The right wrong recipe for speculaas
May. 1st, 2020 05:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
catsittingstillA Thing happened today.
I found my mom's recipe for speculaas, which is ... "Dutch gingerbread" is the closest shorthand I can come up with. It's a cookie I associate with Christmas, thick, dark brown, mostly from all the spices in it, and with a very distinctive taste.
And here we run into the child-of-expatriates portion of my heritage. The speculaas of my childhood wasn't the real thing. Back when Mom and Dad moved first to Canada and then to the US, there weren't always easy translations of everything from Dutch to English and Mom's speculaas recipe just called for such and such grams of "speculaas spices." Mom did her best to approximate with the spices she could easily get hold of in the US, and the verdict of visiting Dutch relations was universally "This is very nice, but it isn't speculaas."
Except for me, it was. It was the only speculaas I had ever known.
Crank the timewheel and some thirty years later, Mom found out that the spice whose name she hadn't known and which she hadn't found among the spices easily available to her in 60s and 70s Oregon was allspice. Around that time imported Dutch speculaas also became more generally available.
And the only speculaas I had ever known--my ur-speculaas, my platonic speculaas--vanished. Real speculaas doesn't taste right to me. It isn't even all that nice, because it's very thin and not those thick mouthwatering dark slabs of speculaas with blanched almonds glued on with egg yolk that Mom used to make. But just as Dutch speculaas is not the speculaas of my childhood, Mom's speculaas was not the speculaas of HER childhood and once she could make the real thing she wasn't interested in the facsimile.
It didn't occur to me to ask Mom for her old recipe because I didn't do much cooking at the time. When Mom died I inherited her old recipe boxes and went carefully through them but she had naturally enough, but to my dismay, discarded all her old copies of the approximation she had made.
But today I found her "corrected" recipe, which presumably has all the right structural stuff in it: the flour and butter and egg and so on. So now I just have to recreate the spices. Which I *think* were cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg and cloves. I remember looking in the bowl and seeing the different sized piles of spices. Cinnamon was the biggest and ground cloves was the smallest; I'm just about positive of that. Maybe I can re-create the proportions.
One of these days I'm going to try.
I found my mom's recipe for speculaas, which is ... "Dutch gingerbread" is the closest shorthand I can come up with. It's a cookie I associate with Christmas, thick, dark brown, mostly from all the spices in it, and with a very distinctive taste.
And here we run into the child-of-expatriates portion of my heritage. The speculaas of my childhood wasn't the real thing. Back when Mom and Dad moved first to Canada and then to the US, there weren't always easy translations of everything from Dutch to English and Mom's speculaas recipe just called for such and such grams of "speculaas spices." Mom did her best to approximate with the spices she could easily get hold of in the US, and the verdict of visiting Dutch relations was universally "This is very nice, but it isn't speculaas."
Except for me, it was. It was the only speculaas I had ever known.
Crank the timewheel and some thirty years later, Mom found out that the spice whose name she hadn't known and which she hadn't found among the spices easily available to her in 60s and 70s Oregon was allspice. Around that time imported Dutch speculaas also became more generally available.
And the only speculaas I had ever known--my ur-speculaas, my platonic speculaas--vanished. Real speculaas doesn't taste right to me. It isn't even all that nice, because it's very thin and not those thick mouthwatering dark slabs of speculaas with blanched almonds glued on with egg yolk that Mom used to make. But just as Dutch speculaas is not the speculaas of my childhood, Mom's speculaas was not the speculaas of HER childhood and once she could make the real thing she wasn't interested in the facsimile.
It didn't occur to me to ask Mom for her old recipe because I didn't do much cooking at the time. When Mom died I inherited her old recipe boxes and went carefully through them but she had naturally enough, but to my dismay, discarded all her old copies of the approximation she had made.
But today I found her "corrected" recipe, which presumably has all the right structural stuff in it: the flour and butter and egg and so on. So now I just have to recreate the spices. Which I *think* were cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg and cloves. I remember looking in the bowl and seeing the different sized piles of spices. Cinnamon was the biggest and ground cloves was the smallest; I'm just about positive of that. Maybe I can re-create the proportions.
One of these days I'm going to try.
no subject
Date: 2020-05-01 11:05 pm (UTC)I wonder if your mother also put cardamom in there?
no subject
Date: 2020-05-03 02:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-05-02 03:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-05-03 02:07 am (UTC)But I'll let people know if it works.
no subject
Date: 2020-05-02 06:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-05-05 01:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-05-07 01:54 am (UTC)I remembered making it with my Mom when I was a kid, and the various size piles of spices in the bowl before they were stirred in. I was just about positive cinnamon was the biggest pile and cloves was the smallest--quite small. I was pretty sure the other two spices were ginger and nutmeg, with ginger being bigger and nutmeg being smaller.
Mom's corrected recipe called for 4Tbs cinnamon, so that gave me my cinnamon target. I was making a 1/4 batch (because why throw all those ingredients away if I got it badly wrong, and if I made something I liked a quarter batch was a reasonable amount for me and Kip to eat) so I used 1 Tb cinnamon, 1/2 Tb ginger 1 tsp nutmeg and 1/4 tsp cloves. It came out tasting pretty much right to me, but the texture was a bit more cake-like than I remembered--probably because at that size the recipe called for half an egg and I think I ended up with more like 2/3 or 3/4 of an egg. It's hard to divide an egg in half.
Even so, I liked it enough that Kip only got a couple of pieces. Probably not something I should make very often.