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Christmas comes in many flavors, but the tiniest taste of whatever food you associate with the celebration can flood every sense with the spirit of Christmases past.
By JANET K. KEELER, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times, published December 23, 2001
For every family who celebrates Christmas, there's a food that makes the season bright. Or maybe one that, thank goodness, is served only once a year.
In our house that special food is saffron loaf. To my husband, it conjures up warm and fuzzy feelings of growing up in a bucolic, colonial New Jersey town. His roots spread to the rock quarry towns of Pennsylvania and Cornwall, England, and his people have been making saffron loaf since King Arthur set up the castle in Tintagel. Or that's what he'd have me believe when he beseeches me to make the vile stuff.
Two teaspoons of saffron give the bread its yellow crumb and its oddly medicinal taste. He slathers it with butter and is transported to the rolling, snowy hills of his youth. I've actually watched guests take bites and spit them into napkins.
To him, though, it says Christmas and home, and reminds him of a mother, now gone, who loved him very much. Every year I make two loaves, one to eat right away, one for the freezer.
Earlier this month we asked readers to share their stories about foods that represent Christmas to them. About 100 of you responded with tales of homemade taffy, Depression-era splurges and packages loaded with goodies from faraway lands.
If there is a common thread among the stories it's that Christmas treats, be they sweet or savory, have the power to transport us to another time. A little bit of food creates a lot of nostalgia, about Nona's Italian kitchen, a farm in the Midwest or a modest living room lit with love, sugar cookies and Christmas tree lights.
Mabel Hood Dorman, whose family ran St. Petersburg's Hood's Dairy from the 1920s until 1973, remembers her mother's baking acumen and generosity. Every year Sally Hood would make 30 to 40 applesauce fruitcakes and give them as gifts. She started baking before Thanksgiving in order to get the cakes done in time for Christmas.
For Gretel Irwin of St. Pete Beach, store-bought lebkuchen now stands in for those her grandparents sent every year from Germany.
"We opened the box after dinner while listening to Christmas music," she writes. "Our gifts were put under the tree, but the chocolate-covered gingerbread cookies, or "lebkuchen,' as my parents knew them, were eaten right away and for me it magically became Christmastime."
If you are a grandparent and don't think the food you serve at Christmas makes an impression on young palates, think again. Many people wrote lovingly and longingly about once-a-year treats from Grandma's kitchen. Alexis Rosenberger, 10, of Palm Harbor sings the praises of her grandmother's stuffed squid with red sauce over the top. She loves the delicacy so much that the cooks banish her from the kitchen to prevent her from sneaking some from the pot. Other remembrances of Grandma's cooking were not so exotic.
"My grandma made these Italian cookies she called "ginnetts.' I'm not even sure if that's the way it's spelled," writes Donna Fillmon of Tarpon Springs. "They were delicious, doughy cookies that had a surprise inside. Round ones had cherries and oblong ones hid delicious melted chocolate chips. When they cooled, she'd drizzle a glaze over them."
When Fillmon's grandmother died in 1990, she thought the cookies were gone forever, too. The recipe had not been written down. To Fillmon's delight, her sister April has learned to replicate the cookies and she now makes them every year.
Julie Grimes of St. Petersburg remembers her grandmother's "famous noodles" floating in delicate chicken broth, and Helen Yates, also of St. Petersburg, has a soft spot for her grandmother's old-country "buchta," a bread filled with poppyseeds, nuts, cherries and sometimes drizzled with frosting.
"You knew it was Christmas when you smelled that delectable bread baking in the oven," Yates writes. "Since she passed on a few years ago, I also lost that wonderful experience, but not the memory."
Shirley Knox of Brooksville was lucky enough to have two grandmothers who cooked, and Christmas was their backdrop for a stuffing cook-off. A dressing was made for every taste -- herb, mushroom, oyster and chestnut. While some family members kept them separated or only tasted their favorite, Knox mixed them all together on the plate!
Evelyn W. Atherton of Palm Harbor has some ambrosial memories about a traditional Southern Christmas salad. She remembers her parents' painstaking efforts in making ambrosia with sweet navel oranges (no membrane or pith), fresh coconut and pineapple.
"A layer of pineapple, a layer of coconut, alternately, into Mom's big yellow glass bowl with ridges, used only for ambrosia at Christmas," she writes. "The layers were always topped with the fresh coconut."
For Tacy Longstreet of Clearwater, it's another citrus fruit that screams Christmas to her.
"Tangerines and Christmas morning are forever linked in my memory," she writes. "As children we would slip down to the living room before our parents. We were allowed to open our stockings first. They were full of tiny treasures. In the toe of each stocking was the tangerine. Small, round and tasty, it was the last to emerge and the first eaten. Each segment was savored as we opened our gifts."
At Karen Palmer's house, no one was allowed to touch the presents until Dad had his breakfast. As you can guess, the wait was excruciating, even though the stockings were fair game.
"In my teens, I found a recipe for English muffins and we negotiated with my father," writes the St. Petersburg woman. "He agreed that as long as he had English muffins and coffee, which didn't take long to eat, we could open our gifts. To this day, some 35 years later, English muffins are a Christmas treat."
For Regan Stevens of Palm Harbor, it's not exactly cookies, but the containers they come in that put her in the Christmas mood.
"Each Christmas my mom gets out her stack of three red holiday tins," she writes. "My brother and I are adults now, but we still run for the red tins like children, hopping to see aluminum foil poking out, a sure sign that cookies are inside!
"Often, two of the tins are filled with a new cookie, but the bottom larger tin has always been reserved for The Snowballs. Never have I had one as good as my mom's from that revered red tin."
Cookies are on the mind of Valerie S. Kirby of Clearwater at this time of year. It's her own kids who ask for "rugs," the name they gave to their favorite pressed cookies.
"Even though all the cookies that were shaped with the cookie press were made from the same recipe for sugar cookies, they always thought the "rugs' tasted the best. . . . My children are grown and have children of their own. They live at a distance, so I have to do the decorating myself, but they look forward to receiving "rugs' in their Christmas package."
Though it seems as if women get all the Christmas cooking kudos, there are some men making culinary memories. One is Jordan Holzmacher's Uncle Angelo and his fabulous "meatball cookies."
"They are round like a circle, have sprinkles or nuts in them and taste like chocolate muffins," writes the 9-year-old from Palm Harbor. He won't share the recipe, so Jordan has to wait until Christmas Eve to get his favorite version, chocolate glazed with sprinkles.
Anita Harris of St. Petersburg had to work for her favorite Christmas food: walnuts.
"These light-brown nuggets only showed up at Christmastime, and even their dish was mysterious, a dark wooden bowl with a brass rise in the middle," she writes. "It appeared each year with its own little hammer and a set of picks.
"A perfectly separated shell was a joy in itself. With crayons, paper and glue I created pet turtles, baby cradles, little Dutch ships. I wanted to build a nativity scene inside a walnut shell, but that was a task too daunting for my childish hands.
"I have one now, a miniature nativity with the tiniest baby Jesus imaginable, hecho en Mexico, made perhaps by a skillful Mexican who shared my childhood pleasure of finding a bowl of walnuts at Christmastime."
The simple pleasures of Christmas leave powerful memories. Such is the case with Gladys Spaulding of St. Petersburg and her enjoyment of homemade taffy as a young girl in the 1920s.
"As Christmas neared and I saw Mother's grocery basket with its two bags of sugar and flavorings waiting for Chuck Jaspring's pick-up truck, I knew he would be transforming the ingredients into delicious walnut and vanilla-flavored, hand-pulled taffy," she writes. "Both Chuck and his well-kept secret recipe are gone, but I can recapture a bit of that delight I knew when I catch a glimpse of Mother's pink Depression Glass in my cupboard. She used it for Chuck's taffy."
Harold Ceasar of Brooksville is a child of the Depression who grew up in Detroit. Even in the toughest times, his struggling, Italian-immigrant father was able to scrape up enough money at Christmas to buy a lamb roast and a chicken for homemade pasta sauce.
"He would make sauce with hunks of lamb and chicken simmered in it," writes Ceasar. "The aroma would wake up the whole neighborhood. We would make the raviolis. Roasted lamb and chicken. Wow, what a meal, and yes, chunks of Italian bread. Always Jell-O for dessert. Maybe a pie. Grate our cheese on the ravs. That meal and my parents are still in my heart."
Ceasar's feelings about his father's lusty meat sauce is exactly why I make the saffron loaf for my husband, no matter how much it's not my cup of tea. They keep the joy of a child's Christmas alive.