Tag Archives: baking

Spritz Cookies

Text: “For my entire life every single time it’s Christmas or winter break my mom would make spritz cookies with us. We’d all work together to make the batter and bake the cookies. It’s a tradition we’ve done every single winter. I don’t think that’ll change even when I’m an adult, and when I’m an adult I will teach my family how to make spritz cookies. It’s a tradition my mom did when she was growing up, it’s a tradition that we do now, and it’s a tradition that my lineage will be continuing on in the future. The recipe has been passed down for generations on my mom’s side of the family, which is primarily from Wales and England. I think it’s super cool that I’m part of a generational ritual.”

Context: This tradition was shared by the informant, an Event Planner, who has participated in this annual ritual since early childhood. The informant first learned about the significance of spritz cookies in their family history through repeated hands-on experience each winter break, helping their mother prepare the cookies. Their mother emphasized that this was a multigenerational family recipe, handed down from her own childhood and rooted in her family’s Welsh and English heritage. The informant interprets this annual baking ritual as a meaningful act of cultural and familial continuity – something that binds generations together across time and space. They also see it as a future-oriented tradition, one they plan to continue with their own children, preserving both the recipe and the values it represents.

Analysis: This tradition exemplifies the cultural and emotional power of food-based rituals in maintaining family identity and heritage. The act of baking spritz cookies is more than just a seasonal tradition. It operates as a form of intergenerational storytelling and connection. Through this practice, the informant participates in a lineage of family members who have preserved both recipe and ritual, reinforcing the family’s cultural background and values. The emphasis on continuity (“when I’m an adult I will teach my family”) reflects a deep investment in the idea of legacy, which is an important theme in many food traditions across cultures.

The ritual also supports family bonding, especially within the context of a season (Christmas-time) that culturally emphasizes family unity. As a repeated, collaborative act, the baking process intends to bring people together. Because the ritual is tied to the winter holidays, it becomes part of a broader celebration, blending personal tradition with a culturally shared season of reflection and togetherness.

Informant Info

Race/Ethnicity: White

Age: 25

Occupation: Event Planner

Residence: Oak Park, CA

Date of Performance: April 22, 2025

Primary Language: English

Other Language(s): N/A

Relationship: Sister

Pre-Thanksgiving Festival/Tradition

“A tradition that my family had is called Pie Day, and it’s not 3-14 but instead the day before thanksgiving. It’s essentially a party where friends and family come together and make pies for thanksgiving, everyone is in the kitchen. Before we moved to Washington my grandma would always have pie day at her house and that is the one time of year that I would see the most extended of extended family. There are lots of wine snacks and cooking. In Washington it was much more my parents’ friends and a couple cousins and such, and the night ends with everyone gathering on the couch and sitting down for a show or movie.”

The informant performs this tradition every year the day before Thanksgiving, typically held at her parents house in Olympia, Washington, USA. Depending on the year, different people may arrive to participate in this tradition. The informant’s immediate family, her parents’ friend group, her dad’s work friends, herself and her siblings, who invite a couple of their friends, and then some extended family are all potential participants, depending who is in town. Every person who comes can bring a dish they would like to make for the next day, but most people just come to socialize and decompress before the busy Thanksgiving day. The informant is not sure when it started, but her family started preparing the pies for Thanksgiving in the days before and as the years went on, more and more people were invited to participate in preparing food prior to the actual holiday.

The tradition demonstrates a culture that values food and socialization, as nearly all cultures do. Cooking together is a common way to build bonds between people, especially family and close friends. It is a sort of unofficial folk festival for just the small group of people involved, taking place the day before a bigger holiday. This is relatively common as people prepare for holidays. There are group cooking days for food-centered holidays, group shopping excursions for the winter holidays that involve gift giving, and group decorating days before decoration-centered holidays like Dia de Los Muertos or Christmas. It is a way to mount the excitement for the holiday as well as extend the celebration.

Family Christmas Cookie Making

Main Piece

“Every Christmas, our house becomes a ‘candy factory’ – at some point when I was growing up, my mom found recipes for chocolate fudge, peanut butter toffee fudge, and peppermint bark, tweaked some of them so they didn’t have quite as many sticks of butter and cups of sugar, and started making them to give to neighbors and family. My dad started bringing them to work to give to his coworkers too, and now it’s something everyone looks forward to getting from us each year. My brother and I started helping make them pretty early on, at least since I was in eighth grade, and it’s become a key Christmas tradition – responsibility, even – to share with our mom every year.”

Interpretation

Informant’s Interpretation: This tradition holds primary relevance to informant as a family tradition. She likes to spend the time with her mom, but notes that since the whole thing puts a stress on her mom, helping can sometimes “feel more like a duty than a fun cozy Christmas tradition.” However, she notes that she still heavily associates this with how her family celebrates Christmas and thus enjoys it.

Personal Interpretation: I find this to be a classic example of a family Christmas tradition–particularly so because other families recognize it as such and come to enforce the idea of the tradition from a slightly-external perspective. While associated with a religious holiday, I don’t see any particular direct connection to Christian tradition other than perhaps the origins of the types of cookies. That said, it feels pretty removed from any religious context and has more to do with the time of year and family-centric association than anything else.

Background

Informant is a 21 year old college student raised in Rancho Bernardo, California. She is female-presenting, white, and of European descent.

Grandma’s Christmas

Date: April 12, 2022 

Source and Relationship: Emily, cousin

Type: Tradition, Recipe, Family

Folklore/Text: Grandma’s Christmas: “My favorite part of every Christmas was spending the morning of Christmas Eve at Grandma’s house, when she’d make all the cousins ebelskivers for breakfast. I’m not even really sure how to describe them other than pancake balls. They were light and doughy and most of the time we’d pipe them with fruit or syrup or something. I think they’re Austrian or something, because I remember her telling us that she got the idea to make them after watching The Sound of Music. After everyone finished eating, we’d all gather around her tiny fake Christmas tree and exchange presents. Most of the time mine would be a scarf or a gift card. I miss her a lot.”

Explanation/Context: Every Christmas since I was born, all 20 of my first cousins on my mom’s side and their partners would squeeze in my grandma’s condo and share a giant breakfast together. By the time I was five or so, there was a clear schedule to our family reunions in December – we’d all arrive around the 22nd, share Christmas Eve morning with Grandma Julie, and then all go to Christmas Mass together at her favorite church the next morning. Since she passed, my aunts and uncles have attempted to make ebelskivers from her recipe book each year, but they simply don’t taste as good as when she made them in masses in her tiny kitchen. 

Annotation: Ebelskivers are actually spherical snacks of Danish descent, not Austrian. The name literally means “apple slices” in Danish, but typically apples are not a central ingredient in present-day recipes. The crust is similar to regular pancakes, but due to its shape, the inside tends to have a texture more like bread pudding, which is why it pairs well with fruit and other toppings. 

Butter Tart Recipe

Nationality: Canada/USA
Age: 49
Occupation: Barre Instructor
Residence: Seattle
Performance Date: 4/4/22
Primary Language: English

Context:

This recipe for butter tarts was passed down to the informant, AS, by her mother and is directly transcribed. Butter tarts are common in the area of Ontario where she grew up (Blenheim), though she says that every family has their own variation on the recipe. Other varieties often include nuts along with the raisins. To AS’s knowledge, they are not particularly associated with any holiday or specific tradition.

Main Piece:

Butter Tarts
 Pastry  1 1/2 C sifted all purpose flour  1 1/2 C sifted cake and pastry flour
 1 tsp. salt
 1C shortening  About 8 Tbsp. cold water.
 Filling
 1/2 C butter
 1/2 C corn syrup
 1 C washed and dried raisins
 2 eggs
 1 tsp lemon juice
  1 tsp. vanilla
 To make pastry, sift the sifted flours with the salt and cut in the shortening with pastry blender until size of peas. Drizzle in water 1 Tbsp. at a time, tossing with a fork, until you can gather it up into a dampish ball between your palms. Roll out very thinly on floured board. Cut out rounds and line medium sized tart tins with them.  Note I would buy tart shells !!!!
 To make filling, mix all filling ingredients. Spoon into prepared tart shells, filling 2/3 full. Bake at 425 13 to 15 min. WATCH CAREFULLY.
 Enjoy.

Analysis:

Family recipes are a very tangible way to pass tradition down through generations. For one thing, parents generally cook for their children, so the recipes have already been integrated into the children’s lives, and once the children learn to cook, they often learn from their parents. If the children later move far away from their parents, as AS did, family recipes can be a great way to bring back a taste of home. I find it very interesting that the informant mentioned that many families in this area of Ontario have their own recipes for Butter Tarts, some with nuts in the filling. The multiplicity and variation establishes Ontario Butter Tart recipes firmly within the category of folklore.

The format of the recipe also speaks to the proliferation of folklore on the internet and its transmission through digital means. During our conversation where I collected this piece of folklore, AS told me she would send me her mother’s recipe so that I could have that exact recipe that had been passed down through the generations, since she did not remember all the details. When she did send it to me, it was in the form of the email that her mother used to send her the recipe in April of 2020, then forwarded on to me. The original subject line is “Butter Tart Recipe,” and reads: “Hi [AS first name] and [AS’s son’s name]:” and then the above copy/pasted recipe. Also attached to the forwarded email I received was the reply that AS sent back, reading, “Thanks Mom! We’ll let you know how it goes.” This illustrates how the internet allows folklore to spread down family lines even when different generations of the family are separated by thousands of miles of distance. The intended recipients of the emailed recipe being AS and her son also informs the idea that AS asked for this family recipe in order to make it with the next generation of her family, to pass on the practice just like her mother did to her.