There’s a chill in the air but my kitchen is filling with the warm scent of honey and spice: cinnamon, anise, mace, cloves and ginger. I am making German Lebkuchen, or Advent cookies, which smell as cosy as a winter market. Baking gingerbread feels like a sweet denial of the harsh world outside the kitchen, and more so than ever in this second pandemic year.
These are not the industrially made chocolate-coated hearts you get in bags at the supermarket, though I love those too. The Lebkuchen I am making are rectangular and each is decorated with a single glacé cherry and four blanched almonds, one in each corner. Supposedly, these are the biscuits that would have made up the walls and roof of the witch’s house in the original Grimm’s fairy tale “Hansel and Gretel”. It is an old, old recipe, one that could only have come from a grandmother.
Not that the grandmother was mine. My maternal grandmother was neither German nor interested in baking. As the first person in her family to go to university, she feared that if she developed too many skills in the kitchen she might be expected to stay there for ever. If I limited myself to the treats of my grandmother, I would eat nothing but ready-made mince pies at this time of year. My grandmother felt it was a waste of time to bake a cake when you could be reading Balzac. She called me a clown because I liked cooking (and watching TV).