Happy Christmas!

Every year on the 23rd December, the Krumlov residents organize themselves to perform a Nativity at the main Square. I have blogged about them before, but this year - joy! - Pushkin and I have been asked to join in, which we took to be a real privilege as it means we are now accepted by the townsfolk as one of their own.

So instead of watching from the crowd, this time we borrowed costumes from the theatre, rehearsed yesterday, and had a whale of a time being part of this ritual occasion - both irreverent and solemn.

As I said in my previous blogs, what is so wonderful about this 'show' is that it is totally non commercial,  rehearsed but still spontaneous, and there is not a Santa in sight because people here love their traditions. 

And it is humbling to see how everyone - both the performers and the huge crowd in the square know all the words and melodies of their many many carols, and how generations join together to celebrate their Christmas as a community.

I couldn't take many photos today for obvious reasons, and I regret not having had the opportunity to show you some of the more 'Czech' solutions to missing props or cast, such as a dog with a sheep's skin fastened on its back to represent the shepherds' sheep, or a horse with silly felt humps to stand in for one of the King's camels - but here are just a few pictures to bring you closer to the fun. The Nativity, just as the St Nicholas Eve party, are true highlights for me here - I enjoy these even more than the traditional Summer Festival of the Five petalled rose, which is great but a little more organized. And, as usual, my very favourite characters here are the angels of all different shapes and sizes. Hallelujah :-)

Wishing all our blog readers a wonderful Christmas and a happy New Year!
Salamander

CHRISTMAS BISCUITS

Looking at the Statscounter, I realize that the time has come when hundreds of our readers search for Christmas biscuits and pastries again. So I thought to put more recipes up. If you haven't seen my posts from previous years, do have a look, there are many more delicious traditional Czech Christmas pastries and cookies recipes. Bon apetit! 

 Each of these recipes makes a fairly large quantity of biscuits – use half the ingredients if a smaller quantity is required. 

Please note all these biscuits will need to be stored for a period of time in cool temperatures (5-10C) to allow for the flavours and texture to develop fully 

GINGER FLOWERS 

INGREDIENTS 4 eggs, 6 yolks, 500g caster sugar, 550g flour, 2 tablespoons ground ginger

METHOD

In a mixer or a mixing bowl, beat the whole eggs, the yolks and the sugar till fluffy. Fold in flour and ginger.

Put the mixture onto a lightly floured board and work gently into a smooth pastry. Roll out gently to about a 5mm thick – do not use much pressure or the resulting biscuits will go hard. Cut out flower (or other) shapes. Put these onto a greased baking tray, or a tray lined with baking paper. Leave to stand for several hours, or overnight.

Baking:

Put your tray into a fairly hot oven, to allow the biscuits to quickly rise – but then turn the temperature down so they don't turn brown – they should be golden colour.

Decorating:

When totally cooled, brush them over with egg white, and (optional) use the egg white to stick a small piece of candied ginger on the top.

Store in paper shoe box or similar for 3 weeks or longer in a cool place.

YUMMY HAZELNUT STARS

INGREDIENTS:

for the pastry:

400g flour, 170g icing sugar, 150g unsalted butter, 2 eggs, 4-5 tablespoons soured cream, 2 sachets vanilla sugar, pinch of salt (optional)

for the topping:
160g hazelnuts - ground, 80g marzipan, 4 level tablespoons icing sugar, 2 egg yolks, 2 tablespoons fresh orange juice

METHOD

Mix all the pastry ingredients together to a smooth consistency, form a ball and leave it in the fridge for an hour or so.

Shred or grate the marzipan, and mix it with the yolks. Add sugar, juice and nuts.

Roll the pastry to 4-5 mm thickness, cut out star shapes, place them on a baking tray lined with baking paper, and brush with egg white. Spoon a small heap of the topping on each star. Optionally, place a whole hazelnut on top.

Bake at around 180C for 15 minutes, leave to cool and store in an airtight container in a cool place for two to three weeks.

FRUITY/NUTTY GINGERBREADS

INGREDIENTS

Pastry:

2 cups milk, 6 tablespoons honey, 4-5 tablespoons melted butter, 200g caster sugar, 2 eggs.

600g flour, 2 sachets raising powder, 100g ground hazelnuts, 100g ground almonds, 100g ground walnuts, 100g sweet candied fruit (raisins or sultanas, orange and lemon peel, or similar mix), 1 teaspoon cinnamon, 1 teaspoon ground cloves., largish pinch of ground star-anise, 2 tablespoons cocoa, grated lemon rind to taste.

Icing: 300g icing sugar, 2 egg whites, 2 teaspoons lemon juice or rum. 

METHOD

In a pan, gently melt butter, stir in milk, honey and sugar. When cooled down, mix in the eggs.

Put all the dry ingredients onto a floured board, mix through and add the honey-milk mix. Work into a pastry, adding more flour if too sticky.

Form a ball, cover in cling wrap, and leave in the fridge for a minimum of three hours – or overnight.

Next, roll the pastry to about 5mm thick, and cut out shapes. Place your shapes onto a baking tray lined with greaseproof paper. Bake in low to medium oven – check that the honey isn't caramelising or the biscuits will turn bitter.

When cooled, before removing biscuits from the tray, pour a thin layer of sugar icing over the upper part of the biscuits.

Leave in a tissue-paper lined paper box, in a cool place for two to three weeks.

HEART-WARMING CHOCOLATE HEARTS

INGREDIENTS

Pastry:

300g flour, 150g icing sugar, 150g ground hazelnuts, 150g butter, 150g grated bitter chocolate, 2 eggs, 1tbsp orange peel, large pinch cinnamon.

Filling: cranberry or apricot jam – or Nutella

Topping: melted chocolate

 METHOD

Mix sugar and eggs, add the flour, nuts, and butter. Add lemon rind and cinnamon, turn onto a floured board and work into a smooth pastry while adding the chocolate flakes. Form a ball, wrap it in cling-film and leave in the fringe for an hour or so.

Roll the pastry out quite thin – 3mm, and cut out heart shapes. Place these onto a baking tray lined with baking paper, and bake in a moderate oven (170C approx) for about 10-15 minutes.

When cool, spread half of the hearts with the jam or nutella, put the other hearts on top like sandwich, and pour on melted chocolate.

These biscuits need to be stored in an airtight container in a cool place for a week.

ALMOND DELIGHTS

(THESE DO NOT REQUIRE BAKING)

INGREDIENTS

400g skinned ground almonds, 160g icing sugar, 80g melted white chocolate, 40g powdered milk, 2 egg-whites, 4-5 drops of almond essence, icing.

METHOD

Mix the sugar with the egg-whites, add almonds, powdered milk, melted chocolate and almond essence. Put the mixture between two greaseproof paper sheets or foil, and roll to about 3mm thick.

Gently peel off the top paper and cut shapes from the rolled-out pastry. Leave these to dry for at least three hours.

When dry, use your imagination in decorating – white icing with coloured balls, or just plain roasted almond flakes...

DATE SURPRISE

(THESE DO NOT REQUIRE BAKING)

INGREDIENTS

Pastry:

300g ground almonds, 200g ground walnuts, 160g icing sugar, 150g ground butter biscuits, 2 tablespoons lemon juice, 6 tablespoons brandy or rum, optional pinch cinnamon.

Icing: melted dark chocolate, half a date for each biscuit

METHOD

In a mixing bowl mix all the pastry ingredients. Roll out between two sheets of greaseproof paper or foil., to about 3mm thick.

Gently peel off the top paper, cut out diamond shapes and leave them to dry out till the next day.

Decorate with a date covered with melted dark chocolate.

Leave in an airtight container for a week or so.

DATE PURSES

(THESE DO NOT REQUIRE BAKING)

INGREDIENTS

500g dates, 200g marzipan, 80g cooking chocolate, tablespoon butter.

METHOD

Cut each date lengthwise, remove stone and replace with a piece of marzipan. Dip into melted chocolate and leave on a wire-mash stand to harden. Store in fridge.

MOROCCAN GRILLAGE

INGREDIENTS

500g mixed peel, 500g mixed nuts, 500g sugar (or less if peel is very sweet), 600g flour, 1/2l whipping cream

Melted dark chocolate as icing.

METHOD

Chop the candied fruit and nuts and mix them with the sugar and the flour. Bring the cream to boil and remove from heat straight away. Pour the cream into the mix, and let it stand to cool.

moroccan grillage

Place small heaps of the mixture onto a baking tray lined with greaseproof paper, and bake in a cool oven (max 150C) till orange-brown. As soon as the colour changes, remove from the oven and tray while still on the paper, and leave to cool. Then pour melted chocolate on the top.

Christmas at Forest House

Wishing you all good fortune in the New Year - Pushkin

Czech Christmas traditions - Christmas Eve

While the main event of the day is the festive dinner and the gifts under the tree, many families here still take pleasure in the few rituals that have to do with looking into the future, because Christmas - or more precisely the Winter solstice with its promise of new light - used to be seen as the start of the new year. The roots of these customs go back to pagan times.
Here are a few:
Lead melting : take a lump of lead (used to be a lead coin, now a fishing weight) and melt it in a strong pan. Pour a small amount of the molten lead into a pan with tepid water. The resulting shape of the solidified lead signifies your future.
Walnut boats : each person puts a small candle in a half-shell. These 'boats' then float in a large basin. Whose boat sails towards the middle will leave home, boats that stay near the rim signify those who stay at home, and if two boats keep sailing next to one another, these two people will be very close.
Shoe throwing : this is a custom for single women. Stand at the furtherest part of the room, with your back facing the door. Throw a shoe over your head towards the door: if it lands with its tip towards the door, you will marry. If it faces back into the room, you will stay single.
Apple cutting : (this only for the brave!) Cut an apple in half, cross-wise. If the seed-chamber is in the shape of a star, you will have a good, healthy year. If it is misshapen or rotten, you will be ill. If it is in the shape of a cross, you will die.
Spring-gazing : At midnight, girls go to the nearest spring or pond - if it is frozen, they make a hole in the ice. Water at midnight is magical, as it does not reflect your face but instead acts as a window into your future.

Cesky Krumlov Nativity

This evening Pushkin and I, plus my visiting parents, went to the Town square where the residents perform their yearly Nativity. It's always a fantastic event, as it is completely un-official, un-sponsored, devised by our friends from the Mill but enjoyed by all, old and young alike.

People joyfully dress up as angels, shepherds, farm-folk, etc, and those who don't take part all come to watch in a big crowd. It starts with a procession of musicians playing carols, then angels dancing and prancing - the most delicious are the little children of course, but the odd beer-bellied dad is also something to behold! There follows a more solemn procession with Mary and Joseph with a (proper live) baby, and more carols and dancing. Last in are the Three Kings on horses - provided by our friends of the Pohoda stable. The shepherds settle by a roaring campfire, the carols are cheerfully joined in by the whole audience. The last, most solemn, carol - a Czech 'Onto us the Christ is born' is sung in all seriousness by everyone on the square upon which the little angels all go round with plates and baskets of biscuits (baked at the Mill) and little jars with candles, handing them to the audience as presents.

The whole thing is absolutely lovely and genuine. Always brings tears to my eyes, I am not ashamed to admit. My parents loved it, and Pushkin took these photos for you to share. We were just sorry there was no snow this year - plenty on the hills but here in the town it's just got too warm lately. But even so, I wouldn't have missed it for the world :-)

folk traditions - Christmas in Bohemia

I'm no expert on the subject, but find it fascinating to compare traditions so here are some for those who might also be interested:

For the Czechs, like the most of the mid-Europeans, the most important part of the Christmas celebrations is Christmas eve. The tree doesn't get dressed until then, and both the main dinner and the present-giving take place that same evening. The presents under the tree are from Baby Jesus, not Santa (though the marketing people work hard to globalise the Czech Christmas, and in many cases are succeeding - for one thing, jolly Santa is easier to turn into blow-up or cuddly toys. However, a huge petition online 'keep our Baby Jesus' is a sure sign of some resistance :-) and after all, the Czechs still have their Saint Nicholas going strong)

Although carp is now the main item on the Christmas eve table, is was not always thus. For centuries carp was a fish kept by the aristocracy in own ponds so folk had crayfish, snails etc. But most had soup or gruel just like every day, except made a bit more special by adding as many ingredients as they were able to (Štědrovka= Plentiful soup, as the Christmas eve is in Czech the 'Eve of Plenty'). And then something sweet, mostly using dried fruit and honey. The idea for the Christmas dinner table was to use everything that the homestead gave: a bit of grain, a bit of fruit, root vegetables, legumes. And everything had some significance: red apple as symbol of life and health, peas or beans as symbol of plenty because they expand when cooking, nuts as symbols of wealth, grain as symbol of eternal cycle. And there would be a plate set for any member of family who died in the previous year. The head of the family would then go and give of the dinner to all their animals (peas to the hens, garlic to the rooster, herbs to cows, etc... and even leftover bones to the fruit trees) as thanks for having provided for the family.

As Christmas is a festival of nascent Light, it carries many customs associated with the mystery of Time - most with roots stretching far back into pagan times. These I shall tell you about in my next post.

Mad Czechs and Christmas Carps (and other weird things) in baths

Czechs are well known for their resourcefulness, borne of centuries of relative hardship. So they turn to anything that is useful in any circumstances. And a bath happens to be a very useful receptacle for anything that needs to be confined for a few days. Such as a carp that needs to be kept live till Christmas Eve, which is the day that it is traditionally on the menu.

So if you were to go out today or any day until Wednesday next week, you will find at every other corner jolly people in rubber aprons busily fishing huge carps out of large wooden tubs to the delight of queues of eager customers. They come with their string-bags as most of them take their purchase home live, and pop it into the bath. There it stays while the family goes without a wash - but then at least they get the entertainment of getting to know and befriending the unfortunate creature, even giving it a name. And so Fred, or Peter, is a beloved family member until the morning of its demise-day, when in thousands of Czech families the same tragicomedy ritual gets performed - dad chasing the slippery carp with a mallet all over the kitchen table, floor, chairs, wherever the poor thing happens to land in desperation to save its life.

But eventually it ends up on the festive table in the form of breaded fillets with potato salad, or, more elaborately, cooked in dark beer with prunes and raisins, sieved root vegetables and cream.

Nowadays the more trendy families are against this mass slaughter of carp, nevertheless they can't resist the 'carp-in-bath' ritual. So they go with their string bag and buy a carp, have it in the bath f0r a few days, and then stuff it into the string bag again and go with their children to a riverside, where they virtuously 'set it free'.
Whereupon the exhausted carp dies anyway.

A very elderly Jewish lady told me once how her childhood years were punctuated by having geese in the family bath, force-fed with potato dumpling pellets until they were so obese they hurt. But the resulting geese fat and liver were a delicacy prized beyond anything else.

And so, should you get a live chicken from some good soul in the countryside, why not bring it to your high-rise flat and keep it in the bath? Or a rabbit or two? After all, where there's a bath, there's a way :-)

Traditional Christmas pastry decorations; biscuits

I've pinched these two images off Google because, alas, I just don't have the patience to make any of these - but I thought they should go on the blog because these 'Vizovice' figures are very typical of Moravian, folksy, tree-decorations, and unusual in that they are made from dough.
You can read about the process (in English) and see many more photos of this decorative pastry
by clicking the link, but in short, all you need is ordinary flour, mixed with water, and a tiny bit of yeast (a pea-size bit for a kilo of flour). You work this well into a smooth dough, firm enough to hold shape when modelled.
Modelling the various figures and animals is done by hand, with the aid of scissors (e.g. for feathers or for hedgehog spines) or a small knife, and often a motif of platting is used too. Use linseeds for eyes and buttons, etc.

Leave your figures to rise slightly once on the baking tray, brush them over with egg-white, and bake slowly in a dry oven - about 3 hrs at 120C.

You can make people or animals - in the traditional lore each animal symbolises some wish, such as a frog stands for clear water, dove for peace, cockerell for fertility, squirrel for plenty in the larder. The pastries are then used for decorating the Christmas tree, sometimes people make figures for more or less elaborate Nativity scenes that are placed under the tree.
A lovely way to involve children when making home-made decorations, if a bit messy :-)

Christmas biscuits

By popular request I've added a few more recipes to the post below:
see 'Christmas biscuits - Recipes 3'
Bon apetit!

Christmas biscuits - Recipes 3

Mini Nut cakes
100g flour, 150g icing sugar, 250g unsalted butter, 150g very finely ground nuts (works equally well with walnuts or hazelnuts)
Redcurrant jam
Icing: melt 3 bars of cooking chocolate, and mix with 200g butter, 150g icing sugar and hot water as necessary.

1/Mix all ingredients and work into a pastry. Don't overwork it.
2/ leave in fridge for 1/2 hr
3/roll out to 4mm thickness and cut out small (approx 3-4cm diameter) round shapes.
4/bake on baking sheet till golden pink
5/When cooled, stick together a pair of biscuits each with redcurrant or cranberry jam
6/ pour on the icing and leave in a cool place to set.

WALLNUT BISCUITS
200g flour, 120g butter (unsalted, 100g icing sugar, 2 eggs,lemon peel, walnuts (whole)

1/Mix flour, sugar, I whole egg + 1 egg white and add the grated lemon skin.
2/ Leave for 30 minutes in a cool place.
3/ Roll out to 5mm thick, cut out shapes, add walnuts as decoration, then leave again for 15 mins.
Bake in hot oven.

CHOCOLATE ‘SALAMI’
(this is easy-to make, no fuss, but absolutely scrumptious)
100g cooking chocolate. 1 whole egg, 180g icing sugar, 180g nuts (half ground fine, half in rough bits), candied fruit

1/ Mix melted chocolate (not too hot) with egg, add the sugar and the rest of the ingredients.
2/ Make a salami shape, (using icing sugar on hands), and wrap it in aluminium foil, again first putting sugar on the foil so it doesn’t stick.
3/ Leave in fridge – do not bake!!
4/ Before serving, unwrap and cut into thin 'salami' slices

CHOCOLATE 'SALAMI' 2
As before, but adding crushed biscuits

COCONUT BALLS
40g butter, 120gg sugar, 30g cocoa, 50g ground coconut, 1 egg white
(you can add rum or brandy)
Mix all together, make small balls and leave in the fridge. DO NOT BAKE!

ALMOND biscuits
140g icing sugar, 140g almonds with skins – ground (can be made with any other unpeeled nuts), lemon rind from ½ lemon, ground vanilla – pinch, 3 egg whites

Mix all together, let it rest, then roll out to 1/4cm thick.
Leave on the board to dry out a bit.

Then make icing:
100g icing sugar, 1 egg white, ½ teaspoon lemon juice

Spread icing on the pastry, cut out shapes, then bake.

CHOCOLATE HALF-MOONS
120g butter, 120g icing sugar, 120g cooking chocolate, 3 eggs, 120g flour

icing: 300g icing sugar, 4 spoons rum, water

1/Beat butter, sugar and melted chocolate to a foamy consistency.
Add eggs (gradually)
Flour should be folded in last.
2/Pour onto baking tin finger deep.
3/Bake in moderate oven.

4/when baked and cool, pour icing over it.
5/When icing hardens, cut out half-moon shapes