My maternal
grandmother wasn’t happy unless we cleaned our plates. Actually, she wasn’t happy until we’d stuffed
ourselves silly and could barely walk out of her house. She showed her love by feeding us, and she
loved us a lot.
Never did
Granny show us more love than at Christmas.
In our family, cabbage rolls, tasty packets of ground pork and rice,
seasoned with salt, pepper, onions and garlic, and stuffed inside leaves of
sour cabbage, were staples at every function.
Depending on what had been raised the on the farm that year, we had turkey
or goose for Christmas dinner, expertly roasted by Granny to crispy brown
perfection. The bounty of Granny and
Grandpa’s gigantic garden the previous summer meant that we always had bowls
filled to overflowing with fluffy mashed potatoes and steamed vegetables. In the “not from the garden” category were
salads made from Jell-o and canned fruit cocktail, or perhaps Jell-o, mini
marshmallows, and other sweet ingredients.
Sometimes we’d have lettuce salad, but the quality of fresh vegetables
in our 1960s small town store in the middle of a Canadian winter was hit or
miss.
Always
accompanying the main dishes were homemade breads and buns that melted on the
tongue. The aroma of freshly baked bread
filled Granny’s house, making this simple staple a highlight of the meal. Next came an array of pickles from the
extensive collection in Granny’s cellar.
There were always pickled cucumbers, preserved with dill, garlic and
tiny chili peppers to give them a spicy bite.
Granny also pickled beets, pearl onions, carrots and beans in various
combinations in a range from sweet to spicy.
If it grew in the garden, Granny pickled it, canned it, or froze it.
And then, if
we could expand our stomachs just a bit more, along came dessert. The baking began weeks earlier with the fruit
cake, stuffed with dried and candied fruit in a moist, dark batter. Once baked, the fruit cake needed time to age
and ripen. Granny wrapped it in brown
paper and stored it under the bed until it was ready. There were cookies of all kinds including
jam-jams, two layers of moist cookie with homemade raspberry or strawberry jam
sandwiched in between. Then came
Granny’s famous butter tarts, a delicious concoction of butter, brown sugar,
egg and raisins baked inside a flakey tart shell. I have a memory of my cousin and I sneaking
into Granny’s freezer and stealing the tarts she’d made for a special
occasion. We got into trouble but it was
worth it for a taste of mouth-watering, sugary goodness.
But my
favorite dessert of all was strudel. The
strudel was also made weeks before Christmas and required a team to
assemble. My mother, one or two of my
aunts, and perhaps a neighbor lady or two, arrived and the work began. Granny mixed up a batch of dough for the
strudel, a kind of phyllo pastry that could be worked and stretched like a
rubber band. Despite its flexibility,
the delicate strudel pastry required careful handling; too vigorous a pull
would result in a tear. Granny and her
team gently stretched the pastry, slipping their hands underneath and carefully
pulling and kneading until the pastry reached every corner of Granny’s dining
room table, an area about six feet long and four feet wide.
Sometimes I
was allowed to help spread the pastry with chunks of peeled apple, generous
sprinkles of cinnamon and sugar, and dollops of butter. Once that was finished, I stood back and let
the team begin the delicate task of rolling the strudel. With one aunt on each end, one working the
middle, and Granny supervising the whole operation, the strudel was rolled,
jelly roll style, until it was a long tube consisting of layer upon layer of paper
thin pastry with pieces of apple and sugar trapped in between. Granny cut the strudel into family sized
portions, giving several sections to her helpers and popping the rest into the
freezer to be eaten at her own Christmas dinner.
I looked
forward to the strudel every Christmas. It
didn’t feel like Christmas until the strudel had been served.
Our family
followed the German tradition of celebrating on Christmas Eve. After the Christmas Eve children’s concert at
the church, in which my cousins and I recited our memorized parts and received
a brown paper bag filled with candy and mandarin oranges for our efforts, we
all congregated at Granny and Grandpa’s tiny house to open presents and
eat. Delicious cooking smells mixed with
the cold night air as we entered the front door. Pungent sour cabbage intertwined with roast
turkey and cinnamon and apples. Every
window in the house fogged from the cooking heat and steam. The house was filled to capacity with aunts,
uncles, cousins, grandparents. Though
all the leaves had been placed in the dining room table, we still had to eat in
shifts, the men and children going first and the women last. Granny would hover over us through both
shifts, refilling empty bowls, clearing dishes, and always exhorting us to “Eat,
eat!”. We did our best to comply.
Granny’s
been gone now for many years, as are my parents and grandfather and several of
my aunts and uncles. I live far away
from the cousins I grew up with, and don’t see them as often as I’d like
to. Life now is far different then it
was in my childhood, and so is Christmas.
It’s time to make new traditions.
My daughters
and I have attempted to recreate Granny’s cabbage rolls, with mixed
results. They might not be as good as
the originals, but the joy we get from making them together makes up for
whatever they lack in taste. We’ve replaced
salads made Jell-o and tiny marshmallows for ones with lentils, beans, and arugula. Apple pie is substituted for apple strudel,
the recipe for my favorite dessert having died with my grandmother.
But one
thing will never change. Christmas means
getting together with friends and family over a sumptuous meal. For me, food is synonymous with love. When I find myself telling guests to “Eat,
eat!”, I think of Granny and smile.
Jana Richards
Laugh. Cry. Love. Feel the Romance.
