In Iowa: Links to past, future are key ingredients in family holiday cookie recipe

To me, Christmas tastes like kringla.

Every year throughout my childhood, my grandma Mae or my great aunt Peg baked dozens and dozens of these cakelike Scandinavian cookies and distributed them among my cousins as a special holiday treat. We devoured them slathered with butter.

My grandmother has since passed on, and my great aunt is in a nursing home, no longer able to bake. My sister and parents and I have tried recreating their recipe, but can't ever seem to get the results quite right.

We suspect my grandmother may have left some ingredient or step off the recipe card she gave us, maybe because the process was second nature to her and she didn't think every step needed to be written.

Now that she's gone, we keep trying to crack the code, perhaps because these simple Christmas cookies are a link to the past.

For me, they are a link to my childhood, to my grandmother and to my great-grandmother Helga, who taught her the recipe, and to those who brought that recipe with them when they moved to this country.

I don't know all their stories, but I know my Danish and Swedish and Scottish and German ancestors immigrated here looking for a better life. My father recently told me what he remembers of my Swedish great-great grandmother Jennifer, whose wooden rocking chair sits in my living room. She spoke little English and watched the world go by from that chair.

'She made us slippers and mittens while rocking in that chair, looking out the window, and she rarely spoke to anyone,” my father said. 'She lived to be 93, I think.”

My father inherited that chair, and my parents rocked me in it as a baby. Now it's in front of my fireplace, a tenuous connection with those who came before me. It broke, once, the arms coming loose after so many decades of supporting my family members, but my father was able to fix it.

I wonder if someday my children or their children will sit in it, and if they will know it once belonged to a Swedish woman named Jennifer and her American children.

Maybe that's why it's so important to me to keep making kringla, to figure out the recipe. I want my future children to taste this small link to their Danish and Swedish ancestors and to remember they, too, are descended from people who were once strangers in a strange land.

When they hear of refugees looking for a new home, I want them to be able to picture a woman who perhaps had their nose or their eyes stepping onto a boat, determined to secure a better future for her family. When they see immigrants newly arrived in this country, I want them to think about her struggling to learn English and make a living on the Iowa prairie. When they meet someone trying to assimilate into a culture that is often unkind to foreigners or those who are different, I want them to picture this woman staring out the window, remembering the home she left behind as she knit mittens for great-grandchildren who couldn't speak her language.

We are a nation of immigrants, after all, and whether now or a hundred years ago, these are all our stories. A cookie recipe might not seem like much, but maybe sharing a little bit of kringla can help share some empathy.

l Comments: (319) 398-8434; alison.gowans@thegazette.com