I am absolutely certain my grandmother, Helen Lerner, could have made anything from scratch, sweet or savory. She was a fantastic baker. She made her own pickles from what my grandfather grew in the garden. She made homemade noodles for her homemade soups. I’m pretty sure there was a time back in the day she made her own soap. Of course, she made her own jams, jellies, and preserves. One of my favourites was her chokecherry jam.
Chokecherries
My grandmother passed away when I was finishing my last month of grade eleven. In the last year or two of my grandmother’s life, my mother often went to Lethbridge to help her out and, later, visit her in hospital. After one of her last visits, my mother returned home with a bunch of things my grandmother had made, including several jars of chokecherry jam. I was pretty sure that they did not last long in our family of seven.
Fast forward to just over a year later. I moved to Vancouver to attend my first year of undergrad at the University of B.C. A few weeks after having moved into residence, my mother sent me a box of my things. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that the box included the last jar of my grandmother’s chokecherry jam. Needless to say, I did not rush through that jar. I used it judiciously and sparingly, without being stingy, and savored every bit of it. It was a wonderful way to remember my grandmother.
The topic of food is one of the prompts that shows up in the 52 Ancestors Challenge every year. This makes it a difficult topic to write about, since I covered it broadly in the first and second year I participated in the challenge. However, as Amy often reminds participants, the prompts are merely suggestions and we can interpret them as broadly as we want. Which I’ve done, writing about pets when the prompt was flowers, and vice versa!
With this week’s prompt, I’ve not stretched the topic as far as pets to flowers. Rather, I am looking at the favourite treats of my ancestors.
I’ll start with my mother’s maternal line. As I’ve often written about here, that branch of the family are Germans from Russia. One of their favourite treats is halva. It’s a confection that originated in Persia (now Iran) that spread throughout the Middle East and, later, throughout the Ottoman Empire. While halva was originally made with a variety of different ingredients, such as flour and dates, the traditional Turkish version is usually made with sesame seeds and most often sweetened with honey or sugar. You can find halva in many varieties. Halva with pistachios, chocolate, or vanilla is quite common.
Many German settlements in the Russian Empire were in what is now the Ukraine, which the Russians had taken from the Ottoman Turks in a series of wars in the 17th and 18th centuries. While the German population was originally introduced to the Turkish version of halva, they most likely learned of the sweet treat from the local Jewish population that had been in Ukraine for centuries, including the time of Ottoman rule. However, the Germans soon modified the recipe using sunflowers, which are abundant in Ukraine and that are a symbol of that country. I’ve heard that many German-Russians prefer the sunflower variety, but I’ve never seen it. My grandmother and mother always bought the traditional Turkish version. While not a traditional Christmas food, that is the time of year my mother would most often buy it. My mother often spread it on toast, which is quite delicious.
Turning to my father’s side of the family, I’ll admit that Dutch cuisine is not world-famous for many good reasons. That said, there are many delicious treats that make up for it. One of my favourites, bitterballen, is commonly found as a bar snack. They are somewhat similar to croquettes, but are smaller and rounder. They are made of a mixture of minced beef, roux, onions, and seasonings, breaded, and fried. They’re addictive little snacks. There is a chain of cafes and coffee shops in the Netherlands called The Bulldog. In the 1990s, they had a location in Vancouver. I often went there for lunch with a friend and we always started with bitterballen.
Bitterballen are traditionally served with mustard. Lekker!
The Dutch also have many sweet treats. Almond-based treats (including marzipan) and baked goods made with warm spices are quite popular. The one I can remember having ever since I was little is speculaas. They always contain ginger, along with spices such as cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, cardamom, anise, allspice, and white pepper. With those flavours, they were a common Christmastime treat, but now it is common to enjoy them year-round. They are particularly good with coffee. While speculaas might have been obscure outside the Netherlands and its former colonies, they’ve always been relatively easy to find in Canada. I’ve also noticed them popping up on baking and cooking shows in recent years.
Another delicious treat that is also good with coffee are stroopwafels. They’re made up of thin waffle-like wafers with a thin layer of caramel sandwiched in the middle. (“Waffle”, by the way, is an English word of Dutch origin.) They originated in the city of Gouda as a means for bakers to repurpose crumbs and scraps. You can get them freshly made from street vendors in the Netherlands, as well as bakeries and cafes. The availability of stroopwafels in Canada seems to wax and wane, although they’re always available in Dutch specialty stores. They were also featured as the technical challenge during “Caramel Week” on Season Eight of The Great British Bake Off (airing as The Great British Baking Show in the United States and Canada). It’s common to place them on top of a hot cup of coffee, which warms and softens them. So delicious!
Finally, many people know that the Netherlands is famous for its chocolate. During Sinterklaas, a favourite treat is chocoladeletters (“chocolate letters”). Centuries ago they originated as baked goods, but are now almost exclusively made of chocolate. It is traditional to receive a chocolate letter of the initial of your first name. My great grandmother, Elizabeth Bakker, always included chocolate letters in the box of goodies she sent us every Christmas. When we were children, there was always an argument that some letters were bigger than others so they had more chocolate. The truth is, while the surface area of each letter might differ, they are manufactured in different thicknesses so that every letter contains the same amount. The other problem is finding letters that are uncommon initials for names in the Netherlands, although that is less of a problem than it used to be.
Chocolate letters are another item for which, outside the Netherlands, the availability seems to change over time. When I was a kid, they seemed to be available everywhere. Purdy’s made their own for a while, but I haven’t seen them there in a long time. In recent years, the only place I could find them were in Dutch stores. Even then, I could not find Droste letters – the absolute best ones, bar none – anywhere. You could only find the secondary brands. I once asked a vendor if Droste no longer shipped to Canada, and was told they were simply too expensive to carry. Luckily, a couple years ago I found Droste chocoladeletters in a Dutch store in Lethbridge.
Fortunately, chocolate letters seem to be getting easier to find again, as I saw them being sold in many mainstream supermarkets and shops last Christmas. I first noticed them showing up a couple years ago in a local independent grocery store that specializes in Asian foods and ingredients of all places. Plus, in our neighbourhood of Steveston, there is a chocolatier that makes them – in every letter!
During my first trip to the Netherlands, I discovered a Droste store directly across from the Amsterdam Centraal Station. I enjoyed being able to buy any letter I wanted, well out of season! Sadly, the last time I was in Amsterdam, the store was gone.
This week’s topic for the 52 Ancestors Challenge is “Food and Drink”. Finally, a topic I can really sink my teeth into!
Soup of the Day
Last year on The Great Canadian Baking Show (a direct adaptation of The Great British Bake Off), one of the contestants said she was using her great grandmother’s recipes. There are things my grandmothers made that I have been trying to recreate or emulate for years, but nothing from any of my great grandmothers. I also realized that if I had recipes from my great grandmothers, my kids would have recipes from their great great grandmothers. I love to cook, both my kids really like being in the kitchen with me, and my eldest shares my love of genealogy, so it would be special to have those kinds of recipes.
I asked my mother if she has any of her grandmothers’ recipes, and asked the same of my mother-in-law. I now have a few of those recipes.
From my wife’s mother, I got a recipe for brown bread handed down from her grandmother. Among other things, it calls for two cups of rolled oats, nine cups of flour, and a cup of molasses. Despite that volume, it apparently yields only three loaves of bread. While I am rather good at baking, I don’t really enjoy it, so I haven’t yet tried out this recipe, especially with the volumes of ingredients it requires.
Something I have tried making, however, is cranberry sauce using a recipe from my wife’s great aunt. My wife is actually a very good cook, but doesn’t enjoy it as much as I do so she rarely does. However, she’s usually the one who will make this cranberry sauce. Besides, I don’t actually like cranberry sauce.
So many cranberries!
My mother said that her maternal grandmother was not really a good cook, except for one thing: raisin cookies. While I take my mother’s word for it, I find it hard to get excited over raisin cookies.
My maternal grandmother was an amazing cook and baker. She made her soup noodles from scratch and pickles from cukes my grandfather would grow. While my grandmother was born in Saskatchewan, both her parents were Germans from Russia, so a lot of her cooking reflected that cultural heritage. My mother, also a very good cook, learned from her mother, so a few of our favourite meals as kids also reflected that background.
My grandmother also made her own preserves, jams, and jellies. Of those, one of my favourites was her chokecherry jelly. A year after she died, I moved away from home to attend university. While unpacking, I discovered that I had a jar of her chokecherry jelly in one of my boxes. Realizing that I had the last jar of her jelly in the entire world, I savoured and stretched it out as long as I could.
Making stock during my latest attempt to replicate my grandmother’s soup.
My dad’s mother was not as good a cook. Rather, her usual fare was either very, very good or…not so very good, to put it kindly. In fairness, a couple of things she seemed bad at was because she was cooking for my grandfather’s tastes. For example, he enjoyed meat beyond well done. However, my grandmother made amazing soup. I have spent years trying to recreate her groentensoep met balletjes (vegetable soup with meatballs). While it’s a common traditional Dutch soup, everyone has their own little twists on how they make it. I exchanged many emails with one of my aunts over the years as we tried to work out my grandmother’s special way of making it.
My grandmother made a lot of customary Dutch dishes. Some I really liked, others I found…less likeable. While it was usually greasy, I really liked her hachee, a beef and onion stew. However, I really disliked her stamppot, which she made more often than not. Stamppot usually consists of potatoes boiled and mashed with other vegetables. My grandmother typically made boerenkool stamppot– kale and potatoes. The way my grandmother made it, she’d boil the vegetables beyond recognition, then my dad would make me cover it in gravy and mix it together. I was sure I was being punished for something.
One day during a trip to Alberta to visit my parents, I found myself in my grandparents’ neighbourhood. I thought the time of day was right, because it meant that I was probably too early for supper. While I loved her soup, I didn’t want to run the risk of ever having to eat boerenkool stamppot again. Unfortunately, my grandparents were eating early that day and my grandmother had already started cooking and invited me to stay for dinner.
Much to my surprise and delight, in addition to her soup, I discovered that my grandmother was making nasi goreng, an Indonesian fried rice dish. As Indonesia was a former colonial possession, Indonesian food is very common in the Netherlands. It’s fantastic food, It makes up for the fact that some staples of Dutch cuisine seem to be things made on a dare – or named on a dare, like snert (a nickname for ertwensoep, traditional Dutch split pea soup, which is delicious).
I asked my grandmother if she was trying something new. She replied that she made it all the time. I did a mental double take and said that I had never seen her make Indonesian food before in my entire life. “Oh, that’s because your father doesn’t like it, so I never made it when your family came for dinner.” So all those years I had been choking down boerenkool stamppot we could have been enjoying nasi goreng! Needless to say, that evening I let my father know how unimpressed I was to make this discovery.
Rijsttafel, a sampling of Indonesian dishes served wth rice, at the former Balilicious restaurant in Vancouver.
While it seems that Dutch cuisine leaves something to be desired, I may be exaggerating to some extent. Some of my favourite treats and dishes are Dutch and I’ve collected a few cookbooks with Dutch recipes. Unfortunately, I have yet to find many recipes that work for our entire family. While my version of my grandmother’s groentensoep is generally a big hit, other things seem to divide the house fifty-fifty.
Making rodelinzensoep (red lintel soup) using a recipe from my father’s cousin.Snert! Fun to say, fun to eat!
Before I leave the topic of Dutch food, never accept an offer from a Dutch person of dubbel zoute drop: double salted black licorice. Lots of Dutch people love to see the reaction of their unsuspecting victims. I love black licorice, but without the addition of the Dead Sea.
Over the last few years, I’ve started to acquire recipes from more extended branches of the family. My brother-in-law is Jewish, and I’ve acquired a few recipes and cooking tips from his sister and mother. Sometimes I’ll try making a particular dish from recipes I’ve found online, and then sought guidance from my sister’s mother-in-law as to how to tweak and improve the dish. What I have discovered is that the best latkes are the ones made by someone else – I find them to be a lot of work!
Meanwhile, I just remembered that at the time of that episode of The Great Canadian Baking Show, my parents were in the middle of moving house, so my mom said she’d look for her mother’s notes and recipes after they settled in. However, visiting her over Christmas and well after the move, I completely forgot to follow up on it. Hopefully I can remember this seven months from now, when visiting her next Christmas!
A Deck of Ancestors 