A Harte Appetite

Over seventy-five years ago Irving Berlin wrote what has become the most recorded song of all time: "White Christmas." It’s easy to understand how Berlin, born in a town near Siberia, could feel nostalgic about a winter snowfall.

German lebkuchen the Cadillac, or the Mercedes Benz of spice cookies, was probably the first cookie traditionally associated with Christmas. Lebkuchen may also very well be the oldest form of cookie know to human kind.

Research shows that the traditional depiction of the first Thanksgiving may not be altogether accurate. In fact, whatever happened at Plymouth 400 years ago, it may not have been the first Thanksgiving at all.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, putting together a Thanksgiving Day menu is not particularly challenging. After all, the fundamentals of the holiday meal are hardly open to debate.

I’m grateful to Roman Catholic nuns for their role in inventing and perfecting some of the most heavenly pastries on earth. Collectively called convent sweets because they originated in the convents of Italy, Spain, and particularly Portugal as far back as the 15th century, they ultimately made their way far beyond the Iberian peninsula.

Over the Millennia civilization has progressed and so has breakfast cereal. Among the earliest of modern cereals was granola, still a staple today, although these days you have to be careful with granola because some of it is little more than cookies masquerading as health food.

Though candy corn is available year round, 75% of its annual sales occur around Halloween. Thus each Halloween Americans buy some 35 million pounds of candy corn which works out to about 9 billion kernals.

Where would you find the most authentic Chicken Kiev? Probably Ukraine. The definitive Peking Duck? Certainly Beijing. The perfect Swedish Meatballs? Obviously Sweden. Or maybe Ikea. And where would you go to find the ultimate Greek yogurt? That’s not so easy a question to answer.

You might expect as much from a cheese made in a country with a long tradition of cheese making. In the Netherlands, but the practice can be traced back at least as far as 800 B.C.

The Ritz cracker was a considerable improvement over previous crackers. Not pale or square but golden and round the Ritz was the result of leaving out the leavening and adding more shortening to make a crisper, more buttery product.

Cake mixes have some real advantages over home made. For instance, they’re much more forgiving. Over-beat the batter and they still bake up fine. Under-beat it and the result is nonetheless perfectly acceptable. Take a box cake out of the oven sooner than you should and all will be well.

Butter is to the Irish what olive oil is to the Italians. They cook almost everything with it and though they might occasionally be cowed into using a butter substitute like margarine, they would never think of insulting guests by offering it to them lest it bring shame upon the house.