Ostfiiesland Heritage

I don’t often think about my German heritage and so last week when I took my mother to a German dinner - sponsored by the Ostfriesen Heritage Society of Grundy Center, Iowa – I was surprised at how nostalgic I became for a way of life that I actually know very little about.

My mother grew up in a rural part of Iowa that had been settled by immigrants from Ostfriesen, Germany. It’s located in the northwest corner of Germany on the North Sea Coast....



... and when my mother’s grandmother left it behind to come to this country along with scores of others from the same area, she brought with her a rich store of traditions and customs. She also brought along a distinctive language, Plattdeutsch, otherwise known as Low German. Over the years, the language, as well as the special customs and the traditions of the area, have been gradually disappearing. And I suspect that my mother’s generation is probably the last to have vivid memories of what it was like to grow up surrounded by people who spoke Low German and did things the way their ancestors had done them.



Mother told me that when she was a little girl, Low German was still the primary language in many homes. But there was a move on to change all that. In fact mother tells the story about how hard the pastor of their small country church worked to switch his Sunday services from Low German into English since so many in the congregation wanted it that way. But some of the older members were dead set against it and so the poor pastor, trying hard to please everyone, compromised by conducting the service in Low German one week and English the next. As the older members passed away, so did the Sunday services in Low German!



Mother belonged to the first generation that did not hold on to the language. When she married and moved away to a different part of the state she left behind the language and customs of her ancestors. The only time my siblings and I heard Low German spoken was during our brief summer vacations with our beloved grandparents. We couldn’t understand it, let alone speak it, but we grew up loving to listen to Grandma and Grandpa when they started talking in Low German (usually when there was something they didn’t want us to know about.)

So one of the best things about the German dinner, in addition to the Schweinebraten Lende (roasted pork loin), the Stompt Toffels mit Stip (mashed potatoes with gravy) Gruner Bohnen & Rot Kohl (green beans and red cabbage), was the chance I had to listen to the familiar sing-song cadence of Low German which sounded exactly the way I remembered it sounding all those years ago. Here’s an example.

That was a commercial for a popular brand of Ostfriesen tea, and to my great delight my name was drawn for one of the door prizes that was given away the at the German dinner - a bag of Bunting tea! It couldn’t have been a more appropriate prize for me since the one Ostfriesen custom I’m familiar with is tea time thanks to those summer vacations with grandma and grandpa.



Without fail, we always had tea in the afternoon and again before bedtime. And whenever friends came by – no matter what time of the day – Grandma always put the tea kettle on, got out her pretty tea cups and saucers, and set about in the kitchen to put together a tray of freshly baked cakes and cookies that were always ready to be served whenever company came.

My mother has told me that tea-time used to involve a fairly elaborate set of social rules. For one thing it was unthinkable for a hostess to be caught without something that had been freshly baked and ready to be passed around on one of her prettiest serving platters. The tea itself had to be prepared correctly. Here is how mother remembers doing it:

Fill the teakettle with water and heat it until it is just about ready to boil. Meanwhile fill the tea pot with tea leaves – one teaspoon per cup and one for the pot. Pour the hot (but not boiling) water into the pot to cover the leaves and allow them to steep for 3 to six minutes. Then fill the pot with the rest of the hot water. Now the tea is ready to serve using a strainer to prevent loose tea leaves from ending up in the tea cups. But wait….it has to be done correctly, because it’s customary to serve tea with cream and sugar. And not just ordinary grain sugar or (horrors) powdered coffee creamer. No, it’s got to be heavy cream and kluntjes.



Kluntjes are lumps of rock candy that are placed in the tea cup before the tea is poured. Then comes the cream and this is the tricky part: you fill a spoon with cream (preferably using a Rohmlepel – a spoon with a round deep bowl intended just for this purpose) and very gingerly dribble it across the surface of the tea making sure that the spoon doesn’t actually come in contact with the liquid.



If you perform this little procedure correctly the cream will sink briefly into the tea and then rise back to the surface in the form of flowery cloud. I am determined to try this for myself sometime just to see if I can do it and I’ve even found a youtube video that illustrates how it’s done.

Ostfriesen tea time usually involves more than just one cup of tea. Mother says that a good hostess kept a watchful eye on the tea cups. If they were empty it meant “more please.” On the other hand if a tea cup had been turned upside down on the saucer it meant “no more, thank you.”

My generation is probably the first to have grown up with such scanty knowledge about the language and customs that were such an important part of our Oestfriesen ancestors’ way of life. But at least I have a tiny little bit to hang on to and possibly even hand along to my children. Perhaps I should invite them to come for teatime one of these days…..

Recipe Box (Trisha)

Stuck on the top of one of our kitchen cupboard shelves is an old discolored box that’s been there for years, accumulating an odd assortment of rarely used recipes. It’s just an ordinary hard plastic recipe box and I have often thought about pitching it because for one thing I don’t cook. So why on earth am I keeping all those handwritten note cards – some of them so faded with age that I could barely read them even if I did cook! But I can’t bring myself to toss into the trash that beat up old box with its smudge prints left behind by the sticky fingers of whichever grandma it was who used it so regularly before she died. Denny and I simply can’t remember if we acquired the box from his side of the family or from mine, and it’s ended up turning into a kind of family culinary archive containing the likes of Grandma Maude’s recipe for trinkle cake, Aunt Marie’s porcupine meatballs, Grandma Miller’s Sugar cookies, Denny’s mom’s Cherry Pink salad and even my own mother’s Hungry Boy Casserole- a recipe I remember asking her to give me when my two sons were little boys even though I don’t recall ever using it. To be honest, I’ve never used the majority of the other recipes in that box either, including all those I clipped out of magazines in the early days of my marriage (back when I aspired to being a happy little Suzy Homemaker). But from time to time I get them all out and go through them one by one, carefully replacing them behind their dog-eared cardboard index tabs to make sure that the cookie recipes don’t get lost amidst the salads, the casseroles don’t mingle with the beverages, and so forth. Why bother? Why not just ditch the whole kit and caboodle and open up a little more cupboard space? It’s because stuck at the very back – which is where I inevitably end up putting it – is a tattered piece of brittle newspaper, yellowed with age and practically falling apart from being unfolded and refolded so many times. It’s a clipping from a newspaper with recipes for how to cook wild game – pan fried rabbit, squirrel, pheasant, wild goose. It’s from my Grandpa Ray who had numbered the recipes and asked Grandma to enclose them in one of her letters to me. I don’t remember that Grandpa ever sent me a letter and I don’t have a single piece of paper with his handwriting on it – except for those numbers he’d printed on that faded print of newsprint. It probably goes without saying that not once in my life have I ever cooked a rabbit, squirrel, pheasant or wild goose. But I cannot imagine getting rid of those recipes because it would be like letting go of my Grandpa all over again. Though he’s been dead now for nearly 40 years, I’ve still got that fragile piece of newsprint that opens up so many memories of him every time I unfold it. I guess that’s why I can’t get rid of the plastic recipe box either. It’s too full of links to other people I can’t let go of.

Some thoughts on genealogy (Denny)...

A number of years ago, I renewed my interest in genealogy. What sparked that interest was discovering my grandmother's bible in which she had written the names of her ancestors stretching back to the time when they lived in New York. Some of those people had lived through the Revolutionary War. Only a very little research led to a whole "fan" of relatives reaching back into the early days of this country--in two cases, reaching right back to the May Flower. It was great fun--something akin to being a detective confronted with an ever expanding mystery, lots and lots of clues, and, if persistent, solutions.

My mother re-married after my father was killed in World War II. That meant that, unlike my childhood friends, I had three sets of grandparents. And because my step-father had been my father's first cousin, this meant that I had five grandparents, rather than the normal four, to trace.

T. S. Eliot noted that "What we know of other people/ Is only our memory of the moments/ During which we knew them" (from the Cocktail Party). When I was a child, I had a sense of being a member of a rather large set of people, the family, and that among these people there was a feeling of natural camaraderie, ease, and good humor. Unlike the strangers who came into my life, I experienced relatives (even the ones I had never met) as diverse, sometimes quirky, but basically good people who knew who I was (without me having to explain the multiple relational paths I had to most of them) and who accepted me into their circle with nary a question. However, I never met any of my relatives as strangers--that is, unlike meeting the father of my friend who was an adult and a person I had never met before, meeting relatives for the first time did not entail any shyness or uncertainty or even any period of "getting to know" one another. The reason was because I was a child. Had I been unable to meet my relatives until I had become an adult, my reaction to them would have been much different. Whereas the distant strictness of my step-grandfather would have been off-putting as an adult, as a child I simply accepted him as still another mysterious manifestation of that set of people called relatives.

My mother's father died when I was quite young. I do not have a great number of memories of him, nor did I as a child spend a lot of time in his company. I remember him laughing a lot (he was a great practical joker), being gone a lot (he and my grandmother traveled the country extensively hauling their trailer behind them), and being "an old man." My mother once sent me uptown with a message for him. I found him in the "card room" on the south side of the square. It was a smoky place with a wooden floor and a number of tables with "old men playing at cards with a twinkling of ancient hands" (Yeats). Whatever the message was, he laughed out loud, made a comment to his card partners (who also laughed) and told me to pick up a candy bar on my way out (which he would pay for).

My step-father's father was a stern and a strict man who loved to sit in his easy chair (I dared not sit in it when he was around) with his family arrayed before him and telling stories. My aunts and uncles would good-humoredly prod him into telling the same stories over and over which, at each telling, became more and more detailed and complex. And at Christmas, there was always the "extra" party (without grandpa) where the aunts and uncles would have a drink and would give each other bottles of whiskey as presents.

But the grandfather I knew best was my father's father. Perhaps because he had been killed in the war, my grandfather was especially attentive to me and allowed me to spend hours and hours with him, tagging after him while he did the chores out on the farm, teaching me to collect the eggs from the hens that pecked painfully at my hands, protecting me against an old sow with a 2 x 4 as we walked across the lot, giving me a tin cup of water from the tank below the wind mill, showing me the hay mow where I could go to play if I wanted, and letting me fire that old two-barreled shotgun that had been his father's.

Herwig Arts, a Jesuit theologian, once said language is an "attempt to encapsulate the 'not yet' of the future and the 'no more' of the past" (Faith and Unbelief, p. 120). And perhaps that is what genealogy is: an attempt to capture the "no more", especially when confronted with the ambiguity and uncertainty of the "not yet." However, it must always be tempered with the realization that the memories I have were those that I made when a child and when living in a safe environment with a group of people who I knew (by instinct) were integrally a part of me and I a part of them. As Eliot says (to continue the quotation from above), "And they have changed since then./ To pretend that they and we are the same/ Is a useful and convenient social convention/ Which must sometimes be broken. We must also remember/ That at every meeting we are meeting a stranger."

Genealogy is like that. The further back into history we go, the less we know of people. True, we have "the facts" like birth dates, marriage dates, death dates, dates of children's births. But we do not have the intimate connection with those strangers in the dusk that we did with the family we knew. And so genealogy is a two-tiered process. The first is that of historian--the dates and events that one can find documented in the record. The second is that of family member--the memories of real people at times in my life, or the stories of other family members of times in their lives. Is it any surprise to find that the latter is always of more interest than the former?