Honey Anise Cookies * Christmas 2019

HONEY COOKIES   Christmas 2019

 I haven’t made Honey Anise Cookies for a few years. I dug out the old family recipe favorite and for a few hours channeled my mother, Helen, and my Aunt Aldina. It is Aunt Aldina’s recipe. She said her mother used to make them. So, I guess I was also channeling my grandmother Katharina Meidinger Just, who died in 1925 as a 37-year-old mother. It’s hard to know things about a grandparent who died long before I was born except through stories, photos, and, in this case, a recipe.

I had forgotten how many cookies this recipe makes when you roll them out. This time it was 10 dozen. I remembered that other years, when I didn’t have time to roll the dough, I rolled a spoonful into a ball and pressed the ball down with a drinking glass. Even then, the recipe was large.

Making the entire adventure sweeter was the fact that I was using fresh honey from hives on the farm I grew up on north of Berlin, ND.

As I mixed, cooled, rolled, baked, frosted and sprinkled this batch I wondered how my grandmother, a mother of nine, had any time to make cookies. Her oldest daughter, Aldina, was her right hand, and was only 16-years-old when her mother died, leaving Aldina to take over for her mother.

Like all prairie farm women, Katharina and Aldina did their share of farm chores, raised a huge garden and canned a cellar full of summer’s bounty. Chickens were their domain supplying the family with eggs and meat. There was sewing, mending, cleaning, laundry, cooking, baking and endless childcare.

Not all was work…. Katharina played the pump organ that sat in the living room. When guests came, they would circle the organ and sing - in German - hymns and folk tunes from their home in Russia. Some dating back to their ancestral villages in Germany. I know this because I was a family history sleuth in the 1970’s and interviewed anyone I could find who knew Katharina Meidinger Just. Learning about her vocal and musical side was a gift. My sister and I, as well as our children loved studying piano and voice.

As I was channeling those influential women in my heritage I began to wonder if this Honey Anise Cookie recipe was unique to my family OR another example of the foodways of my ethnic group – the Germans from Russia.

I consulted every cookbook I own. I have town centennial cookbooks, church cookbooks, regional cookbooks, ethnic cookbooks, even one in German that I had to consult the translation app on my phone to read. The result is that I found variations of my family recipe in a dozen of the cookbooks in my library.  All the recipes called for honey, lard, eggs, flour, and soda or baking powder in varying amounts. All called for Anise flavoring. I use Pure Anise Extract from the grocery store. The oldest of the cookbooks called for Star Anise. What on earth is Star Anise, I asked myself.

I consulted Sam Brungardt, the editor of Sei Unser Gast, published by the Minnesota North Star Chapter – Germans from Russia. The world of the internet gave us these results:

Illicium verum is a medium-sized evergreen tree native to northeast Vietnam and southwest China. A spice commonly called star anise, staranise, star anise seed, Chinese star anise, or badian that closely resembles anise in flavor is obtained from the star-shaped pericarps of the fruit of I. verum which are harvested just before ripening. Star anise oil is a highly fragrant oil used in cooking, perfumery, soaps, toothpastes, mouthwashes, and skin creams. About 90% of the world's star anise crop is used for extraction of shikimic acid, a chemical intermediate used in the synthesis of oseltamivir (Tamiflu).

Sam wondered if it was possibly much easier and cheaper to obtain Star Anise in South Russia because of the trade routes coming from the east through Asia. No argument there.

So – does that mean Honey Anise Cookies were made in the German villages in South Russia and came to Dakota Territory with my emigrant ancestors?

I consulted Louise Wiens, Leamington, Canada. Louise writes the “At the Familientisch with Louise” essays for the quarterly Heritage Review published by the Germans from Russia Heritage Society (GRHS). Louise’s parents were born in Leipzig, Bessarabia and Schonau on the Dnieper in what is now Ukraine. They were deported to Kazakhstan in 1945 and were able to emigrate to West Germany in 1955 ultimately arriving in Canada some years later. Leamington (north of Detroit, Michigan) has both Black Sea, Bessarabian and Mennonite (also a Germans from Russia group) communities well established there.

Louise consulted a Mennonite cookbook she received decades ago and found a recipe for Anise Drop cookies. The next day Louise visited her Aunt Hulda, born in Leipzig, Bessarabia, who told Louise that many families in her community kept bees and baked with honey all year round.  

Questions remain for me. Answers are still out there. Since I started this inquiry I have learned that something called Anise Oil is available via the internet. Still, the opportunity to feel a connection with those who came before - while I bake a recipe that has survived five generations in America is priceless!

Photos: 1. Young Katharina Meidinger Just, 2.Aldina with three younger sibling Circa 1915, 3.Aldina late 1920's, 4. Helen Dockter Just's Honey Anise Cookie recipe handed down from Aldina Just, 5.cookbooks from my collection that contained Honey Anise Cookie recipes. 6. Jack Halverson (Katharina's 2nd great grandson) frosting Honey Anise Cookies. December 2019.