Relative relations

Let me stay with language plays and curiosity for another post. If people end up in my blog through searches it is often Schiele, de Stael or Twombly that they are looking for. More infrequently it's a line from a Rilke poem, the search for interesting stuff on pastel, painting reflective surfaces or the like. Toulouse Lautrec's Suzanne Valadon is VERY popular and so is Feininger's Vogelwolke.

And while once in a while someone looks for the Baklava recipe, noone has done so, to my knowledge for my granny's Christmas biscuits - Kolutschen.

Until yesterday. I was thrilled. Well: it's cold and dark outside, it's almost the end of the year and so Kolutschen are in order. Someone else obviously thought so too. I have another look at my site stats and see a hit from Eschede, the village my mum grew up in, not far from where my parents live now. I look further and see that that person was looking for Kolutschen. How exciting. Eschede and Kolutschen. I need to tell someone!!! [and this is my 3rd... no 4th... round in telling this story, ;)]

I tell my brother this morning. He: How weird. I: And it's not our parents... it's a really unusual ISP. He: Oh, granddad's neighbours, D.'s have their own ISP. I look and it is indeed them. Out of more curiosity, I type in Kolutschen, first google.co.uk, my blogpost is the only entry; then google.de... And again: only my entry matches. 'Or do you mean Kolatschen?', 'No, I don't.'

Fascinating... this technology.


After the phone call, I realise that it's not any neighbour of my granddad, but my father's cousin's house. Where he used to spend his summer holidays, and where at their wedding he met my mother.

Often I giggle at the thought that someone is looking, e.g., for 'Moon + Trees + Romance' and ends up at the post about my neighbour, or for 'mugging Pollokshields' and ends up at Fully Automated Nikon.

But, now I see my gran's neighbours looking for, well, Oma Eschede's Kolutschen. And they did find precisely that recipe of their neighbour who hasn't baked these probably for more than 15 years or so.

Have some biscuits for christmas...

... and Oma Eschede's* Kolutschen would be an excellent choice.

Well, there was a plan to take a picture of the full tin,
but by the time I got round to it,
only these three were left...

They are part of my first memories of making Christmas biscuits. My mum, my little brother and myself in our old house's kitchen had set up an elaborate division of labour: first, Torben and I would have to attempt to roll the perfect round globes which wouldn't fall apart - difficult one, that one. Then we would argue a bit of who would have to baste them in egg white (not much fun) and who would be allowed to roll them in sugar after (much more fun).

Because he was younger, he wasn't allowed to carry out the more delicate task of poking little moulds into them (of course this isn't part of my memories but vividly in his; and probably one of the few disadvantages of being younger - which is of course my vivid memory ;)), the final task would be to fill the little moulds - like bird nests with jelly.

These were my mum's mother's Kolutschen - simple short crust dough with sugar and jam - unbeaten for Christmas sweetness. Strangely enough, these are biscuits I have still to make myself but without fail they would be in one of my mum's biscuit tins, as they are indeed this year.

Here's the recipe

Kolutschen

250 g sugar
150 g butter
1 pack of vanilla sugar
3 egg yolk
400 g flour

Whisk butter for 15 mins, add sugar, yolks and flour, form globes (about 2 cm diameter) , roll in egg white, then in sugar, use one of those squeeze things to making meringue (well: in German it's Fingerhut) to make a mould which you then fill with a bit of jelly (like the redcurrant one here).

Bake for about 10 mins in oven of 180 degree C (fan-assisted).

Here's another gem from my mum's cook book. It's not so much the recipe - I don't think she ever made that After Eight Cake, but it's my other granny's handwriting... and from the titling by me it must be about 20 years old...




* well, naming grandparents in my parents' house happened according to location, so we had Oma and Opa Eschede and Oma and Opa Uelzen ... and as a geographer I would learn some 20 years later that space and place mattered ...

.

Fields? Family? Anybody?

Easily impressed by what's in front of me, let's do a bit of family story telling today.

My granddad turned 90 yesterday. So, happy, happy birthday, Friedel! He'd been, first anxiously (so as to not tempt fate) then eagerly planning his big bash to offset the far too many funerals that now mark his diary of events.

With having been 'elsewhere' for so long and so persistently, I successfully managed to avoid most family occasions, so much so that I tend to say "there's not much family" where I'm from. Obviously a lie - as the table full of people who I don't know testifies.

So, the first happy family party for me in... I don't know... probably 14 years?... my parents' silver anniversary I guess?...

The village where my mother grew up shares a lot of family from my mother's and my father's side. My dad's uncle lived opposite my mother's parents. And they are all from around there anyway... well, both my grandfathers' families, not my grandmothers' sides.

Where am I going with this? To the fields, and to Albert Koenig. But first two tangents: to Reñaca a bit north of Valparaiso in Chile and to my grans's christmas biscuits.

Field with orange

Tangent 1: after too much lunch, my dad, Torben and I go for a walk - round the swimming pool, and through some fields... I grin, take some photos. Welcome back, just the right time for late summer fields again. There's the little river, well... a burn really... where my mum learned to swim. We come back and my mum says... "I've been talking about you, and Harald wants to talk to you about Chile." Well, let's talk about Chile. H. is one of the son's of my granddad's best friend. H. has travelled, plenty of times to Latin America, to Africa and to Asia. He wants to retire between Reñaca and Viña del Mar, just north of Valpo. ¡Qué raro! He tells me 'talk some more, Gesa, your German sounds so lovely and strange'.

Tangent 2: 'Gesa, Gesa, Gesa - Annegret wants to talk to you about Kolutschen', my mum says excitedly after yet more food. 'They found your blog'. Yes, I know they found my blog. And a few hours later I'm talking to people I spent summer weekends with in their outdoor pool, whom I last saw about 30 years ago, and we talk about never having gone away and about being strange. And about Oma Eschede's Kolutschen recipe, which they stumbled upon last winter. Annegret tells me 'You know, I didn't need the recipe, I have it myself - it's really only two people in the world who made these, my mother-in-law and your gran. We were just curious and googled. And how weird to find them. My daughter asked: Do you know a Gesa Helms? But she's not from here. She's from somewhere in England!'

Na, and then the Men's Choir came and sung. Sung some more and drunk some more. It's so rural and villagey, I tend to forget just how familiar this all is, how I can decipher it blind, find it elsewhere such as in rural northwest Scotland and find the markers, the points to orientate yourself by, to trip up and despair over.

My granddad, orchestrating, to the left with beer glass

¡Raise your glasses, once more! And sing some more about the woods and the meadows, the wind and the darkness, the heathland, the shepherd and a rural idyll that never really was but still warms our hearts.

Oh, and then something really strange was taking place. At the far end, my other granddad sat. Only, he died seven years ago. And nonetheless, one of my dad's former bosses looks soo like him, it's uncanny. Only later my dad told me that his boss' gran was a cousin of my granddad's gran. Well... family... everywhere
Well... Opa Uelzen... he's (not) the one in the middle of this picture.



Albert Koenig: that's tomorrow's programme - in practice, if not in blog.