Christmas Cookies, Hot Toddies, and Wishing I Was in Prague

Me and my brother in Wenceslas Square in Prague, December 2004

Yesterday I spent the evening baking with a friend who is moving to Prague in a few months to teach English. (Actually I made dough that went into the freezer for baking off today, but he baked dozens and dozens of cookies and brownies until 4am.)  For Christmas, I gave him a copy of the book of essays by Ivan Klima called The Sprit of Prague. I thought that it would be good for him to have a native’s perspective on the city’s tragic and triumphant history.

I reread the title essay and thought how true this passage was... "A city is like a person: if we don't establish a genuine relationship with it, it remains a name, an external form that soon fades from our minds. To create this relationship, we must be able to observe the city and understand its peculiar personally, its "I", its spirit, its identity, the circumstances of its life as they evolved through space in time. " My friend's Prague will not be the same Prague I know because he'll have a different relationship with the city. Mine is based on family history, a strong cultural affinity because of things like getting a minor in art history in college, a love of Art Nouveau, learning to speak Czech, plus my first European travel alone was to there.

I have been to Prague three times, but the last time was 13 years ago and it was actually in December that I went. I’ve thought of that trip every Christmas since because we did so many winter activities while we were there. My traveling partners (my mother and youngest wbrother) and I shopped the Christmas market in Old Town Square on December 6^th, the feast of St. Nicholas. We drank svařák in Prague and vařonka in Frenštát pod Radhoštěm. We bought Betlems and holiday cards. And it snowed our last night in the city. Shop windows were decorated, as were the tables of the family members we visited.

As my friend prepares for his trip with endless hours on websites, I’ve been thinking nostalgically about my first trip to Prague in 1996. It was pre-internet, so I read whatever I could get my literal hands on… books (fiction and guidebooks), travel agency pamphlets, and family memorabilia.  I created a book of sorts for my mother, so she'd know what I'd be doing every day of my trip (it was pre-cell phone time, too) and included photocopies of images of places I'd visit, quotes from Ivan Klima and other Czech authors I'd read that inspired me, and a section of my great-grandfather's autobiography mentioning the one trip he made back to then Bohemia and Moravia (1883) after he immigrated to Texas. His trip included a few days in Prague, which coincided with the reopening of the National Theatre, which had experienced a fire two years before.

My great grandfather, Alois Kallus.

While correcting my friend's pronunciation of Holešovice, washing dishes, reorienting myself in my mind to the location of Wenceslas Square in relation to Prague Castle, and wishing terribly that I was  standing on the Charles Bridge right then, I made poppy seed cookie dough. These are my favorite cookies at the moment… so easy to make, small and pretty, crisp and not too sweet, nutty, and full of poppy seed flavor, for which I can’t seem to come up with any adjectives. Either you know it or you don’t. Poppy seeds are certainly an ingredient in Czech and Texas Czech baking and the cookbook source for the recipe is from a traditionally Czech community (Moravia, for goodness’ sake), but I don’t know the recipe’s origin.

The recipe straight from the cookbook is below, but my variations were: 

• I used butter instead of margarine
• I used pecans for the nuts

And some things to note:

• I got the best results when I baked them five minutes, then took them out of the oven and flipped them over to bake another five minutes. Otherwise, they browned only on one side.
• The recipe made over 100 small cookies (about two inches in diameter.) 

Poppy Seed Cookies

By Mary Ann Spies

From Centennial Celebration (1913-2013) Czech Heritage Cookbook of the Ascension of Our Lord Catholic Church, Moravia, Texas

1 cup margarine

1 cup sugar

1 egg

1 teaspoon vanilla

1 ½ cups chopped nuts

½ cup dry poppy seeds

2 ½ cups flour

Cream margarine, sugar, egg, and vanilla. Add nuts and poppy seed. Stir in flour.

Divide dough into 3 rolls. Place each on a piece of saran wrap and sprinkle with sugar.

Freeze overnight. Slice while frozen and place on cookie sheet. 

Bake at 350 degrees for 8-10 minutes. 

Getting through hours of Christmas baking requires some kind of libation, so I also made Czech-centric hot toddies, which were a delicious stand in for what I really wanted to make (vařonka), only I couldn’t remember the drink’s name to look up a recipe until today. I started by Googling "warm Czech drinks" and ended up finding a recipe for a hot toddy made with the Czech liquors Becherovka and Fernet, both sold at my local Spec's. This version is different than a classic hot toddy... spicier, and with a slightly bitter flavor. The recipe can be found here with an entertaining justification by the blog's author. I like it as an alternate version to, but not a replacement for, the classic. 

So, this evening I baked off the poppy seed cookies, I made another hot toddy, drank it in my vintage Czech P.A.L.T. teacup, rented The 1988 film The Unbearable Lightness of Being, based on the Milan Kundera novel, and was transported for a couple of hours to my favorite city in the world, with whom I'm determined to restart a relationship.