Above image: A resident at RCCC’s Culinary Program prepares lunch.
Whenever I bring in food from home for lunch at work, I jokingly call it Prison Food. Well, let’s face it, prison food has historically gotten a bad rap, and it’s not without reason. But why can’t those who prepare food in prison be skilled and make delicious meals too? My dad sold vending and cafeteria service to the Old Workhouse in Camp Washington in the 1980s through Servomation. While his company supplied good food to the inmates, he had stories about rats the size of cats roaming the facility built in the mid 1800s when he visited. I don’t want to share my table with mammoth rats.
When I worked in product management in the food service industry, the combi ovens we supplied to prisons had to be specially designed so there were no sharps that could be removed and used as a weapon by inmates.
At a New Years Eve Party this year, I met a gal who is the Account Manager for Sysco Food Services, supplying River City Correctional Center (RCCC) and their Culinary Arts Program to teach inmates how to cook. When she described the program, I got a whole new insight into prison food. She had just moved here from out of town when she took the job with Sysco, and was trying to grow the small accounts she was given. The admins of River City were surprised when she asked if she could visit and help teach the inmates, or residents how to cook. With her engagement and interaction with the residents, she has grown that account almost as much as the top salesman has grown his accounts with the Jeff Ruby Group.
Thursday is Frisch’s Day at RCCC, where residents are served items from the Frisch’s menu. In addition to cooking for residents, members of the program also prepare special meals for meetings on site with administration, and also bake and sell holiday treats annually.
RCCC Food Service Manager Greg Janneck says the residents get a good grounding in commercial food operations. The program teaches the residents everything from the basics, all the way through food safety, sanitation, equipment, food preparation, and even management.
Former Frisch’s Human Resources Manager Lamont Taylor said residents who successfully complete the culinary training – which includes 124 hours of kitchen and classroom work – are guaranteed a job at Frisch’s.
Getting a job goes a long way towards keeping a convict from re-offending, according to Taylor. Transitioning back to society with strong job skills helps former inmates become productive members of society.
About 150 residents graduate from the Culinary Arts Program each year, and the program has also served as a model for other workforce development programs around Ohio.
There is a new food item that has been trending on Reddit with lots of hater comments. It’s called the Beankie, and it’s a Twinkie filled with baked beans. The primary photo of it is shown with a can of Bush’s original baked beans. So, it might be a social media brainchild of the Bush Baked Bean Company to reach out to Millennials and Gen Z eaters. The photo shows a cross section of a Twinkie with baked beans stuffed into the core alongside the cream.
If you think about it, it’s not that far off from the Southern standard dish of beans and cornbread. A Twinkie is really sweat cornbread, and stuffing beans inside just makes it a handheld convenience version of that dish. Actually, I think it’s brilliant and whomever makes Twinkies now should consider making a version of this, so folks don’t have to disassemble themselves and inject beans into the Twinkie body. Maybe even a collab with Bush’s would be smart.
This made me think about the other pairings around the world of savory stews and chilis with pastry. Regionally in Ohio and the larger Midwest, pairings in school cafeteries with chili and cinnamon rolls was fairly common dating back to the 1960s. Many adults who grew up in the Midwest fondly recall the excitement they felt when it was Chili and Cinnamon Roll Day at school. Neither my grade school nor high school cafeteria served this, but it was common all over Ohio.
In the Yankee north, we seem to use saltines or sprinkle oyster crackers on anything warm in a bowl, including soups, stews, and chilis. As a kid, I remember other kids replacing oyster crackers with sweet animal crackers in their soups and chilis, and also replacing the ubiquitous saltine cracker with a sweeter graham cracker, even with cinnamon grahams or chocolate grahams. Now that’s something I can get behind.
And, this pastry-savory stew combo is not limited to America. In Puerto Rico black beans and rice is served with sweet plantain chips or even a sweetish, hush puppy like fried fritter called a sorullos. They are a long Twinkie-shaped, fried cornmeal based dish that are a staple of Puerto Rican cuisine and sometimes stuffed with cheese.
Above Image: Puerto Rican sorrullos
In Phillipine cooking the pulled pork BBQ called lechon asado is served with a sweet steamed rice cake called Puto, much like Southern American BBQ is served with a side of sweet cornbread.
German sauerbraten recipes call for crushed gingersnaps or lebkucken in the sour sauce that drenches the marinated meat. And there are even goetta cousins or grain sausage recipes that also include gingerbread and raisins.
It might have been done already, but even king cake with gumbo or beignets with etouffee should be served in New Orleans in the winter.
So, this warm stew -confection marriage is not something to scoff or hate on, especially during the cold winter months. I think there’s a wide open field with which to experiment. Maybe one of the chili parlors should consider offering a cinnamon roll or slab of schnecken with a bowl of chili. I’d be game.
Simplicity wins out again. We’ve finally admitted defeat with the gingerbread house. Firstly, buying a gingerbread kit is super-expensive, and making architectural grade gingerbread should be left to the professionals. How many gingerbread houses made by these professionals have tumbled on TV contests because the royal icing or isomalt couldn’t hold it all together?
No one wants to spend all that time making gumdrop lanes and pretzel fences and have the gingerbread house collapse in front of their eyes. It’s a traumatic experience.
And, in the end, you spend all this time decorating a gingerbread house, you want to display it through Christmas. By the time you want to tear into it, it’s stale, the icing is like cement, and all the gumdrops have hardened. It’s the worst experience.
The last few years, making hot chocolate bombs had become the new activity to replace gingerbread house building at the holiday season. And, it didn’t matter that the bombs were perfect, because they were going to melt in a cup of hot chocolate anyway.
Ok, so what has replaced the gingerbread house building this holiday season? Thanks for asking – it’s decorated ice cream cones. Turn them over and they make the perfect Christmas tree looking canvas for icing, candy bits, marshmallows, luster dust and whatever edible bling you want to add. It’s sort of a cheap cabinet cleanout – you can use leftover icing, sprinkles, M & Ms, or coconut flakes. And, these decorated cones won’t collapse. You can make a beautiful forest of them, all while still decorating the landscape with gumdrops and pretzel fences.
It’s a brilliant marketing ploy by the cone companies to sell normally warm weather ice cream cones into the holiday season.
My niece recently attended a cone decorating party with her gal pals. But her absent minded mother instead of sending a container of sugar, sent along a container of sea salt. Apparently, the girls were not pleased with the end result when they showered said salt over the cones to make ‘snow’ and tasted the sweet, but super-salty creations. Nailed it!!
Someone in Chowdown Cincinnati group on Facebook recently asked if anyone knew where you could get chili cottage fries like they used to have at the old Chili Company. The Chili Company was a parlor that aspired to be a franchise power like Skyline or Gold Star, but went out of business in the late 1990s due to bad finance practices. It’s a shame because they had a differentiation from other parlors with their offerings. I patronized the White Oak Chili Company in High School and the Oakley Chili Company in my first days as a young professional after graduating college.
The Oakley location has since became a Hothead Burrito, a Fatburger, a yoga studio and now is a bank.
The White Oak Location was originally a Swiss/German immigrant hangout called Fridolin Gutzwiller’s saloon, which my fourth great gramps, Johann Brosey, supplied his Price Hill made Catawba wine to in the 1850s and 1860s. I wrote about its history in the blog:
Now that White Oak location is an Indian Restaurant. So,it’s gone from raclette and schorle to lassi and curry – a truly immigrant fusion story – Swiss to Macedonian to Indian.
The Chili Company was started in 1978 by William and Georgia Poulos, whose family already had a chili legacy. A relative of this family, Joe Poulos, was the first Skyline franchisee in 1958 at Fifth and Main.
By 1990 the Poulos family had 2 company owned and 10 franchised locations of the Chili Company. They filed for bankruptcy in 1989, while suing their insurance company for failing to secure fidelity insurance for them. They alleged that their bookkeeper, had embezzled $500,000 in money in 1987 to fund his gambling debts. Their son Peter owned the White Oak building and was president of the business to the end.
Chili Cheese Fries as an item at a Cincinnati Chili parlor might come in third in popularity to the cheese coney and the threeway, but they’re still on the awards box and widely loved and respected. And you can get a variety of types of them at the various parlors. Skyline and Gold Star are currently dueling out to see who has the best Funnel Cake Fries, which can be ordered in the chili-cheese variety. Pleasant Ridge Chili has a painted advertisement on the side of their small building promoting their chili cheese fries with gravy – a sort of Cincinnati take on Canadian poutine. Blue Ash Chili says, “yes, and…” offering both – chili cheese fries and gravy chili cheese fries.
For those unfamiliar with the cottage fry, it’s a thicker, round, beveled cut of the potato that’s fried. It has a mildly crispy outside and a creamy inside. They are getting rarer and rarer as an item in Cincinnati restaurants and I may need to put them on my Endangered Cincinnati Foods list.
Two still married couples are known to have met at the White Oak Chili Company over chili cheese cottage fries. One are the parents of Cincinnati journalist and author of Lost Treasures of Cincinnati, Amy Knueven Brownlee. The other couple is Dave and Melissa Kolb. Melissa was a waitress there while she went to University of Dayton and Dave gave her a $10 tip and asked her out at the parlor. There may be a truth in all this – love lasts when founded at a Cincinnati chili parlor.
The cool thing about cottage fries, and also threeways, at the Chili Company were that they were available in unlimited servings. Many tested the limits of the offer and their stomach capacity. Nearly 25 years later, Cincinnatians are still talking about this beloved regional fave. Another thing the Chili Company was known for was their varying levels of spice in the chili, going from traditional to the spiciest Torpedo level, a mouth burning fan favorite. They also made popular pancakes, but they were not part of the unlimited offer.
The Chili Company was also open very late and was a standard stopoff after leaving the bars. Waitresses called this the Drunk Shift. In the 1980s, the White Oak Chili Company was run by Dave Rose, Pete Rose’s brother.
No one has yet to answer the woman on Chowdown Cincy, so maybe one of the local parlors will take up this unlit torch – perhaps Camp Washington Chili?
This year the epic poem, “The Night Before Christmas” celebrates it’s 200th birthday. It was written by a wealthy New York minister named Clement Clark Moore for him to read on Christmas Eve to his six children in their mansion in what was to become today’s Chelsea neighborhood of New York.
And the interesting story is that he was inspired to write it on a last minute honey-do errand from his wife, Catherine.
The St. Nick that Moore describes has evolved over the years and morphed into the all red-wearing Santa Claus of today. That image was largely formulated in 1931 by Coca-Cola illustrator, Haddon Sundblom.
On Christmas Eve 1822, Reverend Clement Moore’s wife was roasting turkeys for distribution to the poor of the local parish of Chelsea. It was a yearly tradition to fill baskets for the local needy parishioners. In the process, she discovered that she was short one turkey. She asked Moore to venture into the snowy streets to obtain another. He called for his sleigh and his portly New York Dutch coachman, Patrick and drove “downtown” to Jefferson Market, which is now the Bowery section of New York City, to buy the needed turkey.
Above photo: The Moore Family home in Chelsea New York.
Moore is said to have composed the poem while riding in his sleigh; his ears full of the jingle-jangle of sleigh bells and the horse calls of his coachman. He returned with the turkey and the new Christmas poem. His coachmen Patrick related later that he ran out of the carriage upon their return, spouting details like, the bowl full of jelly line, and St. Nick’s wide face. Poor Patrick was left to convey the turkey to the servant in the kitchen for its neck breaking and butchery.
Moore ran into his study and finished the poem at his writing desk. There are two desks in museums that claim to be that desk. One is on display at the New York Historical Society and the other is at the National Christmas Center in Middletown, Pennsylvania. Both have provenance of being owned by Moore and passed along through his family, but neither has real proof of being THE desk.
After Christmas Eve dinner that evening, Moore read the new verses to his family. We do not know what the Moore’s ate that Christmas eve, but we do know that two days before Moore had been out in the Bowery, getting last minute items consisting of sugarplums, bread, coffee, sugar, and a case of French wine – ooh la la! The sugar and sugarplums might have been used to make a good English plum pudding.
His children loved the poem. He painted a new pic of what would become the American Santa and his animal helpers– with eight named reindeer – Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donner (originally Dunder) and Blitzen. “The most famous reindeer of all,” Rudolph, came along in 1939, more than 100 years after the original eight. He was created by Robert May, an employee of the Montgomery Ward department store.
Montgomery Ward wanted a little Christmas booklet to hand out to children in the store, and May was in charge of writing it. The result was the story of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Then in 1949 the song based on May’s story was recorded by Gene Autry. A few months after the first historical reading, Moore’s children told a visiting friend of their father’s wonderful Christmas verses. This Miss Butler copied the poem into her album and the next December, probably unaware of Moore’s intention to keep his poem private, she sent a copy to the Troy (New York) Sentinel, which published it anonymously
Moore, initially embarrassed of being associated with a child’s poem, eventually admitted to it and it was published with illustrations in 1848. That first Santa illustrated in that 1848 publication is shown as a spritely colonial New York Dutch man with high breeches, and buckled shoes, a hip-length dark fur coat and a flat-topped beaver skin hat, common among the Dutch of New York. And as described by Moore, he smoked a pipe – which explains why American Santa marketed a lot of tobacco products in his early days. One of those was Cincinnati candy maker Mueller’s Black Licorice pipes, cigars and cigarettes.
Moore’s description is said to have been based on his coachman, Patrick. The American image of Santa continued to have that flat dark cap up into the next century. And red wasn’t even his color until the 1930s and 1950s. Santa had long flowing robes of green, purple, blue, gold, but rarely red.
There was no mention in the poem of leaving St. Nick cookies and milk.
That custom—and perhaps leaving a few carrots for his reindeer—took off as an American holiday tradition in the 1930s, during the Great Depression. In that time of great economic hardship, many parents tried to teach their children that it was important to give to others and to show gratitude for the gifts they were lucky enough to receive on Christmas. It was probably a German family who started this, familiar with the Christmas cookie bunterteller tradition in Germany– a decorative bowl or plate filled with a variety of Christmas cookies like lebkuchen and zimsterne – set out for the Christmas eve family celebration.
Some thoughtful children, like both of my nieces, are nice enough to leave a carrot, apple, or hay out for the reindeer so they can refuel too.
Over the years, different countries have developed their own versions of the cookies-and-milk and animal feed tradition. British and Australian children leave out sherry and mince pies, while Swedish kids leave rice porridge for the mischievous house Jultomte or Christmas elves, who are the inspiration for today’s Elf on a Shelf. Santa can expect a pint of Guinness along with his cookies when delivering toys in Ireland.
And that brings up the subject of what inspired the reindeer and their names. St. Nick’s animal helpers of Europe were centuries old and the fusion of them is what formed Moore’s eight reindeer. Moore was a well-read intellectual and was familiar with classic folklore and mythology. He is said to have been inspired by the old Scandinavian tale of Woodin or Odin. Odin, the most important Norse god, was said to have an eight-legged horse named Sleipner, which he rode with a raven perched on each shoulder. During the Yule season, children would leave food out for Sleipner, in the hopes that Odin would stop by on his travels and leave gifts in return. The same tradition continues today in countries such as Denmark, Belgium and the Netherlands, where children still believe that horses carry Santa’s sleigh instead of reindeer. On Christmas Eve, they leave carrots and hay—sometimes stuffed into shoes—to feed the exhausted animals. In return, they might hope to receive such holiday treats as chocolate coins, cocoa, mandarin oranges and marzipan.
Moore was also was an avid fan of Washington Irving (a New York of Dutch descendance) who wrote in 1812 “A History of New York” in which he talks about St. Nick flying over houses and dropping presents into chimneys.
Moore’s brilliant imagination gave us a lot more in the eight named flying reindeer than the children of Europe had. In France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Switzerland, for example, St. Nicholas comes bearing gifts with a donkey, ungifted with the power of flight.
French children leave out a glass of wine for Père Noël and fill their shoes with hay, carrots and other treats for his donkey, Gui (French for “mistletoe”)
Above photo: In Switzerland, St. Nick, his bad helper Schmutzli and his donkey Babalou.
In towns in Switzerland, Santa arrives on a variety of vehicles. In Fribourg, Santa sits on a donkey named Babalou. In Näfels, a carriage picks him up from the forest. In Brunnen, he travels by boat over the lake. In Interlaken, he goes by train. And in the cities of Basel and Zurich, he sometimes even hops on his motorcycle.
In the Netherlands, Sinterklaas rides a white horse called, Slecht Weer Vandaag, or in English, Bad Weather Today, because the horse hates to go out in bad weather. Children also leave our carrots in wooden shoes and sneakers for him. In Amsterdam, Sinterklaas’ horse is called Amerigo.
Above Photo – Sinterklaas and his horse in Holland
In Sweden, as well as other Scandinavian countries, there is a Christmas goat called the Julbock, or the Yule goat, and has a long history. Traditions vary slightly, but it seems that originally the Yule Goat had a connection to the grain harvest. By the 17th century, the grain-harvest goat had become a scary figure that roamed around on Christmas night, knocking on doors and demanding food.
By the 19th century, the Yule Goat began delivering Christmas gifts. Like in America with Santa, one of the men of the family would dress as a goat and distribute presents. As time went on, the role of gift giving passed from the goat to little goat-riding elves who left their gifts while children slept. In some areas, children would leave barley in a shoe for the Yule Goat.
In Victorian era depictions in the United Kingdom, Father Christmas, was shown with a crown of holly riding a large goat.
Pre 1900 and early 1900 Santa also rode in many other vehicles in America. Postcards showed him in Model T’s, air balloons, big wheeled bicycles. In midcentury America Santa travelled on rockets, helicopters and sputniks. Santa basically became a marketing vehicle whose image was used to sell products from trains to tires and national programs. Maybe all that marketing revenue is how he funds his vast gift giving enterprise.
As an avid Christmas collector one of my favorite Santas is as a Pacific Northwest homesteader delivering gifts in a birchbark canoe with a black bear as his helper. This Santa is a lot more fit and outdoorsy than the sleigh riding Santa, but resembles that earliest Moore Santa in all fur.
Over 90 years later the tradition of leaving Santa a treat continues, inspired by Moore’s epic poem, written 200 years ago this Christmas Eve. In Cincinnati, good little children leave Santa a plate of Cincinnati Cheese coneys and maybe some oyster crackers, with a peppermint patty to freshen his breath.
My mother and grandmother taught me to always bring something to the table. That means never going to a party unarmed without a special bottle of alcohol or a plate of sweets. My first day of kindergarten, my mom armed me with a package of gummy fruit slices – red (cherry), orange (orange), yellow (lemon) and green (lime) slices. Passing them out I made fast friends including my gang of “Stand by Me” friends – Jock, Stephen, Bruce, Kyle and Scott. I still keep in touch with some of them. Gummy fruit slices quickly became my fave childhood sweet.
This year I found the link to the Swiss home village of my maternal Brosey family. Since then and visiting the area in June, I have been obsessed with learning about Swiss food culture. I fell in love with their gingerbread – Leckerli, their fruit crepes, their ginger ale-like soft drink called Rivella, and their caramelized onion pizzas. And, given my love of gummy fruit slices, I was happy to find them in a Swiss Christmas candy called Quittenpastli. Think of it as the Swiss great grandfather of the Chuckles candy. In Switzerland’s canton of Zurich, near the border of German and French speaking cantons – a traditional Christmas recipe for Quittenpästli has very few ingredients, but requires lots of patience and tons of stirring.
It’s a chewy fruit bit, similar to a Turkish Delight and those oldey-but-goodie fruit slices, but made with one of the oddest fruits – the quince. It’s also called Pate de coings in the French speaking regions of Switzerland. The oldest known recipe for Quittenpastli comes from the 16th century, so this gummy has been around for a while
I made something similar a few summers ago when my friend Greg gave me a bushel of quinces from his ‘orchard’ in Westwood. It was the Spanish Membrillo, which is typically served alongside a hard cheese on a charcuterie board.
There are various ways of making Quittenpastli. Recipes from 1920 instruct us to boil 6-8 quinces until soft (without any added water), and then pass them through a fine sieve. For 1 pound of quince pulp, 1 pound of sugar is added to a pan along with 1 glass of water, cooking until the mixture forms thread stage (108°C – 118°C). The pulp is then added, and cooked until it forms a mass. The mass is then emptied into a tray, smoothed until 1cm thick, and left to dry overnight. Next day it is cut into shapes, coated in coarse sugar, and allowed to dry for 8-10 days.
The high pectin content of quince makes it an easy fruit for firm gelled candies and jams. No added gelatin or pectin is needed.
It’s extremely doubtful I’ll be able to make them this year, and no one makes them commercially or elsewise, so unless a local confectioner will make them special, I’ll have to wait for my next trip to Switzerland to taste these delicious sounding gummies.
This year two of my favorite foods turned 100 – Cincinnati Chili and the Gummi Bear, or Gummibaerchen, as they.re called in Rhineland, Germany, where it was born. This past June I floated past the town of this treat’s nativity – Bonn – on the Rhine River, as we headed from Cologne to Koblenz. The treat was invented by Johannes “Hans” Riegel of Bonn by his company known as Haribo. The company name takes the first two letters of his name and hometown to form Ha-ri-bo.
He was fed up with his dead end confectionery job at a factory in Bonn and decided to go out on his own founding Haribo in 1920, making colorless hard candies. Two years later he started making the rainbow colored chewy gummi bears, which he called Tanzbären (“dancing bears”) He put his wife Gertrud to work as his first employee, delivering the deliciously chewy confections to customers around Bonn on her fahrrad or bicycle.
Why the form of Dancing Bears? Dancing bears were popular attractions at festivals in Europe. And today they come in the fruity flavors of apple, raspberry, orange, lemon, pineapple and strawberry (which is oddly green colored in the U.S.).
Today, gummy bears are cemented in American popular culture. My window into that was in the 1986 movie Ferris Buehler’s Day Off, where at the end Ferris’ sister offers the principal a gummy bear that had been in her pocket all day. Later it took a pivotal role in one of my favorite award winning musicals on Broadway, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, about an Eastern German rock singer.
Gummy bears fall into the Turkish Delight family tree. The idea of a chewy, sweet fruit flavored candy was not invented in Germany, but in the Mediterranean. The idea of preserving fruit in a sweet gelatinous or pectiny way has been going on for centuries with jams and jellies. The Turkish Delight was the first candy version of this = the great granddaddy of the Gummi Bear. The Turkish delight spawned Greek spoon sweet, called stafyli gliko – made of everything from carrots to quince. Turkish Delights use corn starch instead of gelatin, like gummy bears.
The gelatinous gummy candy was invented in Great Britain in 1909 in the form of Wine Gums, (which actually contained no alcohol). And two other famous American chewy candies pre-date Riegel’s Gummy Bears – the starch-based Jujubes (1920), and pectin-based Chuckles (1921). Other American Jujube-like starch based panned (crunchy outside, chewy inside) like Mike and Ikes (1940) and Hot Tamales (1950) popped up before the gummy bear immigrated in large scale from Deutschland. Even jelly beans, which are a panned hard candy shell coating a chewy center, predate the bears. They were created in the early 1900s by Boston confectioner William Schrafft, more famous for his chocolates. But all of these candies lacked the satisfying chewiness of the dancing bears, nor did they have the same brand of animal whimsy that attracted kids. It seems like the Roaring Twenties was the decade of flappers, mobsters AND chewy candies.
By the end of World War II, Haribo had over 400 employees producing a whopping ten tons of candy a year. Hans Riegel died in 1945 and the biz went to his sons, Hans Jr. and Paul, after they returned from an Allied prison camp. By 1955, Haribo had 1000 workers employed. Paul was production manager and Jr. was CEO over sales and marketing. Hans Jr. came up with the slogan, “Kids and grown-ups love it so, the happy world of Haribo!”, which drives their super-funny adults-with-kids’-voices commercials today.
Now the gummy is the preferred form for delivery of everything from vitamins to THC.
It wasn’t until 1960, when Hans and Paul began mass marketing the bears for a broader European market, that Haribo started producing the squatter, smushier, Gummibärchen (“little gummy bears”). In 1975, Haribo trademarked the term “Goldbären” globally. (The name is a play on the German words for “gold” and “cute.”)
We can thank German-language teachers in U.S. high schools dispensing gummy bears in classrooms so their students could sample foreign cuisines, and American servicemen bringing gummy souvenirs from overseas for their families, for the U.S. demand for Gold-Bears. American candy companies had starting making their own versions of Haribo’s best-selling item. The American Jelly Belly Company (previously The Herman Goelitz Company, started in Cincinnati in 1898 with the release of another iconic candy : Candy Corn) came out with a gummy bear in 1981, the same year Trolli launched gummy worms. In 1982, Haribo, which had been selling Gold-Bears through U.S. distributors, smartly decided it was time to open up its first American office and staked its claim in Baltimore, still in operation today
Over the years many other competitors popped up – Black Forest, Heide, Jelly Belly, but many say Haribo’s bears have a more intense fruit flavor, and a better chew than any of them. And, many also say American gummy bears are sweeter, and have less intense, almost unrecognizable flavors. Some rare gummy fans prefer the mouth-puckering, neon-colored Tolli worms. And who doesn’t like a gummy worm dirt cake, right?
And, you’d think that with the size of the company and the popularity of fussball or soccer in Germany, there’d be a soccer stadium with the Haribo name. But that would be wrong. The Riedel brothers were huge fans and players of Badminton. So they built Haribo Center and Fitness Hall in their hometown of Bonn. Here’s where I make the connection to the Turnverein – the fitness club brought to Cincinnati by Germanic immigrants in 1848 in Over-the-Rhine. The town of Bonn has the Allgemeiner Turnvereine, founded in 1894, which promotes badminton as one of their sports, and plays in the Haribo Stadium, probably chomping on Gold-bears for energy.
This past Friday Channel 12 aired a fantastically produced documentary about the life of Sr Blandina Segale (born Maria Rose Segale) in Italy, near Genoa. She is in the process of investigation for becoming a Saint, and would be Cincinnati and Ohio’s first native daughter to become so. There’s even a miracle attached to her intercession of a woman living in Delhi.
Only a few years after becoming a Sister of Charity, Blandina was sent to Trinidad, Colorado, to minister, and then spent time in Santa Fe and Albuquerque, New Mexico. While there she tended to a wounded man from the gang of Billy the Kid and because of this came under his protection. She also prevented a mob from lynching a man who had shot another man. We know about her time there because she wrote letters back to her older sister at the Sisters of Charity motherhouse in Delhi Township. These letters are preserved and were compiled into a book called At the End of the Santa Fe Trail.
Sr. Blandina was one of the trailblazing Sisters of Charity and locally was the founder of many institutions still operating today. Among these institutions are St. Rita’s School for the Deaf, the Santa Maria Institute for immigrants which she led until 1933, and the Italian parish San Antonio in Fairmount, which celebrated its 100th anniversary this year. By starting St. Rita’s School, she could also be given credit for enabling the proliferation of Cincinnati Mock Turtle Soup, as it was served every year at their summer festival. Sr. Blandina spent her 91 years starting institutions that ministered to the immigrant, Native Americans, trafficked women, children and orphans, and the guilty outlaw, always recognizing the dignity of the human being. I think that’s super-badass.
In 1922, Sr Blandina, along with her older sibling, Sr. Justina, and Sr Euprhasia raised on the order of $5000 and opened what was called a ‘storefront church’, San Antonio, to minister to the Italian immigrant Catholics of Cincinnati. This enabled the women of the parish to make a new delicacy at the Church festivals in the 1930s, called pizza pie, which they had brought with them from Italy. These women were called the (church) Lot Ladies, and among them was Buddy LaRosa’s Aunt Dena , who Buddy credits as the creator of LaRosa’s pizza sauce. She was actually the proliferator of the sauce as it was created from her maternal family in Italy. Non Italians who came to the festival to hit on the beautiful Italian girls, mistook this new and exotic pizza pie for strawberry shortcake, until they tasted it.
Buddy LaRosa in the Channel 12 documentary says that Sr Blandina in her older days visited with and was friends with his maternal Aunts and Uncles, all who lived in Fairmount near San Antonio Church. So, she very likely had Aunt Dena’s pizza pie with what would become LaRosa’s sauce. He said that he even met her when he was 11 years old, which would have been in 1941, the year she died, perhaps at her 91st Birthday Party at the Sisters of Charity Motherhouse.
San Antonio parish spawned Cincinnati’s earliest pizza businesses – the Gramaglia family that founded Pasquales, and the LaRosa family that founded our now largest pizza chain – were and still are members of San Antonio parish.
So, if Sr. Blandina becomes Cincinnati’s first Saint, she would by default become the Patron Saint of Cincinnati Pizza. And then maybe LaRosa’s could bottle the sauce and promote its healing saintly-inspired qualities like Lourdes water. But, Blandina we can all agree, would be a bad name for a pizza sauce!
Above Photo: Grittibanz from Germanic Catholic northwest Switzerland.
There are two bishops in Germanic speaking Europe who have spawned the baking of ‘little man breads’ since the time of the Reformation. There’s a great story in Amsterdam in 1663 when the mayor of Amsterdam prohibited these breads and the arrival of St Nickolas on December 6 because he said they represented Catholic and or pagan images. That story inspired the Rankin Bass holiday Christmas special “Santa Claus is Coming to Town.” The character Burgermeister/Meisterburger represents the meany Mayor of Amsterdam.
While the priestly images of these two bishops – St. Martin and St. Nicholas – still exist in some of the regional breads in Catholic areas of Germanic speaking Europe, they have spawned secular, breads that look more like gingerbread men in the Protestant and non-Catholic regions. There is even a whole other offshoot of these breads made to look like Krampus, the hairy evil beast who accompanies St. Nicholas in Bavaria and Austria to deal with naughty children (and adults). They’re said to be made with Krampus’ sweat for added flavor.
St. Martin’s Day is November 11 in Germanic Europe and signifies the start of the crazy Carnevale/Fasnet/Fastnacht season, particularly in Cologne. On this day breads made to represent St. Martin, called Weckmann, holding little clay pipes and with eyes and buttons made of raisins, are distributed to children by a St. Martin, dressed as a bishop riding a horse. Children also march in elaborate night lantern parades. Last year I made Weckmann on St. Martin’s Day for my niece and nephews, and then on Krampusnacht on December 5, Drew Rath of Tuba Baking specially made an awesome, chocolate-coated, fruit-filled Krampusbrot for our celebration. He has not revealed where he obtained the Krampus sweat used.
Above photo – My version of Weckmann for St. Martin’s Day last year.
Above Photo: Krampusbrot made by Drew Rath at Tuba Baking, Dayton, Kentucky, 2021.
These little man pastries have a wide variety of names, depending on where you are in Central Germanic Europe. There are so many, in fact, that a Little Man Bread Map should be made and a travel podcast should be made to taste all the variations. Widespread in Germany in the Rhineland and Saarland, the Palatinate, in Hesse and in Baden-Württemberg, Franconia and in other parts of northern and partly also in eastern Germany is Weckmann, Weckmännchen, Weckenmann or Weckenmännchen.
Above photo: Stutenkerl
Stutenkerl or Mare are the names of these bread men in Lower Saxony, Schleswig-Holstein, Mecklenburg and Westphalia – the area where the term Mares is the common variant for a raisin bread.
In southern Germany and Austria, the pastry is known as Krampus, referring to the frightening figure accompanied by Saint Nicholas. In East Germany, the pastry is generally not widespread. In German-speaking Switzerland, the pastry is usually called Grittibänz.
In addition, there are regionally influenced names that are unknown outside of the particular micro-region: From the North Eifel to Cologne it is called Pitschmann, in the Bergisches Land they’re called Piefekopp, in the western Ruhr area and Rhineland , they’re called Pumann. In the dialects of Viersen they are called Mönchengladbach, and the surrounding area, they’re called Buckmann or Buggemann. In East Westphalia around the region of Lippe and in the eastern Münsterland it is also known as Piepenkerl.
In the area between the Danube and Lech (Bavarian Swabia and north of Lake Constance) the dough man is called Klausenmann, and in the area around Breisach he is the Baselmann. In Basel (and southwest Baden) it is the Grättimaa, in western Thurgau and eastern canton Zurich near the town of Elgg in Winterthur, he is called Elggermaa. In Luxembourg he is called Boxemännchen (plural: Boxemännercher), in Alsace Manele (Männele) or Manala, in Franche-Comté and in Alsace-Lorraine he is called Jean Bonhomme (Happy John).
above photo: Klausenmann
Above photo: Boxenmaennchen from Luxemburg.
In northern Rhineland-Palatinate it is called Ditz, in the North Baden-Palatinate-South Hesse area Dambedei, Maddinsmändl or Hefekerl, and in Eichsfeld one speaks of Martinsbrot. In Hesse, especially in the Rheingau, there is the Weggbopp
Finally, in the Netherlands, he is known as of Buikman, Wekkeman, Weckman, Weggekèl, Mikkeman, Stevensman, Piepespringer or Ziepesjprengert.
The names Stutenkerl and Weckmann refer to the type of dough and shape of the pastry: a little man made of flour, sugar, fat and yeast (mares) or from flour, salt, yeast and water (Wecken). Klausenmann takes its name from St. Nicholas. Buckmann refers to the thick belly of the dough man.
Grittibänz and Grättimaa in Switzerland refer to the spread legs of the little pastry man. “Gritti”, comes from the high German “grätschen” which translates as “splayed” or “straddled”, describing the form of the legs. “Bänz” was a short form of the common 1800s name Benedict and was used as a stand-in name to describe any man, like the name Jack in English.
Dambedei is of unclear origin, but the forelimb could contain the same word as in Dambelhan’s ‘clumsy, groping man’. Terms such as Männlein as well as the common basic word -mann in Buckmann, Weckmann or Klausenmann as well as -kerl as in Stutenkerl refer to the pastry being in the shape of a man.
The secular pastry figure originally represented one of the two bishops (St. Nicholas or St. Martin), whereby today’s clay pipe, which is mainly added to the North German variants and the Rhenish alarm clocks to St. Martin, is supposed to represent the crosier or bishop’s staff. This is said to date from the heyday of pipe bakeries in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries and was influenced by the Reformation to secularize Catholic symbols.
Aside from Tuba Baking in Dayton, Kentucky, no other bakeries in Greater Cincinnati or Northern Kentucky make these little man breads. Maybe as St. Nicholas Day celebrations are revived, so too can be these breads.
Above photo: Me playing St. Nick at the German Heritage Museum 2022.
I have to admit I’m not a fan of the pear. To me it has a gritty, grainy texture I’m not a fan of. In the 1980s my mom used to make a green jello salad with pears and a jelled cream layer on top. I always asked for a pearless zone for me. But she never complied, saying pears are good for you, and if you don’t eat your fruit you’ll develop bowel issues. Well, in defiance I ate around the pear and a jellied pear was always left on the plate.
We even had two pear trees in our backyard which produced bushels of beautiful fruit every fall. You’d think I’d have latched on to it.
In the last few years I’ve taken on to some Ohio-made pear ciders. I hope that the new Cidery in Norwood will make one. This seems to be the only redeeming quality for me in the pear.
When we think of holiday fruits, I think more along the lines of cranberry, pumpkin, with apple and cherry falling in behind. Even orange seems to have more of a holiday fruit role to me than the pear, as we always got one in our stocking on St. Nick’s Day. In the early 1800s, it became popular to place an orange in the toe of each Christmas stocking to symbolize the three bags of gold that the Bishop of Myra — the real Saint Nicholas — gave to three poor women to use as dowries.
To be fair, pear can really be used in anything where apples play the star role – pie, crisps, brown betty, tart tatin, galettes, and many more.
Now if you baste a bosc pear in juice and cover it in cream sauce, I’m maybe a bit more on board, but still that grainy texture.
Harry and David, have been selling boxed deluxe pears to give at Christmas since 1934. I remember getting these from vendors at work years ago and trading them with others for more enjoyable goodies.
The pear has even been in one of the most known Christmas Carols, written in the late 18th century, The Twelve Days of Christmas. The first day of Christmas, in the song is marked by a gift of a partridge in a pear tree. But I would more likely eat the partridge than the pear. So, why am I still not on board with the pear as a holiday fruit?
I had certainly never come across a fruitcake with pear and I’m one of the weird super-fans of the fruitcake. That was until I found Klezenbrot. In Tyrol, Southern Austria, Catholics make kletzenbrot around the holidays. It’s a sort of fruitcake made predominantly of the native dried pears, but with the additions of raisins, dates, and other dried fruits, along with hazelnuts and rum or brandy. Kletzen are pears that are grown in Austria and Bavaria exclusively for drying. These dried pears are also used to make pear schnapps and brandy. The raisins used in Kletzenbrot are called Zibeben, which are dried grapes straight from the vine with pips or seeds. In Southern Germany and parts of Austria the “Zibebe“ is a common, old-fashioned word for raisins. Kletzenbrot It’s a dense bread made with rye flour, that I think I would like. And, it’s considered a quickbread made by adding sodium bicarbonate and buttermilk to the sifted dry ingredients, then folding in any chopped nuts or dried fruits. It’s not as popular in America as the Christmas stollen, another dark German quickbread made primarily with raisins which was called Poor Man’s Fruitcake, and which my paternal grandmother liked to make at the holidays.
So boozy, dark rye based fruitcake – maybe this is the vehicle to bring me to the pear as a holiday fruit. And hopefully the drying may take some of the graininess out. Well, since no bakeries make it locally, I guess I’m going to have to make it myself. Happy baking to me!
dannwoellertthefoodetymologist 