Episode #7 -The Importance of Holiday Cooking Traditions

I put a call out this week to ask people to share a favorite holiday cooking tradition. I got a lot of response and quite a few recipes in my inbox. Do you have a favorite holiday cooking tradition? Are some of your family traditions being lost or resurrected? We'll talk about that and much, much more. today on Bending The Spoon. But before we get to that, I'd like to remind you that if you like recipes, go to bonicellicookingclub.com and sign up for my email list and check out all of the options for participating in the club. And if you like what you're here today, hop over to podchaser.com and leave Bending The Spoon, a positive review. Also, for the video version of this podcast, subscribe to Bonicelli Cooking Club on YouTube. Now let's talk about the importance of holiday cooking traditions. I am the granddaughter of Italian-American immigrants and grew up on the Minnesota Iron Range in the town of Chisholm. My grandparents met in America, even though they were from neighboring towns in the Dolomites in Northern Italy. Maybe it wasn't all that surprising that they met here since most Italians didn't speak English and had no American friends or family, my grandparents included, they formed communities here in America, so they met. My grandparents moved to Northern Minnesota because of the mining, not because my grandfather was a miner, but probably because everyone needs shoes and he was a cobbler and my grandmother was a seamstress. Thousands of immigrants moved to places like Chisholm on the Minnesota Iron Range to work for the iron mines or do job supporting the mining industry. In the late 18 hundreds, much of the influx was largely Scandinavian after 1900, many of these immigrants were from Eastern European countries such as Italy, Croatia, and Poland. So the Iron Range was a mix of culture and there was a lot of food diversity. My grandmother came to America when she was only 16 years old. She bought her basic cooking skills and traditions with her and absorbed more from the Italian community that she was a part of. Now, most of my family's cooking traditions, most, but not all, came from my father's side. My grandmother on my mother's side, my Grandma Beau, didn't cook. She reheated. So it wasn't too big of a surprise that my mother wasn't a big cook. She didn't grow up with it. But for the holidays, everyone rallied. And not surprisingly, my mother took to baking, which she was very good at. She made beautiful pies, pumpkin, specifically for both Thanksgiving and Christmas. But the other thing she was a master of was potica now potica is Slovenian in origin. It's a delicious rolled and filled pastry prepared with a light brioche-like dough and a rich walnut filling. It's traditionally eaten on all holidays like Easter, Christmas, and other celebrations like birthdays and weddings. Now, I don't know where she got the recipe or who taught her to make it, because making potica is one of those things you need to be taught, but we all loved it. Anyway. We .Had the pies, the potica, and if we were lucky and begged enough, my grandmother's ravioli and if we were really lucky and really begged a lot, my grandmother's perfect gnocchi with her sauce, which was very bolognese- like. She always lightly fried and breaded cauliflower and made wax beans with yellow onion and cheese, lots of cheese and her favorite cranberry sauce. My Dad and Mom, mostly my Dad, were in charge of the main dish ham for Christmas, and we made cookies, sugar cookies, thumbprint cookies, and date balls with rice. Crispies rolled in coconut. I have no idea why they were called American pan fries, but they were yummy. Another tradition that comes to mind is the Polenta on the Board Party. I will explain more about that later, but one last thing I'd like to bring up now is the tradition of fish or seafood On Christmas Eve. In Italy and other Christian cultures, people abstain from eating meat on the eve of a feast day. So my father would go to my grandmother's to have Baccala salted cod and polenta. Baccala is similar to Lutefisk and it smells terrible. So terrible that my sisters and I would often stand outside in the middle of winter while my Dad ate. My Dad loved it though, and it is time for our featured ingredient, and it is not salted cod. This week's featured ingredient is cinnamon. Cinnamon is a spice that I'm sure no American Christmas holiday is without. Cinnamon is a warm spice made from the cut barks of young tree shoots. There are three main types, Vietnamese, Soft Stick, and Cassia. Cassia is the most commonly used and widely available. A warming spice actually has a warming effect on the body, increases the metabolism, helps digestion and increases immunity. Other warming spices include nutmeg, ginger, cayenne, turmeric, cardamom, and cloves, and cinnamon is often paired with these spices. Another characteristic of cinnamon is that the aroma can trick our brains into smelling and tasting sweetness. Even if there is no sugar in the dish. Cinnamon itself is not sweet, but open up a jar and smell it and you'll detect sweetness. Cinnamon is native to Asia, Vietnamese cinnamon, Sri Lanka, Soft Stick, cinnamon and Burma, Cassia cinnamon. It's cultivated in China, Vietnam, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Madagascar. Cinnamon is a typical spice in American baked goods, but used in other parts of the world in savory dishes as well. It's best to buy cinnamon quills whole from a reputable dealer and grind them yourself as needed. However, they are very hard, so you'll need a spice or coffee grinder. If you do buy ground cinnamon, buy it in a small quantity because the spice will start to lose its potency in three to six months. Store in an airtight jar or container in a cool, dark place. Cinnamon is this week's featured ingredient. My grandmother always called polenta peasant food. As a kid, I agreed with her not realizing that the ground corn made into a porridge, polenta was the key to many family survival during the poor economic time in Italy that drove her as the eldest daughter to America to work. I remember telling her when Chefs in America started featuring polenta on their menus, she just shook her head. In Italy, there was a practice of scrubbing a board and pouring and spreading the polenta on it. Covering it then was sauce and cheese and eating the polenta right off the board. Polenta On The Board, kind of a Sunday evening family thing. Now my parents, along with several other families in Chisholm, turned that concept into a Polenta On The Board Party at the Valentini Supper Club. This was a very large scale version of that tradition with bats of polenta and sauce and many long tables with boards and lots of people. It was always the day after Thanksgiving. Now I replicated the party in my restaurant and home, or at least I did up until the pandemic. Next year. Who knows? Another festive holiday tradition. We tried one year, mainly because it was in one of my favorite food movies The Big Night. It's a Timpano. Now the Timpano is from Calabria, which my family is not, but we had to try it. It's just too fantastic to not make it's layers of pasta, meatballs, eggs, salami, and sauce encased in a dough. Ours weighed almost 50 pounds so big that it took four people to turn it out of the pan. We had 30 people at that party and we could have served 60. Of course, the featured meatball and sauce in the Timpano were my father's recipe, which we always make a Christmas for the Polenta On The Board Party that year in the Timpano. Over the years, quite a few of my recipes have made it into the family tradition category. My Chocolate Truffles, Christmas Biscotti Sea Salt Caramels, Almond Tea Cakes, Italian Almond Cake, and Torta Rustica come to mind right now, but some of my recipes aren't really for eating. It's time for the tip of the week. The tip of the week is make your own Cinnamon Sugar Scrub stocking stuffers. I mentioned in the featured ingredient segment that Cinnamon has many, many medicinal properties. One thing I didn't bring up though is it's a potent anti-inflammatory agent. That's why you see it popping up in skin products, and you can easily make your own scrub at home, put it in a jar at a label and bow and voila a little gift. What you'll need is one large or several small mason jars. This recipe makes about two cups of scrub, so you can gauge from that. Then mixed together in a bowl. Three quarters of a cup of brown sugar, one half a cup of sugar, organic if you can find it, three quarters of a cup of almond oil, coconut oil, or olive oil. My favorite is coconut oil. One tablespoon of cinnamon and 10 to 15 drops of cinnamon essential oil. And that's it. Mix it up. Put the scrub in your jar or jars and make it pretty. It will last for up to a month in your fridge. This sugar scrub is for the face and body. It's exceptionally moisturizing and soothing, making your skin glow. Who doesn't want glowing skin? Cinnamon, is also great for treating acne as well as eczema, and it can even reduce signs of aging. The tip of the week is make your own cinnamon sugar scrub stocking stuffer, and remember to save some for yourself. You are listening to Bending The Spoon, the podcast dedicated to making you a better cook. I'm Chef Laura Bonicelli, and I want to remind you that if you like recipes, go to bonicellicookingclub.com and sign up for my email list and check out all of the options of participating in the club. And if you like what you hear today, hop over to podchaser.com and leave Bending The Spoon of positive review. Also, for the video version of this podcast, subscribe to Bonicelli Cooking Club on YouTube. Now back to our episode. The title of this podcast is The Importance of Holiday Cooking Traditions, but I really haven't told you why holiday cooking traditions are important. They're important because all traditions and in particular food and cooking traditions, ground people, it reminds us of who we are, what we come from, and honors the people who took the time to cook with us and for us. I worry that these traditions are getting lost with our sped up culture and way of life. So if you have a family cooking or baking tradition that you are thinking about resurrecting and continuing, I hope you'll do it. Even if you don't have the recipe, find something similar and make it into a project. Involve the kids, the sisters, the brothers, the cousins, the aunts, the uncles, the friends, Mom and Dad. The dog. Make it or a new recipe. Create and continue your family cooking traditions, they are important because they are yours. Also, if you need any help resurrecting a recipe, let me know. It's my thing. I can help. Last week I sent out an email to my cooking club members and email list asking people to tell me about their family cooking traditions. I got some great responses and I'm going to read a few of them. This one is from Carl. My family tradition is to cure a round of beef for the Christmas table. It's a Scottish and English tradition. We start the project months before the holiday in a crock in our basement. It reaches perfection by Christmas Day, and we serve it sliced as a part of our holiday spread. We also love making Scotch Eggs for the children. This one is from Jeanne, and I will apologize in advance for my tragic Polish pronunciation. Paczki Has been a Polish holiday treat in my family for generations. I remember making them with my grandmother. Anna Nalipinski Lukaszewski,. My mother, father, sister, and brother. Yes. Our whole family participated mostly because Paczki is best eaten hot from the deep fat fryer. If you helped, you got first dibs. A hole-less doughnut with filling on the inside, Paczki are fried, and then cut in half, put a dab Jam, then put the two halves back together and roll and fine sugar. The tradition continues. It is not Christmas without them. We have had three generations of Paczki making gatherings during the Covid years. I would take a day or two and make them to deliver to our families. Many memories over the years have been created around Polish holiday traditions. Paczki is one of my favorites. Thank you, Jeanne for sharing your family story and continuing that tradition even through Covid, especially through Covid. Most importantly, thanks for including my house in your tradition. Here's another one. This one is from Darla. I still live in the small town where I grew up, and I'm happy to say still have many memories of my childhood friends close by. Our mothers participated in a church coordinated cookie exchange every year. We continue that tradition giving everyone participating a chance to enjoy cookies they remember from their youth and new ones too. Recipes are shared and my children are a part of something that I grew up with. Here's another one. This one doesn't have a name. We honor our Mexican heritage by making Tamales every Christmas day. We are fortunate to have four generations living close together. Everyone cooks, everyone eats. And here's one last one. We bottle and give away limoncello to the entire family and our friends. Every year we design our own labels and find a new, beautiful bottle each time. We have the bottles glistening with bows sitting by the door for our guests to take on their way out. Beautiful tradition, and I'm sure beautiful bottles, lots of lemon and vodka. We are just scratching the surface here. There are holiday cooking traditions from all over the world. Thank you everyone for sharing your family cooking tradition stories with me, and now it's time for the Top Tool my top tool for the importance of holiday cooking traditions is the Wilton Cookie Press. Cookie presses are made specifically for Spritz cookies, and I did not grow up making Spritz, and in fact, I didn't like them when I was a kid because my grandmother would get tins of them, not homemade, they were manufactured. And I'm not sure where she got them, but they would always end up at our house. So I thought of them as kind of a filler cookie. Put them on the plate with all the good cookies just to make the plate look full. But they were dry and pretty tasteless, and everyone else got so too because no one ate them Because of those cookies, I never made Spritz. Now, a few years ago, I bought a whole bunch of restaurant equipment. I was buying stoves, and refrigerators, but there were random items included in the package and included was this cookie press. I never used it, but it was brand new still in the package, so I hung onto it and put it in a drawer. Now, this year I thought I'd get it out because it might be fun to press cookies with my Grandson and I came up with a base recipe, one with lemon and then one with cinnamon and guess what? This is really fun to use and it makes absolutely perfect cookies, and my Grandson loved it. And the cookies are actually great. They are soft, they're perfect. The size is terrific. If you just want a little cookie, it's not a big commitment. So this Wilton Cookie press is under $30 and Spritz cookies are now a part of our holiday tradition. Oh, this also works really great for butter based crackers, so my Top Tool is the Wilton Cookie Press. You can find out more and where to get one on my Benable site There is a link in the show notes. When I was growing up, I thought everyone we knew and everything we ate was Italian. From Pigs In The Blanket to potica to ravioli. I even thought my mother was Italian. That didn't go on that long though until I was about eight and my Grandma Beau set me straight. But the point is the deep culinary and cultural heritage, Italian and. Everything else from the Iron Range has deeply informed me as a chef and a human, and I'm really grateful for it. Even as a child, I was aware that the food was really good, and the culture of creating and sharing was exceptional, especially during the holidays. Now I've had an excellent time talking about the importance of holiday cooking traditions. I've loved hearing yours, and I hope you'll have some new ones to tell me about next. Next week's podcast is called Have Yourself a Merry Stress-Free Christmas, or you can sing it, have yourself a Merry Stress-Free Christmas. Seriously, though, I am going to help you take the stress out of cooking for the holidays. Till then, thank you so very much for listening to this episode of Bending the Spoon. If you like this episode or if you think someone else would find it useful, please leave a review on podchaser.com. And if you have any questions for me, find me on Instagram or YouTube or go to bonicellicookingclub.com and leave me a message. Thank you. And go and make some magic in your kitchen. Kiss!