We Can Has Lebkuchen!

You know it’s Advent when the house smells like a German bakery! . . . Or better yet, like your Grandmas’ kitchens at Christmastime!

We made two different lebkuchen recipes this week: One is my mom’s current recipe, and the other is my Great-Grandma Thomas’s.

We always have to collect a bunch of wonderful ingredients; local black walnuts, sorghum from the Mennonite store, candied fruits from the “holiday baking aisle” at Schnuck’s, and more.




Mom’s Recipe

The recipe my mom has used for the past several years always gets rave reviews by everyone who eat those cookies. “Best lebkuchen ever!” is the general assessment. No kidding—they’re awesome. This is my first year to try making them. Why? Because Mom said she wasn’t going to bake them this year!

Mom’s recipe is based on one she found in a church-ladies cookbook: The Fruit of the Spirit: A Collection of Recipes by Heisinger Lutheran Home Auxiliary, Jefferson City, Missouri (Kearney, Neb.: Cookbooks by Morris Press, 2001). It appears on page 295 of that book and is named “Leb Cookies.” It was contributed by Goldie Kirchner, who noted that it “was given to my son, Ray, by Herbert Ehrhardt when they worked together at Stockman Feed Store many years ago.”

It’s got butter in it, and the liquid “lift” is provided by buttermilk and baking soda, so it’s got a good buttery richness to it. And who doesn’t like that?

In addition to molasses, it uses brown sugar, while many other recipes call for white.

Mom adjusts the fruits per her own mom’s way of making lebkuchen: It’s about 50 percent candied mixed fruit, 40 percent raisins, 5 percent citron, and 5 percent candied cherries. No, I don’t think these proportions have to be exact.




Here is something else that is a hallmark of both my mom’s and her mom’s lebkuchen: Grandma Renner always ground her mixed candied fruit in a small, hand-cranked meat grinder—the kind you clamp onto a table to use in making sausage.




I remember watching her push that sticky candied fruit into the grinder and turn the crank. What emerged was even stickier than before! But it had a nice, even texture, with much smaller pieces. Her idea, I think, was to distribute the flavors of the candied fruit more evenly.

Another plus is that by grinding the candied fruit, no one has to bite down on a big hunk of candied-whatever. Well—it’s a plus for people who don’t truly like candied mixed fruit.

Grinding the fruit, I noticed, also makes the dough easier to roll and cut.

Great-Grandma Thomas’s Recipe

This was passed down from the mother of my paternal grandmother. Grandma Schroeder’s mom’s name was Wilhelmine Thomas. I’ve told you a charming story about her and her husband, Albert, in an earlier blog post. Albert and Wilhelmine emigrated from Germany in the late 1800s.




We have a lot of different versions of her recipe, since it was used both by my paternal grandmother (naturally) as well as—get this—by my maternal grandmother! Yes, they were neighbors, and Grandma Renner liked and used the recipe.

Grandma Renner was usually careful to credit it as “Mrs. Thomas’s recipe,” but whether or not it’s marked as such, I can identify the recipe at a glance because, for the liquid rising agent, it calls for X tablespoons of baking soda mixed with Y cups of “cold black coffee.”




Also, although Grandma Renner amended the recipe by substituting her own blend of mixed fruit, grinding it with her sausage grinder, Great-Grandma Thomas’s recipe always only called for candied citron and lemon peel, and raisins and currants. No grinding required.




It never called for butter; early versions of it use lard, but most later renditions specify Crisco.

This recipe uses white sugar with the molasses—not brown.

The resulting cookies aren’t as buttery and sweet as the ones my mom makes. They have a darker flavor, and the chunks of fruit are chunkier.



Despite the thoughtful and well-reasoned alterations made by Grandma Renner, as far as I know, Grandma Schroeder did not change her mom’s recipe much . . . although she did write it down in English. Hmm: Maybe her biggest innovation was to decorate the leppies with stuff like candied cherries and colored sprinkles!




As a kid, I probably wouldn’t have liked them without these additions. I’m glad she used them on some of her leppies, because it started me trying and liking lebkuchen at a young age. (Kids can be kind of dense about really good foods, can’t they? I know I was.)




What Kind of Molasses?

When I started making lebkuchen, my first question on all these old recipes was, “Okay, it calls for ‘molasses,’ but what kind of molasses should I use?” I’m a late-twentieth-century gal; I’m used to having more shopping choices than I know what to do with.

I experimented with sorghum (presumably that’s what they had back in the early 1900s), but also regular ol’ Brer Rabbit, as well as blackstrap. (Wow, that batch was dark and distinctive! And the men in the family seemed to enjoy it, in particular.) I don’t think you can go wrong, though I’m sure everyone will have a preference.




Recently, as I reviewed some handwritten versions from Grandma Schroeder, I found this on one sheet: “Be sure to use ‘ripe’ sorghum or else Brer Rabbit brand.” There you go! Sorghum it is.




Then, from my Grandma Renner, I see in the ingredients list: “32 oz. jar Waconia molasses.” (Which—I think—is either a popular cultivar of sorghum, or else a brand of sorghum molasses that is now long gone.)




After all my experimenting, I’ve pretty much decided that real sorghum is the best, for its rich, light flavor.

Did you know that in Germany, honey is the usual sweetener for lebkuhen? Apparently here in the United States, back in our great-grandmothers’ day, sorghum was much less expensive than honey, so that’s why our grandmothers used it. It’s the same with the walnuts: In the Old World, they must have used English walnuts with their milder flavor, but here in Missouri black walnuts have become the tradition—they add a strong, distinctive flavor that we love but which would probably get our Missouri lebkuchen tossed out of a German bakery like so many inedible hockey pucks.

The Verdict!

Oh, come on. You don’t honestly expect me to pronounce one of these recipes “superior” to the other! All I can say is, they are different, but they are more alike than they are different. And I feel rich indeed to have so many good recipes, from so many wonderful mothers and grandmothers, to bake at Christmastime.

Leppies (Lebkuchen or Lepkuchen)

Around here—and perhaps all around the world, including Germany—this is the number one German Christmas cookie of all time. Really: The official cookie of Christmas. Authoritative. Can’t have Christmas without lebkuchen—not if you’ve got “sauerkraut in the blood” like we do.

If you have German heritage like us, you probably know what I’m talking about. This is just as Christmassy as the Tannenbaum and “Stille Nacht”—lebkuchen. Sometimes you see it spelled “lepkuchen.” We call ’em “leppies” for fun. We’re German Americans, after all, so whatever’s authentic in Germany might be a little foreign to us.




Indeed—official German forms of this recipe nearly always use honey as the sweetener. According to Erin McCawley Renn, in her important book A Midwest German Christmas: Breads, Cakes, Cookies, Sweets, and Special Foods: Weihnachtsgebäck, -konfekt, und –speisen, Nuremberg, Germany, “became the center of the Lebkuchen industry because . . . [it] was on the direct route north from the Republic of Venice, where the spice ships unloaded anise, cinnamon, cloves, cardamom, nutmeg, ginger, and black pepper, and Nuremberg was famous as the center of the finest honey-producing region in Germany.”

But, as Renn points out, Germans who immigrated to America tended to modify their recipes to utilize molasses instead of honey—molasses being cheaper and generally more available. Therefore, among us ethnic Germans here in the Midwest, the “traditional” lebkuchen recipes that came down to us from our immigrant grandmas usually feature sorghum or some other sweetener or combination of sweeteners. Sometimes I use blackstrap molasses!




In my experiments, I’ve found that sorghum is mild and is indeed a pretty good substitute for honey. Blackstrap molasses is delicious, too, with that dark, smoky, almost bitter flavor—and it makes for some truly distinctive cookies.




There’s also such at thing as “white lebkuchen,” which uses white sugar as the sweetener. My recipe for white leppies came from my Grandma S’s collection, and it calls for “cardamom to taste.” (Oooh, don’t throw me into the briar patch!)

The recipes vary considerably, but they almost all have a few things in common. First, they use a wonderful variety of spices, types that are traditionally considered almost medicinal, as digestive aids. These spices make me think of Indian cuisine: Cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, ginger, pepper, cardamom. Remember the comment about the spice trade? Here you go. When they first appeared in Europe, these were special, precious flavors. So special you reserve them for Christmas.

Another thing most leppies share is candied fruit. Candied lemon peel, candied citron, and candied orange peel pop up a lot. Some newer recipes use “candied mixed fruit,” with that pineapple . . . and whatever those little green things are.




In my family, you can’t have leppies without nuts, and the nuts are usually black walnuts. White leppies tend to include almonds instead. I guess some people use English walnuts and pecans for their lebkuchen, but whatever. With my people, leppies are the number one reason to procure black walnuts every fall. We compete with the squirrels for them.

As Renn also points out, nearly all lebkuchen recipes call for the completed dough to rest for some days before rolling and baking, in order for the flavors to meld.




Many recipes involve large amounts of ingredients and make a huge supply of cookies. Stored in a sealed container in a cool place, leppies can last for months—without any preservatives.

These are apparently pretty healthy cookies, as cookies go, having relatively few calories and being low in fat and cholesterol.




My uncle, a retired Conservation Agent, used to bring a coffee can of leppies and a Thermos of coffee with him on his frozen, late-night stakeouts, waiting in his darkened patrol car for poachers during deer season. His mother’s lebkuchen forever have a special place in his heart.

Lebkuchen recipes are passed down through the generations, sometimes modified, sometimes adhered to with stereotypical Germanic strictness.




In my case, I have the same recipe from both of my grandmas, since one grandma’s mother provided the recipe to both women—they lived on the same street, so Wilhelmine Thomas’s recipe is “grandma’s leppies” for me on both sides of my family. And each modified the recipe slightly to her own preferences.

After all this discussion, I’m not going to give you the precise formula. I will tell you, however, that Great-Grandma Thomas’s recipe calls for a half gallon of molasses, “10 cents citron peel” and “10 cents lemon peel,” “1/2 box of raisins,” “1/2 box of currants.” There’s a certain amount of interpretation required.

Her recipe also calls for “3 or 4 cups cold black coffee.”




Sometimes lebkuchen turn out kind of stiff and hard—but they are all precious in my sight. The stiffer ones are good for dunking. Or you can seal them up along with an apple, which mellows the texture after some weeks.

Yep, I made a ton of leppies this year, and the house smells absolutely marvelous.




Referenced in this post:

Erin McCawley Renn, A Midwest German Christmas: Breads, Cakes, Cookies, Sweets, and Special Foods: Weihnachtsgebäck, -konfekt, und –speisen. Hermann, Mo.: Deutschheim Association, 1999.

How do you get a copy of this book? Its copyright page gives a phone number for the publisher, the Deutschheim Association: 573-486-2200. Here is the association's website. Here is the Missouri DNR's website for the Deutschheim State Historic Site. Finally, the Gasconade County Historical Society sells the book on their website; click here to view that page.

Black Gold

This is real, true, black gold, black-walnut gold, exquisite, painstakingly shelled and picked, the ultimate nut, dark, rich, and smoky. Black walnut shells are incredibly hard; it’s a mystery to me how anyone can extract nutmeats that are larger than a crumb or a smear.




A sixteen-ounce bag of these fancy babies costs ten dollars (well, $9.99) from Hammons Products.

But my mom knows a fellow in Jeff City who has a contraption that makes the cracking and picking easier, and he produces shelled black walnuts for family and friends. This year my mom bought from him four quart-sized freezer zip-bags, stuffed full. You know what he charged her? Five bucks a bag. Seriously. (Though she insisted on giving him a more than that—you know—just because.)

Mom gets her black walnuts from this gentleman every year, and these nuts go into her fantastic lebkuchen, her billy goat cookies, and lots of other incredible holiday treats. She also shares her black-walnut bounty with her sister in Michigan and (hooray!) with us.

Mom says she’s never, ever, found a piece of shell in this man’s black walnuts.

So am I bragging? No. I’m just saying: This is really, really wonderful, you guys. I rejoice each time I think about these beautiful, tasty, fresh nutmeats, more special than candy.