by C. Devlin » Tue Dec 18, 2007 2:47 pm
My mother’s parents were born in Norway, which of course means my mother was Norwegian. Like everybody else, they had their own fattigmands bakkelse family recipe which we made once a year as part of the Christmas Eve baking extravaganza. We pronounced them “fah’timuhn buckles,” more or less, and although we grew up believing that meant “fat man’s buckles,” especially as we shaped them in what I later learned was a fairly unconventional way, sort of loosely suggesting a buckle, it turns out that “fattigmand” actually means “poor man” and “bakkelse” apparently translates as “cookie,” and so, obviously, the literal translation is “poor man’s cookie,” which is odd, given they’re an obscenely rich cookie, what with the cream and the booze and the extravagant spices and the frying and the copious amounts of powdered sugar they’re ultimately shaken (or stirred) in.
Traditionally, they are a Christmas cookie, made only once a year (Why? Because they’re a pain in the neck to make and although everybody loves them, nobody wants to actually make them), and so we at least got that part right – that and the part where they’re deep-fried in lard, which comes from the season and the thrifty notions that one "use everything," and so rendered fats managed to their way into nearly every winter food. Yum. And I mean that.
But why “poor man’s cookie,” then.... I suspect it’s because the only way you could get anybody to make them was to take them as slaves and chain them to a stove and a near-boiling pot of lard, with instructions to roll the dough as thin as paper otherwise they’d lose a hand. But no, seriously, I wonder whether they may have originated as scraps of dough that seemed unseemly to waste and which bakers sold in penny bags or took home with them, maybe dressed up with a bit of powdered sugar and pretty shapes, and which then over time, because they’re that good, turned into a seasonal thing that mostly mothers and daughters do together because when you’re five it looks like fun, and when you have a five-year-old, you’re desperate to find something to keep her occupied.
There are recipes all over the internet, and pretty much the same, give or take an egg or the booze. If anybody's interested, I'll either post mine here or send it to you. It's long.