By KAREN MADORIN
I love old recipes. They teach about culture, history, and false assumptions for cooks who study or make them.
Moving to Ellis County in the late '70s opened unexpected doors for me to learn about Volga Germans and other ethnic heritages. While expanding my culinary skills, mishaps, misinterpretations, and cultural confusion led to embarrassed blushes a time or two.
Decades ago, a friend delivered a bit of heaven called hemetschwenger: a cinnamon, sugar apple tartlet encased in an envelope of butter dough. After sampling, I asked for the back story on this sweet delight.
She explained an older German lady in Ellis shared the recipe with her family years earlier. She added local families made them along with hertzen and spitzbuben, which I’d bought at bake sales and then learned to make. I immediately assumed this, too, was a local Volga German recipe that cooks took pride in crafting and sharing. Once I tasted hemetschwenger, I wanted to learn to bake them as well.
Heritage cooking offers connect-the-dot history lessons. Hemetschwenger fit that category for me. Grandma Lottie’s sister raised her family in Hemet, California, so I knew hemet was German for apple. Then I researched the meaning of schwenger. Appropriately, it meant sack. These divine pastries were technically apple sacks. How fitting.
My friend’s recipe then delivered another history lesson. Old-time cooks don’t always record exact measurements.
Following initial instructions, I blended 1 cup of sweet cream with ¾ cups of soft butter. Easy. Then I added 1 teaspoon of salt. Again, easy. The next directive led to consternation. Add enough flour to make a soft dough I could roll thin and cut into 3-inch squares. So how much flour did that original baker mean? What constituted soft dough? My friend advised I start with two cups and keep adding 'til it felt right. Home-ec teachers don’t give those kinds of direction, but Grandma Lottie did.
So…
The ingredients also didn’t indicate how many apples to chop. This event occurred before technology so I couldn’t google. We like apples, so I chopped 6 and added a goodly amount of sugar and cinnamon due to more vague instructions. Imagine my surprise when my hemetschwenger turned out much larger and messier than the pretty ones my friend delivered. The quantity of chopped apple created serious leakage from those soft dough sacks.
Fortunately, someone had added degrees and baking time to the recipe because my inexperience would have led to incorrect guesses. After 20-25 minutes baking at 375 degrees, that butter dough turned a golden hue. Perfect. The remove-cool-dip in a bowl of cinnamon/sugar steps transformed raw, simple ingredients into gastronomic bliss.
Once the internet existed, I discovered the recipe called for 2 chopped apples and 2 ½ to 3 cups of flour to make the soft dough. Since I started with lots of apples, I still make them that way despite cleaning more than a little leakage over the decades.
Pleased I successfully made these treats, I shared this recipe on a Volga German cooking site, vague directions and all. In short time, I received a tech-delivered thrashing. These are not Volga German in origin! I assumed incorrectly. German Mennonites brought them to America and shared their recipe. Purists in the VG group soundly corrected my ethnic faux pas.
As I said, heritage cooking offers lessons, and I’ve learned and laughed over more than a few. But never have I made anything tastier than a pan of hemetschwenger on a cold winter day.
Karen Madorin is a retired teacher, writer, photographer, outdoors lover, and sixth-generation Kansan.