Wednesday, December 21, 2005
Our family recipes make a loving legacy
Lindsey Nair
Front Burner blog
Recent columns
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- Be sharp about knives
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- Column archive
Recipes
Today's recipe: European Nut Rolls (in Polish: Hlep)
It's a long way from northeastern Pennsylvania, this cozy patio home on Cove Road in Northwest Roanoke, and even farther from the Polish village from which Patti Stratton's ancestors emigrated in the 19th century.
And yet here she is, kneading the same ingredients for the holiday nut rolls that women in her family were making long before anyone thought to write the recipe down.
Patti uses a measuring cup for the flour, a fancy German-made chef's knife to cut the dough, and the microwave oven to hurry along the bubbling of her yeast starter.
Her grandmother, Albina Waskiewicz, used a coal-fired oven for baking. She measured the flour by sight and touch. To get the dough to rise, she babied it by wrapping blankets around the bowl.
Albina's family ran a tavern on a dirt road outside of Shomokin, Pa., a place where soot-covered coal miners came to drink away the chill. The family lived upstairs from the bar.
When Albina wasn't in school or in the tavern kitchen, she played pool with the miners. Patti never believed this about her grandmother until one day when the family got a pool table for Christmas and 65-year-old Albina showed her granddaughter some moves.
"It turned out she really was quite the pool shark," she recalled, laughing.
Making the European nut rolls on Christmas Eve was another skill Patti didn't fully appreciate until she grew up and found herself craving the annual holiday bread long after her grandmother had died.
Fortunately, her mother had written the recipe down, and, fortunately for Patti's own children and grandchildren, Albina also passed down her baking gene.
Last year the Extra section asked readers to share their holiday traditions, and Patti responded by mailing us her grandmother's recipe. We didn't have the space to use it then, but for some reason the planets lined up, and I found it recently amid the Diet Coke cans and other clutter on my desk.
"It's funny," Stratton said. "I had just decided I wasn't going to make it this year until you called."
As if her children would let her get away with that.
Just as mine would have a fit if we didn't make Nana's sticky buns for Christmas morning or -- a quirkier and more recent custom -- sushi and scallion pancakes on Christmas Eve.
Long after the Xboxes get tossed into the landfill and even long after we're gone, it's food traditions like these that will continue to connect us.
I hope you have a warm holiday, complete with dough that rises and a few familial surprises. It wouldn't hurt to ask Grandma about the old days, either, including the secrets behind some of her specialties in the kitchen -- and maybe even around the pool table.
