December 20, 1968: A few stollen moments is all that we share.

Christmases past have brought the best out of me, but this year finds me with less to offer. The muse and I are splitsville, I think, and I get by mostly on offspeed stuff.

My great-grandma had something special to offer around this time of year. Her offering, unlike mine, depended less on inspiration and more on discipline and experience.

A taste of it now might be nice.

December 20 and 21, 1968.

Stollen, just in case somebody out there doesn’t know, is a traditional German holiday fruitcake, commonly but not exclusively associated with the city of Dresden.

In addition to dried fruit and zest, it can also contain marzipan. My great-grandma had a longstanding fondness for marzipan. (I wonder if she learned to love marzipan because of stollen, or if she learned to love stollen because of marzipan.)

Like all fruitcakes, stollen is not the sexiest food in the world. If anything, it verges a bit on the frumpy. Which made it an ideal Christmastime treat for the humble, rooted folks at 1107 Hope Street.

I would love to share my great-grandma’s stollen recipe. Alas, I don’t have it, and as far as I know it’s not in the family archives.

So, in keeping with the somewhat faded and understated mood this holiday, here’s a secondhand re-gift of someone else’s stollen recipe. It’s from “The Joy of Cooking,” which everyone in the world ought to have on their shelves anyway.

I don’t honestly think anyone’s going to make stollen just ’cause they read about it here. If you do, good luck. If you don’t, I hope you enjoy whatever traditional holiday dish you choose to put on the table.

Merry Christmas.

Stollen, or Christmas Loaf

Have ready:
6 to 8 cups all-purpose flour

Combine and let stand 3 to 5 minutes:
1 1/2 cups water or milk at 105 to 115 degrees
2 packages active dry yeast

Add 1 cup of hte flour. Cover this sponge and let it rest in a warm place until light and foamy, about 1 hour. Sprinkle a little of the sifted flour over:
1/2 lb. raisins
1/2 lb. chopped blanched almonds
Optional: 1/2 cup chopped candied fruit)

Beat until soft:
1 1/2 cups butter

Add gradually and blend until light and creamy:
3/4 sifted sugar

Beat in, one at a time:
3 eggs

Add:
3/4 tsp salt
3/4 tsp grated lemon rind

Add the sponge and enough flour to knead the dough until smooth and elastic.
Cover and let rise until doubled in bulk.
Toss it onto a floured board. Knead in the fruit and nuts.
Divide the dough into two equal pieces.
Roll each into an 8-by-15-inch oval.
Fold in half lengthwise and place loaves on greased baking sheets.
Brush tops with melted butter.
Let loaves rise, covered, until they again almost double in bulk, about 45 minutes.
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Bake 30 to 40 minutes until done.

(The book suggests using a milk or lemon glaze; the stollen of my memory is invariably topped with confectioners’ sugar.)

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Dec. 5, 1969: Baked.

Weird stuff happens when I read poetry. Walt Whitman is to blame for this week’s entry. Walt Whitman, and beer.

December 5, 1969. “Make oatmeal squares.”

Have you ever considered cookies — the unceasing sunshine of the baker’s art?

Why do you think they are there? Do they exist only to ripen our waistlines, or to fulfill some higher inviolate principle of heaven’s reward?

I soar over your ovens … I look into your kitchens, America, in sunlight and in early creeping twilight, in the brownstones and the tract homes, lo these many Decembers.

I see what is good; I espy the holly and the mistletoe; the orbs of color on the trees outside, refracting back through the windows; and the cookies on their racks, brown and cooling like the sands of Egypt, and ten times as eternal.

I have supped on your cookies, like the whale on baleen or the new-born babe on milk. I have built my foundations on your flour and butter.

Cookie-bakers, I embrace the whole of you … the queens among you, the peons and the also-rans; those whose cookies quiver with jelly, and those whose cookies sting with cinnamon and clove.

The least of you have fed me with sustenance, just as the greatest of you.

December 15, 1973. “Cookie day.”

Young bride in the Rockies, adjusting the family snickerdoodle recipe to great heights — I embrace you!

Spinster in Passadumkeag,speaking softly in Tcherman to her crop of pfeffernusse — I salute you!

Housewife in Sacramento, rescuing your children from the scourge of storebought — I hail you!

Young man in Topeka, warily venturing a batch of chocolate chip cookies to win a reluctant love — I salute you also, and pat your back, and steel you to success! (You have entered the brotherhood, and stand on the same lofty heights as the canniest cookie baker.)

What purpose have we, really, but cookies? And what true purpose have our December holidays besides cookies?

Nuggets of hospitality, warmth in the winter, welcome filling us outward from the stomach.

October 3-4, 1968. “Make fruit bars.”

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Nov. 12, 2011: Next stop, Carversville.

This is another post having nothing to do with my grandfather and his calendars. It has nothing to do with my family at all, really. It’s just another of my weird semi-historical jags. If you’re on the train for the calendar entries, the next one will be along on Monday.

My grandmother was a plain cook of the old school.

No flashy triple-decker birthday cakes or hand-iced petits fours for her. Dessert at 1107 Hope Street was more likely to be something homey and traditional — a plate of cookies baked from some venerable recipe, or my great-grandma’s plum cake, or perhaps a blueberry pie.

(Blueberry pie became my grandma’s go-to dessert after one visit where my brother mysteriously decided he couldn’t get enough of it. It was a short-lived affliction, but the pies kept coming.)

Have some cookies.

Dessert at my other grandma’s was a little fancier — banana splits with maple syrup, or a box of those Stop n’ Shop sandwich cookies with a little square hole in the top cookie where the peanut butter would poke through.

As a kid, I was more impressed with the store-bought stuff. As an adult and an experienced cook, I think I would be more receptive to the homemade desserts. Cookies are a vector for conversation, after all, and if they’re too good or too sweet, they overshadow the companionship. (A decent cup of tea goes a long way toward redeeming dry or bland cookies, too.)

I thought of my grandma and her predilection for original-gangsta desserts the other day while reading one of the better cookbooks in my collection — Evan Jones’ “American Food: The Gastronomic Story.”

The first half of the cookbook is a series of narrative chapters, explaining how food traditions evolved in different areas of the United States. The second half consists of regional recipes, ranging from the familiar (Thanksgiving turkey, U.S. Senate bean soup) to the exotic and unusual (West Coast abalone steak, Virginia chicken and oysters over cornbread.) I scored my copy at a deep discount on closeout, and have been grateful ever since.

One of the first recipes in Jones’ dessert section is something called Carversville Black Walnut Cake. It’s baked in a greased and floured loaf pan, so it looks more like a loaf of bread than a cake. And its only decoration is a light gilding of confectioners’ sugar.

The idea of a cake without frosting sounded like something that would have been right up my grandma’s alley. It exuded an air of thrift and simplicity that appealed to me. (Once, years ago, I made a Depression-era mock-apple pie just for fun. It was surprisingly tasty.)

When you stop to think about it, don’t most cakes nowadays seem to exist for the sole purpose of holding up big gloppy piles of icing? Not so Carversville Black Walnut Cake. It makes its own friends, needing neither buttercream nor ganache for support.

There was a local connection, as well. The village of Carversville, in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, is maybe an hour’s drive from where I live. By making a Carversville Black Walnut Cake, I would not only evoke the spirit of my grandmother, but might also gain a little bit of self-administered eastern Pennsylvania street cred.

There was nothing else to do, then.

Evan Jones' book, plus some of the raw ingredients for a Carversville Black Walnut Cake. (In the background: Genesee Cream Ale.)

Creaming everything together.

In goes the marquee ingredient. Black walnuts, incidentally, have a weird, high-sour, almost-turned taste. Would it mellow during baking? I hoped so.

The finished product with its dusting of sugar.

How was it? Excellent. Agreeably crunchy on the outside, and open and crumbly on the inside.

And the distinctive flavor of the black walnuts seemed to go down a notch with cooking — which is good, since the cake is liberally laced with nuts, and their flavor would have been overwhelming otherwise. (I am sure the recipe would be equally noble, and slightly cheaper, if baked with regular ol’ walnuts.)

This is a cake fit for any rainy-day kaffeeklatsch; any kitchen table laid with oilcloth; or any Sunday-afternoon gathering of the septuagenarian ladies of the church. An American classic, in other words.

Grandma would have approved.

Carversville Black Walnut Cake

1 stick butter, softened
1 cup plus 2 tbsp sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp orange juice
2 cups cake flour
2 1/2 tsp baking powder
3/4 tsp salt
3/4 cup milk
3/4 cup black walnut bits
1/4 cup confectioners’ sugar (I used a few pinches)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Cream butter and sugar together. Add eggs, vanilla and juice and mix thoroughly.
Sift together flour, baking soda and salt. Stir this into the first mixture along with milk and nuts.
Spoon batter into a greased and floured loaf pan and bake for 1 hour 10 minutes.
Remove from oven and sprinkle top with confectioners’ sugar.

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