, they take ages to make. (and somehow they’re always the first to disappear, guaranteeing at least 2-3 batches every year).
A staple here in France is the buche de Noel – a cake roll made with gorgeous ingredients (no shortening here – everything’s made with BUTTER)…and iced to look like a log fresh from the forest. Most families buy theirs, but they’re very, very expensive. I made ours this year…and it will be a year before I feel like dealing with another one!
This isn’t really a “tradition” made yearly, but one I have made in the past. Very time consuming cookie, but once you taste it you are in ecstacy. Everyone I’ve ever given this cookie to bites into it and gets this look on their face like they are in culinary bliss. It’s an almond macaroon, which, once cooled is topped with chocolate buttercream and then dipped in chocolate. I got this recipe from a 1967 copy of House and Garden cookbook. What makes this so time consuming is the fact that I choose to make my own almond flour (to be sure it’s fresh) by blanching my own almonds and then laying them out in a single layer to dry thoroughly for at least a day, then running them through my food processor until it makes kind of an almond meal. I’ll break down and try commercial almond flour some day and hopefully, it will yield the same cookie delight.
[...] elaborate Christmas or Hannukah meals (see the comments from our previous post for some great descriptions of absurdly time-consuming puddings, potica, [...]
TAMALES: get about 20 of your closest family members aroound a table covered with corn husks, corn flour dough and meat/chile filling.
Get to filling and rolling the dough in the corn husks, then steam batch after batch for 2 hours each. YUM
Family tradition taught me by my late mother in law… takes forever, but yummy.
The day before you make a standard Cream Cheese pastry/cookie dough and chill it over night. AND you get a large jar of Cherry preserves, which you promptly scrape into a strainer, to let all the jelly soak thru, leaving only the cherries behind.
On baking day: First roll part of the pastry as thin as your patience will allow, and cut with round cookie cutters. Put a wee bit of cherry on each circle, fold over, and seal. When you’ve put together as many half circles of dough, sealed tightly to keep the cherry inside, grind some pecans or walnuts, and mix with granulated sugar. Separate an egg, and through away the yolk, or save it to use in a less time consuming cookie. Beat the egg white with a fork, with a pastry brush, brush the top of each wee cookie with some beaten egg white, and dip into the nuts/sugar mixture.
Bake on a greased cookie sheet at 350 degrees until just starting to turn golden…you don’t want these to brown.
They don’t keep for more than two or three days, so you can’t make them long in advance. But they never last for more than a day, anyway, so that doesn’t matter. They ARE delicious, but a lot of “fiddling” is required.
[...] of us eat too much during the winter holidays—even though we know that all those latkes, lefse, or gingerbread men can linger around our waistlines well into the new year. It’s easy to see [...]
[...] has spent holiday seasons laboring over these delicate potato-based crepes, called lefse, since 1967, when her husband, Arvid, (my grandfather) presented her with this very griddle as a [...]