Fairy Tales and Gingerbread

In the last few months, I’ve read a couple of books of fairy tales for grown ups--The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter and What is Not Yours is Not Yours by Helen Oyeyemi. The latter is short stories actually, but many of them read like fairy tales, especially the very creepy “Dornička and the St. Martin’s Day Goose,” a strange retelling of the classic Little Red Riding Hood and the wolf story, set in the present day. I bought the book after hearing a favorable NPR review and have been attracted to short stories lately, trying to balance my absolute love of reading with the fact that I have so little time to do it.

All I knew of the book was that it is a collection of stories built around the idea of keys and that the author is British. So I was greatly surprised when I got to the Dornička story, which began with a quote in Czech from the fairy tale “The Golden Spinning Wheel,” as told by Karol Jaromír Erben (a 19th-century Czech archivist and folklorist.) Oyeyemi’s story takes place on, and in a village at the foot of, Mount Radhošt’ in northeastern Moravia, where three of my great grandfathers were born and where I’ve stood myself.

Me in 1996, standing between Czech friends from Roznov pod Radhostem.

We're at the historic Pustevny, very near Radhošt'.

The mention of Erben sparked two wonderful things. First, I remembered that I’d bought a book of Czech folk tales by Erben and Božena Němcová on a trip to the Czech Republic for my oldest son in the 1990s. So I searched for the book (I own a lot of books) and read a few stories with my younger son, including one called The Gingerbread House.

Illustration by the Czech artist Josef Lada.

Since I think of food almost continuously, I wondered if I could find any recipes for gingerbread in my Texas Czech community cookbook collection. I did find several recipes for versions of perniky (decorated gingerbread cookies made at Christmas) called everything from Perniky to Molasses Cookies to even Moravian Brown Cookies. I tried the first recipe I found for gingerbread (baked like a cake) and loved how soft it came out and how incredibly easy it was to make, but was looking for something with more intense flavor. Below is a kicked-up version with more spices, and the second attempt was just what I wanted… tender, spicy, and evocative of scenes of small children wandering through light-dappled forests following bread crumbs.

While munching on gingerbread and working on this post in my dining room/library, I Googled Karol Jaromír Erben to learn more about him. His most well known work was a book of folklore ballads, Bouquet (Kytice in Czech). Kytice? “Why does that sound familiar?” I thought to myself. Then the second wonderful thing happened after seeing mention of Erben’s name. I slowly turned my head to the right and looked behind me.

Two feet from my head, sitting on the bookshelf behind me, was a water-damaged 1923 copy of Kytice in Czech, published in Prague, and once owned by my great uncle, Monsignor Alois J. Morkovsky. I have many books and bits of paper, pamphlets, photos, etc. from my mother's family and since many of them are in Czech (and I don't speak Czech that well), I don't realize what I have until I'm doing research about something and suddenly a spark is made. I'll remember an author's name or realize I've got a copy of something interesting. Otherwise, I keep the books as reminders that my family values education and knowledge, and that my ancestors paved the way for my success with their very hard work, diligence, and resourcefulness... like lessons from my own family's personal folk tales. The Kytice book is full of lovely, black and white illustrations and my uncle’s penciled notes… notes about what? I don’t read Czech well enough to know.

But I can only deduce that studying this book, though he was a generation removed from (then) Czechoslovakia, was an endeavor worthy of much time for him. About Erben, David Vaughan of Radio Prague wrote “Erben is to Czechs what the Brothers Grimm are to German literature, and every Czech child can recite extracts from these ballads of water sprites, witches and maidens at the spinning wheel.” I don’t know if the same was true of the first couple of generations of Texas Czech children, but clearly my uncle (a first-generation Texas Czech) was interested. 

If pressed to think of examples of Czech folk culture I was exposed to, folktales definitely do not come to mind. No one in my family wore kroj, either. But the men in my family played taroky. My maternal grandparents spoke Czech, though not really in front of us grandchildren much. Of course, I grew up with Texas Czech foodways. Two of my uncles played in bands and my parents definitely took us to polka dances growing up. At weddings, we’d do the Grand March. My maternal grandmother, Anita Morkovsky Kallus (1915-2012), spoke Czech as her first language and knew several children’s rhymes. I’m grateful to my 31-year-old self for having filmed her with my son (held by my mother) in 1999.

The translation of the rhyme my grandmother is saying is:

Kovej, kovej, kovaricku (Shoe, shoe, little blacksmith,)

Okovej my mou nozicku (Shoe my little foot.)

If you’re interested, too, in Karel’s book Bouquet, there are wonderfully fascinating interviews by Radio Prague with two women who did English translations of the book, Susan Reynolds and Marcela Sulak (who’s actually a Texas Czech poet and professor who now lives and works in Israel.) I ordered a copy of Sulak’s translation here and when it comes, I’ll read it to my son while we’re eating gingerbread and maybe listening to Dvorak’s Water Sprite on Spotify.

And I’ll think of these words from Jaroslav Victor Nigrin, in his forward to an edition of Czech folk tales published in 1921 by the Czechian Literary Society Chicago … “Let us read and study our tales—pohadky—not only for their contents, but also remembering that they are expressions of dreams and hopes of our fathers while they toiled for the better present; let us, as we read them, work and hope for a still brighter tomorrow, when true happiness and peace will be found not only in the tales but in the hearts of all people.”

Gingerbread

Adapted from Angel Gingerbread by Mrs. Mary Kovar in the cookbook Kitchen Treasures, compiled by the Christian Sisters’ Society of the Rosenberg Brethren Church, 1976

1 egg

¼ c. vegetable oil

1 cup flour

½ cup sugar

¼ teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon cloves

2 teaspoons cinnamon

1 teaspoon allspice

2 teaspoons ginger

1 teaspoon nutmeg

¼ cup molasses

1 teaspoon baking soda

½ cup boiling water

powdered sugar

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Beat the egg and add the oil. Sift the dry ingredients and then add to the egg/oil mixture, beating thoroughly.

Then add the molasses. Dissolve the baking soda in boiling water; add to the larger mixture and beat until smooth. Pour into a greased 8-inch square baking pan.

Bake at 350 degrees for 25-30 minutes.

Dust with powdered sugar after the gingerbread has cooled and slice into squares to serve.

Sources:

Ceske Pohadky: Czechian Folklore, Volume 2 of a series called Czechian Classics, Jaroslav Victor Nigrin, editor, published by the Czechian Literary Society Chicago, 1921

Krasna Amerika: A Study of the Texas Czechs, 1851-1939, Clinton Machann and James W. Mendl, Eakin Press, Austin, 1983

Top photo: Woman in Red (London, 2017). Photo by my photographer/son, Dougal Cormie.