3/25/2011:
Christina Rose Marie (Bast) Krismer “Grandma’s Kuchen”
Interviewed: Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, 28 July 2006
Born: Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, 27 August 1937
She was a good cook. She was a very good cook. She didn’t necessarily, I don’t think, do a lot of different things. But whatever she did was well done. We certainly had Kuchen that she made. And I’m not sure if the Kuchen we had was the same as other people’s, looking at the recipes that Michael has had on the internet. Our Kuchen was made – well, we could make it with sour cream or with sweet cream. And most often ours was sour cream based. Because although we had cream on the farm, we wanted a use for the cream when it wasn’t sweet any more. And so we used sour cream. My recipe that I have makes a very big batch. In fact, my sisters who now have got the recipe have said that it makes just too big a batch, so they cut it in half. I can make – what – one, two, three – at least three nine by twelve pans at one time with the recipe. So I mean, it’s not a small batch, it’s a big batch. And we’ve made all kinds of different Kuchens. Straight what I call brown sugar and cinnamon, or sugar and cinnamon Kuchen, spread on the top. Or in fall, one of my favorites is what I call peach Kuchen which we slice peaches onto the top, and then pour some sweet cream on top and let the cream bake with the stuff inside. But then there’s a plum one also that we have. So those are about the basic ones that we used. My mother, however, on the other side, although she made it too, brought with her and made something called Platshinta, and that was a sweet foundation dough that would be filled with cooked apricots and then closed up and sliced, almost like, not like cinnamon roll, but a dough similar to that. And then you baked and had a filling in it. I think some people may have used a poppy seed filling. That may have been another…but I know Mom made what we called the apricot Platshinta.