Advent Visions

December 15:  Ferden

Holidays and festive occasions of all kinds are celebrated by sharing food together.  Christmas, especially, is a time for traditional meals and recipes which are handed down from one generation to another.   Every nationality and ethnic group has its wonderful holiday foods, such as German stollen, English plum pudding, and Italian panettone.  It's fruitcake time, too, although there is some question about whether anybody actually eats them or not.  My mother occasionally made ammonia cookies, which filled the kitchen with a horrible pungent smell while the cookies were being made.   But the ammonia seemed to dissipate while cooking, and the resulting cookies were light and crisp and delicious.

I confess that I have a weakness for all baked goods.   When I was a small child,  my family would make a weekly stop at my grandmother's house after attending church service on Sunday morning.    Always she made coffee cake from scratch, using no recipe except what was in her head.   It was light and buttery and topped with cinnamon and sugar, and I have been trying for years to duplicate (unsuccessfully) what, for me, was a warm and wonderful childhood memory.  I remember, too, that my grandmother allowed me a small cup of coffee dosed with lots of milk and sugar.   She made the coffee by boiling the grounds directly in the water and then pouring the resulting black liquid slowly into our cups to minimize the sediment.   But there were always some grounds left in the bottom of our cups, and my grandmother, with her supernatural powers, would read my fortune in the grounds, always predicting wealth, romance, and success.   I was in awe.

My favorite Christmas food tradition, however, is Ferden.   They are small, round doughnuts fried in a special iron pan--also known as an aebleskiver pan.  My father loved these little doughnuts because of his own Christmas memories.   He grew up in a poor home.   During the hard years of the Depression, there was not much money for a fancy Christmas.   He and his brother would walk the railroad tracks to pick up coal that could be burned in the home furnace, and often they would go miles to find a bakery with day-old bread which could be purchased at a great discount.  Christmas did not promise much by way of presents, either.   But early on Christmas morning, his mother would send him down the alley to her parents' house.  He carried a basket to collect the warm, sugary Ferden that his grandmother would send back to share with the family.  "Eddie," she would say, "you can have one or two before you go home, but leave the rest for your brother and sisters."  I'm sure he had a ring of cinammon and sugar around his mouth by the time he got home.   It was love and joy, after all--the thing that always redeems a scarce and difficult time.    I still make a batch of Ferden every Christmas morning in our kitchen and think of my father with love.   And I remember that another child was born once in a scarce and difficult time, in a little town called Bethlehem.    The name of the town

means "house of bread."

Ferden

Just a doughnut,
it is my father,
and the house of his joy,
the love that held him
in his thin but hopeful days.
We give all that we are,
when we feed the ones
who are our flesh and bone.
Not just flour and eggs, 
sugar and cinammon,
these are sacrament,
an ancient and holy communion
where it is our very self
we give.
This is my body,
I mean, offering 
the plate of sweetness:
a bit of my own best being,
given in memory and blessing.
Take and eat.