12 Days of Holiday Food Memories: Emily Elsen of Four & Twenty Blackbirds Is Too Busy to Bake
We asked a dozen food world luminaries to help us count down the next 12 days with culinary nostalgia, and they gave us their favorite stories of supermarket eggnog, standing rib roasts, discounted candy, and lots of cheer. Enjoy, and happy holidays!
Photo credit: Getty. Lettering: Brian Kaspr
Emily Elsen of Brooklyn pie shop Four & Twenty Blackbirds spends much of her day covered in flour. When holiday season rolls around, she gives a pass to herself and co-owner and sister, Melissa; when you bake all day, baking at home isn’t exactly relaxing. But when Elsen remembers the marathon holiday cookie baking sessions of her youth, she begins to rethink her plan.
For us, growing up we always did a lot of Christmas baking.
We would do chocolate fudge; we would do Mexican wedding cake. Sugar cookies. Hand wrapped caramels. Chocolate dipped pretzels. Little cream puffs. We would do rosettes, which are a sort of fried molded bread. Little bread cookies. And peanut butter cookies with a chocolate kiss in the middle. We’d give them away as gifts.
We grew up in South Dakota, which is very Midwestern. All that stuff we baked is regional Eastern European holiday stuff, for sure.
My family background is German and Czech and Eastern European. That’s where my family emigrated from, and our particular area in South Dakota [has] a lot of that background. You live there if you can tolerate the cold, I guess?
Our mom loves holiday baking. She ran a restaurant that we grew up working in, and our grandmother was a pie maker. Everybody had their own style of Christmas baking. Melissa and I got into it as teenagers.
We certainly learned how to bake in the restaurant, and learned how to cook the basics and stuff. But probably holiday time was some of our first baking projects.
Since I’ve started a pie company, I don’t bake the holiday cookies as much. I wish I did more of it now. But I made persimmon bread this weekend. It was from James Beard’s “Beard on Bread.” I picked up persimmons because persimmons are in season. We don’t bake with them in the shop, but we wanted to try it.
The bread has got a little booze in it. It calls for nuts—I did hazelnuts and a little spice. The persimmon is savory, a little bit, and moist. It makes for a moist bread, almost like a batter bread. It’s a good holiday party snack.
I guess I’ll have to see what I have in me on Christmas Day. Maybe I’ll make some of those old cookie recipes for old time’s sake.
