Family History - Outside the Box and Into the Oven

Kingdom of Bohemia
Coat of Arms

These past few weeks JoAnne and I have been working towards setting up our ward's participation in the church's pilot Billion Graves projects (program to be rolled out to the US, Canada, and Australia in 2015) I have spent some time thinking about families, and relationships we have to our ancestors. Then I read an article by Nelda McAllister, a Latina member for the church from Columbia, and her struggles to maintain her cultural ties to her home country despite innocent ignorance about her background by well meaning people around her. (Hint: Columbia is not Mexico...or Cuba or Argentina for that matter.) In it she described her efforts to keep her connections to her Raza (race) alive, much as those of us with pioneer heritage do every July.

I got to thinking about my own cultural background. I have ancestors from England, Bohemia (Czech Republic now) Denmark, Switzerland, among others. Other than the English heritage that many Americans have inherited from our nation's ties back to England, I know very little about my cultural heritage.

Grandma Turek's kitchen in Hatch

Then I remembered a pastry my Grandma Turek used to make, and the story behind it. Born in Utah, her ancestry was English and Danish, but my Grandpa Turek was born in Nebraska to emigrants from Bohemia, and grew up speaking "Bohunk." He came out to Utah in the 1930s working for the Union Pacific Railroad Utah Parks Company helping to build a water pumping station and power plant in the bottom of the Grand Canyon to supply the then-under-construction lodge and cabins on the north rim. That is where he met my grandmother. After they were married, she went out to Nebraska to meet his family. One the things she learned from my Great-Grandmother was to make kolache (singular kolach), a pastry filled with fruit or poppy seeds. (If you see a "kolach" advertised with meat in it, it is technically klobasniky and was invented by Czech immigrants in Texas. Just FYI)

My grandmother passed away years ago and I was afraid that this link to my Czech past may be lost. I called my dad, who happened to be staying at my grandmothers house in Hatch, Utah to see if there was a cookbook or recipe card at the house. Is answer did not surprise me that grandma usually cooked from memory and there was no recipe at the house. But he did say he would check with his brothers to see if any of them had the recipe.  Uncle Wynn and Aunt Shauna in Washington, Utah came through with Grandma's recipe. (Note the assumption that we all know how to make "sweet dough!" JoAnne thinks the yeast pastry she uses for her Christmas "candy cane" pastry should work just fine). While other fruit fillings could be used, this is how Grandma Turek made kolache as passed on from Great-grandmother Turek of Plzen, Bohemia.

Kolach Recipe

Ingredients: Sweet dough, dry cottage cheese (if unavailable you can use 4% large 
curd from Wal Mart, cinnamon, raisins, sugar, eggs.

Mixing the ingredients: If dry cottage cheese is available place it in a bowl (24 oz 
carton will make about two dozen kolache) If dry cottage cheese is not available 
empty the contents of a 24 oz 4% large curd carton of cottage cheese into a 
strainer where it can be washed with cold water and get the milk out of the chunks. 
After drying for a short time place the washed cottage cheese in a bowl which will 
allow you to mix the following in it. There is not a set amount of cinnamon, sugar, 
or raisins (put in as many raisins as you would like) that I mix in the cottage cheese. 
I generally put about three heaped up table spoons of sugar in the mix along with 
about 1/2 tea spoon of cinnamon. After mixing the cottage cheese, sugar, and 
cinnamon good, I taste the mixture to see how it tastes. I then add an ingredient if it 
seems to need more. You will want the mixture to taste quite sweet because some 
of the sweetness is lost in the dough as it bakes. 

After getting the taste right, mix the raisins and two whole eggs in the mixture. After the dough is prepared and can be rolled out in a thin layer, cut the dough into about 4 inch squares and place a spoon full of filling on the dough, and then bring the 4 corners of the dough together at the top of the filling and get them to stick together. Place the dough filled with your mixture in a baking pan and let them raise for a few minutes. When the dough is raised enough bake kolache at 350 degrees F in the oven until it is golden brown.

Grandpa Edward F Turek
and Grandma Julia Marie Huntington

Great-grandma Marie Houska Turek