5th Day Christmas Past Story

On the 5th Day of Christmas Past, Sheila Stephens (MHA Office Manager) shares a treasured Christmas memory followed by a pioneer account: 
Question: What Christmas food delicacies are a special part of celebrating in these stories or for your family?  

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Mother’s Christmas Cake

Submitted by Sheila Stephens, MHA Office Manager

The year I was nine, my dad was a grad student working on a MS in mathematics at the University of Michigan.  This would be the first year that we spent Christmas all on our own.  Christmas was my mom’s favorite holiday so she was determined that it was going to be great.  In spite of the fact that she really didn’t like cooking, she decided that we were going to have the beautiful Christmas cake she found in a magazine.  The cake called for four layers, 4, 6, 8 and 10 inches.  We didn’t have cake pans in four sizes, so she baked the layers in her skillet and sauce pans.  This made for a LOT of cake, and since the pans were curved where the bottom and the sides met, our layers had round shoulders.  The top layer of the cake was supposed to be cut into a star shape, so Dad got out his compass and protractor (math guy, right?) and made the pattern for the star.  When it was all assembled, it was a really big cake, and not quite as beautiful as the picture.  The round shoulders made the cake look slumped and we weren’t great decorators, but there it was, in all it’s glory.

Spice cake (for the frankincense and myrrh), four layers to represent the 4000 years between Adam and Christ.  The top layer was a star, for obvious reasons and the whole thing was frosted white for purity.  Around the largest layer were 20 red candles, one for each century since Christ’s birth (it’s been a few years, of course), very carefully spaced out to be even by Dad, because you know, math.  The red of the candles symbolized the blood of the atonement.  The cake was sprinkled in gold dragees, for the gold of the Magi.  The dragees looked like ball bearings, and were just about as tough to chew as real ball bearings would have been.  On the top of the star layer was an angel.

We didn’t have much money to buy a tree, so the tree we got was three or four feet tall and we wrapped one of the end tables from the couch in a sheet and put the tree on top.  We didn’t have any decorations for the tree either, so we bought a pound or so of salt water taffy and tied the taffy to the branches with red yarn.  I remember being very proud of our little tree and our enormous round shouldered cake.

We made the cake every year for 10 or 15 years and then more sporadically after that.  I don’t think any of us have made one since Mom died.  (Although I think I still have a carton of gold dragees that I bought at an Amish store about 10 years ago, just in case.)

A Melting Pot of Pioneer Recipes

By Winnifred C. Jardine

Pioneer women who had to decide what few precious things to carry across the plains surely made one choice in common—their own individual collection of “receipts,” as recipes were then called. For them, these were reminders of a security left behind and a hope for the abundance of the future. In the interim, they simply did what they had to do to keep their families alive.  Many early memories of pioneer food concerned the frugality with which the Saints lived: “We lived on cornbread and molasses for the first winter.” “We could not get enough flour for bread … so we could only make it into a thin gruel which we called killy.” “These times we had nothing to waste; we had to make things last as long as we could.”  No doubt the “receipt” books were closed during these times, and efforts were given simply to finding food and making it go as far as possible.  But slowly, even out of this deprivation, recipes grew. The pioneer women learned to use any small pieces of leftover meat and poultry with such vegetables as they might have on hand—carrots, potatoes, corn, turnips, onions—to make a pie smothered with Mormon gravy.

While the first few companies of pioneers were comprised mostly of New Englanders, other states were sparsely represented, as were Canada, England, Scotland, Wales, the Isle of Man, Scandinavia, Germany, and even Spain and Australia. Within the next five years thousands more from other European countries poured into Zion. And with them came their favorite national recipes enjoyed when able especially during special holidays. By the time other immigrants arrived, the critical food shortages were somewhat alleviated, with most families having access to milk and cream, butter and cheese, beef, lamb, pork, chicken, eggs, flour ground from their own wheat harvest, molasses and honey, and a little later, sugar.

Undoubtedly recipes passed from hand to hand. Truly, the cooking pot of the early pioneers was a melting pot for many kinds of cooking from many countries and ranged from the simplest and most humble of recipes to elaborate and elegant dishes from the kitchens of European kings.  Early diaries are filled with happy reminiscences of work and fun: salt-rising bread mixed in mother’s “baking kettle” while traveling in the wagon, then baked over the campfire at night; bacon and sour-dough pancakes cooked over campfires; molasses taffy pulls made possible by generous dippings from the skimmings of molasses boilers; peach preserves cooked in the last of the molasses batch and stored in big barrels; fruits and vegetables dried for winter storage; buffalo pie and wild berries; raspberry and currant and gooseberry bushes planted near the house, yielding fruit quickly and easily.

So many people gathered together with their variety of foods.  The years 1862 and 1863 saw thousands of Scandinavian Saints leaving their homeland to come to Zion. With them came some of their favorite recipes, including Norwegian fruit soup and Swedish jam cake. Of English origin, “currant whirligig” was made in pioneer times with native wild currants. It is equally good made with other tart berries, such as cranberries. Typically German, spiced red cabbage has been passed down as a favorite. It is still used in many homes today, traditionally in some as part of the Christmas feast. Currant bread was brought from Wales in 1856. The Welsh people often used it as a Christmas bread. The Saints found wild currants when they first arrived in the valley, and it is possible that they dried them for winter use. Raisins were not available until later, when cuttings for grapes were brought from California. Potato cake came across the plains with a young woman from Austria and are delicious served hot or cold with any kind of meat, fish, poultry, or salad. With the wild fruits—plums, cherries, grapes, gooseberries, currants—and the glorious fresh fruit cultivated so successfully from imported cuttings, the early pioneer women were soon making some of the delicacies that reminded them of “home.”

Taken from: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/1972/07/a-melting-pot-of-pioneer-recipes?lang=eng