Baking Kiflice cookies taught me how to recreate a feeling of home and tradition | Canada Voices

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Every Christmas they would arrive without failure: A whole tin of crescent shaped cookies covered in icing sugar, round stacked butter cookies and rum balls covered in chocolate sprinkles and sugar. Rum, grounded walnuts and almonds, lemon and yeast wafted from the tin of Finka’s Yugoslavian cookies.

I knew nothing about her part of the world or of her family, except that she came to our house to clean every week in the early 1970s. She knew more about our family than we did hers. She always appeared in the ups and downs of our lives. My parents divorced, we moved many times and our house kept getting smaller and smaller. Somehow, my mom found the resources to pay Finka and once a month she would come into our home and put our dishevelled lives back into a neat and tidy order. And every Christmas she would appear at our door with her holiday tin of strange cookies.

My mom always went for the rum balls. I preferred the crescent shaped cookies, which I later learned were called Kiflice or Kifle – a sweet cookie filled with ground walnuts and sugar. They smelled of yeast, with a hint of lemon and vanilla and tasted sweet, buttery, nutty – they melted in your mouth. But Finka’s cookies represented more than culinary complexity, the cookies were a part of her past, they came from her home in the former Yugoslavia, and were her family’s holiday tradition which had become ours. My little family didn’t have any of its own Christmas baking traditions, there weren’t any bakers.

At 17, I asked Finka if she would show me how to make them. It would be my first baking lesson and my first lesson in the power of family traditions giving comfort. One December night, I went to her house. On her kitchen table were all the ingredients for the Kiflice cookies. A huge bowl of ground walnuts, a bowl of sweet yeast dough, which was prepared the day before. There was white sugar, icing sugar, vanilla sugar and milk. She said it took 10 days to make the cookies! She explained how she cracked open and shelled the walnuts by hand. It was cheaper that way. The task took a week. Then she had to mince the nuts with her special hand crank cast iron grinder. A food processor turned the walnuts to mush. I was absolutely stunned with the amount of work involved.

I sat at the long table and started writing down the ingredients in my leaving-home recipe book. I wondered if the smell of the cookies baking made her think of home. The smell made me think of the many homes I had lived in when she brought over her cookies for the holidays. That night I realized how preparing food can evoke a time, a place, and stir memories and nostalgia of home.

In my new city, I found the exact hand grinder Finka had at a yardsale. An elderly lady came over, curious about why I was interested in it. When I told her, she smiled and gave it to me for free. I carried that grinder from home to home until I got married and one Christmas season I decided it was time to make the Kiflice. It took exactly a week to crack and shell those nuts! Then I pulled out my yard sale nut grinder. The whole thing was a disaster. The nut grinder cracked and broke. My husband didn’t like the cookies and my mother and brother weren’t around to try them.

It would be another 15 years before I would attempt them again. By then, I was a single parent craving my own traditions in a new chapter of my life and I wanted the Kiflice to be part of that.

This time I used shelled walnuts bought in bulk and I ground them with a new hand grinder. The baking smells that December night in my small kitchen took me right back to Finka’s place and right back to my childhood homes. The Kiflice were a success and I shared a tin with my new neighbour, who loved them.

I never kept in touch with Finka but I wish I had. I would tell her how much I cherished that night baking in her kitchen and how she taught me more than a recipe but how to recreate a sense of home through tradition. I’d tell her how much I love her Kiflice and how I make them in my own home now for the holidays.

This year, I’ll share a tin of Kiflice with old and new neighbours. And I hope my own daughter will help me in the kitchen so we can create our own sweet memories.

Marina Wray lives in Toronto.