These Delicious Christmas Pastries Rely on More Than Nostalgia
Lilacs. Peaches. Wild blueberries. These are just a few of the things we love because they are so rare, so fleeting. Catch them in their moment...or wait until next year.
And while most seasonal delights come from the garden, holiday pastries are equally ephemeral—and even more evocative. Each bite is a ticket straight back to childhood. Christmas confections tend to involve generous amounts of nuts, spices, and dried fruits. They hark back to the Middle Ages, and when they appear on the holiday table we eat them for the sake of our ancestors, tolerate them for the sake of nostalgia, and then happily go back to ignoring them.
But today a number of bakers are challenging that approach.
Chef Robin McKay figured there must have been a reason why fruitcake, a long-running Christmas joke, was once considered a holiday requirement. Determined to rescue its reputation, she begins with organic dried fruits and uses great quantities of butter and handfuls of nuts. She adds lemon and orange, along with lots of fresh ginger.
When the fragrant cakes emerge from the oven she brushes them with brandy and allows them to age. The result is so delicious that you instantly understand fruitcake’s past popularity. Robin’s version improves with age, but I always sneak so many bites that it never makes it to December 25 .
Fruitcake isn’t the only thing it’s time to reconsider. When Kate Arding traded her native England for the upstate New York town of Hudson, she brought her holiday traditions with her. “When we were growing up,” she says, “we couldn’t wait until Christmas and Mum’s plum pudding.”
In Britain, of course, pudding is just another word for dessert, and this one is basically a particularly appealing version of gingerbread. Brushed with booze, it is meant to be carried to the table swathed in flames. The cakes, dense with ginger and other spices and suet, are a true taste of the past. And they come in lovely little ceramic bowls that are not only endlessly useful, they’re a lasting reminder of Christmases gone by once the cake is just a memory.
At Christmastime my German father would come home with boxes of lebkuchen: spicy, chewy, gingery cookies laced with marzipan and orange peel. I adored them, but as New York’s German population became assimilated, the Bavarian bakery he favored closed. We grumpily settled for the commercial kind, which proved a very poor substitute.
Then Manhattanite Sandy Lee returned to New York from a stint in Germany and opened Leckerlee, a seasonal bakery whose sole reason for being is lebkuchen. Her fabulous confections rely on the classic Nuremberg recipe, which features a nine-spice blend and a dough heavy on almonds and hazelnuts, and they’re everything lebkuchen should be—including a wonderful way to bring the true taste of Christmas back to the table.
You Might Also Like
