STOLLEN MOMENTS
This Christmas, SAM WOULIDGE will be making traditional German stollen for the first time. She has even surprised herself with how easy it can be – and can’t wait to surprise friends with her home-made gift
Every year I buy Christmas stollen.
It’s as if, come December, my very being craves the tastes of citrus, cardamom and almondy marzipan. It’s my connection to two German-speaking women I have loved and admired.
I met Dorothea met I was 22 and she was 78. I was studying German in Munich during the winter and had been told to contact this friend of my godmother’s mother. I had no interest in doing so because I was young and wanted to be wild, and visiting someone’s 70-something friend was not exactly how I’d imagined I would spend those snowy Bavarian evenings. But Dorothea tracked me down and insisted I visit. I capitulated. And so began one of my loveliest friendships.
It was an unlikely friendship, one that transcended age and language barriers. My life experience was limited and hers was vast. She was open-minded and refused to allow societal conventions to define her. She was thin, ate little and smoked a lot.
She had a younger lover, the son of her late husband’s best friend, and she laughingly told me how, years before, when she’d asked her then boyfriend Wernher von Braun, the famous aerospace engineer, to set a wedding date, he’d told her that “man did not take baggage to the moon”.
Dorothea’s apartment had no kitchen because she had no interest in food. She had turned the space into a study where she stored books, letters and jewellery in a beautiful antique pantry cupboard. She ordered her espresso from the Italian restaurant down the road and it was brought to her on silver trays carried by charming waiters with white linen draped over their arms. She was glorious. She taught me about life. And she gave me my first Christmas stollen, a traditional sweet fruit bread consisting of nuts, candied fruit, spices and marzipan. She also left me her pantry cupboard upon her death and her younger lover arranged for it to be shipped to me. In loving memory of Dorothea, it will only ever be used to store my precious non-edibles.
Aunty Würli is Austrian. She has only ever loved one man, the South African doctor she met in her village during the war. They fell in love and, at barely 21, she came to South Africa to marry him. Now, at 92, despite her love for her adopted country, she is still very much an Austrian. Aunty Würli calls me Sammy because she has known me since I was a small girl. For years she expressed her concern over my lack of success in finding a husband and my inability to cook. Aunty Würli believes that a woman should have a husband and should know how to cook. I have now, at last, managed to appease her on both counts. This year I want to give her homemade stollen to remind her of her beloved Austria, because this year has been hard for her … she misses those she has loved and lost. And so I made stollen for the first time. Stollen filled with marzipan and memories, cardamom and compassion, fruit and friendship. And love. I made it for love. And because of love. And out of love.