For the cookies
1¾ cups all-purpose flour
1¼ cups hazelnut meal (see note)
cup granulated sugar
14 tablespoons (1¾ sticks) unsalted butter, at room temperature
………
KNOPF BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS, 2006
(available in paperback from Alfred A. Knopf, 2007)
THE YEAR is 1939, and nine-year-old Liesel Meminger has just arrived at her foster family’s home in Molching, Germany. She has already stolen her first book—The Grave Digger’s Handbook, which she swiped at her brother’s funeral—and her collection grows in the ensuing years as her love of words and books deepens, and as Nazism tightens its grip on her village. An array of colorful villagers enriches Liesel’s life in Molching: her accordion-playing foster father, Hans Huberman; her strident but loving foster mother, Rosa Huberman; her neighbor and best friend, Rudy Steiner; and twenty-four-year-old Max Vanderburg, a Jew in hiding, who shares Liesel’s belief in the power of stories.
Liesel’s tale is told through the eyes of an omniscient narrator, Death, who reports on events and the taking of souls without sentimentality, but with a keen eye for detail—especially the color of the sky—and a bit of wry wit. Ultimately, The Book Thief leaves us marveling, along with Death, at the contradictions of the human race: “… how the same thing could be so ugly and so glorious, and its words and stories so damning and brilliant.”
Markus Zusak explains how his mother’s cookie recipe worked its way into The Book Thief:
In The Book Thief, the main character, Liesel, soon discovers a constant venue for her book stealing. It’s the mayor’s wife’s library, and when she’s found out, and even encouraged by the aforementioned woman, she is pretty much given a free run at the books there.
At one point, a dictionary is leaning against the window, but it’s around Christmas that a plate of cookies is also left on the table inside. When you’re writing a book, you want to be familiar with even the smallest details in the world you’re creating. For me, there was no question what those cookies would be. They would be vanilla kipferls—exactly what my mother used to make when we were children.
I guess sometimes it’s the smallest things that make a story ring true. You don’t think when you’re young that standing in the kitchen and helping out will be useful in any number of ways later on. For me, it hopefully added just one more small ingredient to make the world of my book both authentic and recognizable.
(See photo insert.)
Growing up in the southern suburbs of Sydney, Australia, my family was a small oddity; our last name wasn’t Smith, Jones, or Johnson. Even as kids, we knew that our parents—who had immigrated separately from Germany and Austria—had brought a whole different world with them when they came to Australia. This was often felt most around Christmas, when we celebrated on Christmas Eve as opposed to Christmas Day. We cooked up weisswurst and leberkase and rouladen, with kraut and potato salad, and everything happened in the night.
The other memory I have of that time, of course, is the sweet things. For starters, my mother would make colossal gingerbread slabs and fashion them into houses. Sometimes her construction work was sound. Sometimes it wasn’t. Us kids would decorate the houses with icing and lollies that ranged from smarties (like M&M’s), freckles, crunchie bars, and jaffas. The jaffas always went along the top, on the ridge. Sometimes small pretzels also found their way onto those rooftops, and it really was the time of our lives, especially given that we felt deprived all year of these things! Of course, we loved it when the houses collapsed as we decorated them—it just meant that they had to be eaten immediately … so there was always plenty going on at our place around Christmas.
Next to the gingerbread houses, the accompanying ritual was the making of vanilla kipferls. This is technically the wrong plural—in German there’s no s on the end—but I’ll go with the English version here.
As a child, I remember making the mixture and taking clumps of it and rolling it into a long sausage. We would then chop it into the sizes we wanted and make them into horseshoe shapes. Of course, these cookies were always best made on cold days, which can be hard to come by in Australia around December. Still, that’s what I do now. As soon as there’s a cooler day in the lead-up to Christmas, I start making vanilla kipferls. For the first time this year, I made them with my daughter, who just turned four. That’s the other good thing about this recipe. Kids can easily get involved. The ingredients are minimal, and if you destroy a cookie or two in the dough-making, it doesn’t matter. You just squash it up and try again.
The only warning I offer apart from choosing the right day to make them is that no matter how well you make these cookies, they’ll never taste as good as your mother’s. It’s just the way it goes.
NOTE: Hazelnut meal is made from ground-up hazelnuts, and can be found at specialty grocers and online. You can also make your own hazelnut meal: Preheat oven to 350°F. Place 6 ounces (1G cups) of shelled hazelnuts on a baking sheet in a single layer. Bake 8–10 minutes, stirring occasionally so nuts don’t burn, until they are fragrant and browned. Remove tray from oven and let nuts cool slightly. While still warm, fold the nuts inside a clean kitchen towel and rub vigorously to remove their skins. Place nuts in a food processor fitted with the stainless-steel blade, and process until they are finely ground.
Using two vanilla beans will give the cookies a more intense vanilla flavor. However, vanilla beans are expensive, and just one bean will still impart a delicious hint of vanilla.
For the cookies 1¾ cups all-purpose flour 1¼ cups hazelnut meal (see note)
14 tablespoons (1¾ sticks) unsalted butter, at room temperature |
For the vanilla sugar
1–2 whole vanilla beans, cut crosswise into 1-inch pieces (see note) |
Preheat oven to 350°F. Spray two baking sheets lightly with cooking spray.
To make the cookies: Combine the flour, hazelnut meal, and granulated sugar in a large bowl. Cut butter into 1-inch pieces and add to flour mixture. Using your fingers, mix butter and flour thoroughly for 8–10 minutes, until a soft dough is formed.
Pinch off small pieces of dough and mold gently between your palms to form 3-inch ropes, thicker in the middle and tapered at the ends. Fashion each piece into a crescent shape and place onto the prepared trays, leaving a generous H inch in between (they do spread a little and grow in size when cooked).
4. Bake for 15–20 minutes, or until just barely beginning to brown (I tend to monitor them very closely and pull them out just short of going brown. Once they’re brown they’re overcooked. And they’re easy to burn—trust me.)
While cookies are in the oven, make the vanilla sugar: Place the confectioners’ sugar and vanilla bean(s) in the bowl of a food processor fitted with the stainless-steel blade. Process until the beans are blended with the sugar, about 15 seconds. Place a fine-meshed strainer over a small bowl and sift the vanilla-sugar mixture into the bowl. Discard the residue in the strainer.
Once the cookies have cooled to slightly warm, pour the vanilla-sugar back into the strainer and sift over the top. (I always struggle with this part—I just can’t get the slightly melted-on effect of my mother’s, but I’m getting there.) From recent experience, they’re not best eaten warm—they’re still chewy. But soon enough, they’ll be crisp and good, and hopefully, it’ll feel like Christmas, or, if nothing else, a good way to spend a book club night in the corner if you haven’t done your homework.
Yield: About 3½ dozen cookies
NOVEL THOUGHTS
The thirteen members of the Chicklit Chicas, based in Ottawa, Ontario (Canada), found a range of topics to discuss in The Book Thief, including guilt, survival, parent-child relationships, the human aspect of the character Death, the value of literature, and the importance of independent thought. The group especially appreciated the book’s unusual perspectives on World War II. “We seldom hear about what it was like for the Germans going through World War II, let alone from a child’s point of view,” says member Tanya Verde. The narrator, Death, initially met with some skepticism on the part of group members, but they were soon won over. “The character of Death became very human to us, and helped make the concept of death more palatable,” says Verde. “In our culture we like to avoid death, but in The Book Thief it is something that just happens. The book handled the topic in a more balanced way. We also found Death’s descriptions to be quite clever and entertaining,” Verde adds.
For their meeting, the Reading Hearts of the Mainline area of Philadelphia ate split-pea soup with ham—in keeping with the pea soup that Liesel’s foster mother, Rosa Huberman, routinely prepared in The Book Thief—along with ham-on-black-bread sandwiches. The group chose a simple meal to approximate the conditions of the characters, who ate watered-down, sparse rations. “The food created an atmosphere that made us feel more in touch with the characters, but yet more privileged, because our food was far more wholesome and filling than theirs,” explains group member JoAnn D’Orazio. “We discussed how difficult it is for us to truly understand the need and hunger of these characters.”
Typical German foods—including bratwurst, sauerkraut, German potato salad, and apple cake—were on the menu for the Algonquin Book Club of Scotch Plains, New Jersey. The potato salad recipe came from hostess Anne Geislinger’s late husband, who was born in Germany during World War II. While the group savored the German specialties, Geislinger shared stories of her late husband’s experiences growing up in wartime Germany.
cup confectioners’ sugar