From cloistered cooks, delectable treats and a connection
Nuns, monks help sustain their lives through baking
MEXICO CITY — It’s the fortnight before Christmas and all through the world’s Catholic convents, nuns and monks are extra busy preparing the traditional delicacies they sell to a loyal fan base even in rapidly secularizing countries.
For many monastic communities, especially those devoted to contemplative life and with vows of poverty, producing cookies, fruitcakes, even beer for sale is the only means to keep the lights on.
But it’s also an enticing way to strengthen their ties with lay people who flock to their doors — and in some cases their websites — in the holiday season.
“Our kitchen is a witness to God’s love to those outside,” said Sister Abigail, one of the 10 cloistered nuns of the Perpetual Adorers of the Most Blessed Sacrament in Mexico City.
“We are in the Lord’s presence, and we’re always thinking that it will make someone happy, the person who will eat this, or they will gift it and someone will receive it with joy,” added the sister, whose convent makes sweets, eggnog, and its bestseller, tamales.
Most monasteries have to be financially self-sufficient. Many in countries such as Spain have to maintain not only an aging, shrinking cohort of monks and nuns, but also monumental, centuries-old buildings, said Fermín Labarga, a professor of church history at the University of Navarra in Pamplona.
Since the small-scale farming with which they supported themselves for centuries stopped being profitable decades ago, most have turned to crafts, including the wildly popular gourmet food production that uses only homemade ingredients and recipes passed down generations.
“An immense majority of people goes to buy the nuns’ sweets,” said Pipa Algarra, who in her 90 years in the southern Spanish city of Granada has come to know each of the dozens of convents’ specialties. Among the oldest is alfajor, a cookie with roots dating back more than a thousand years when this region was a Muslim kingdom, while this year’s novelty is sushi rolls introduced by Filipino sisters.
“The nuns, aside from supporting themselves with this, make really good sweets. And the prayer that comes with it is priceless,” added Algarra, who remembers as a child going to convents with her friends to get dough trimmings from the Communion wafers the nuns also produced.
As a cloistered order, the 14 Poor Clares sisters in Carmona, Spain, have to work to earn their daily bread — in their case, making some 300 “English cakes” and 20 other kinds of sweets a month to sell at their 15th-century convent turnstile, said the abbess, Veronicah Nzula.
There’s a summer slowdown when southern Spain is so sweltering nobody takes coffee breaks with cookies, Nzula quipped. But the production revs up for Christmas as the sweets are also sold at a special market devoted to convent products in nearby Seville.
“While we work, we pray the rosary and we think of the people who will eat each sweet,” said Nzula. She learned the recipes from older sisters after arriving more than 20 years ago from Kenya, like all but one of the current sisters.
Back in Mexico City, the sisters preparing their popular Christmas buñuelos — a sort of flat doughnut made with flour, water and cinnamon — also connect their community labor with their faith. During the Advent season, they pray thousands of Hail Marys as they roll the dough or cover the sweets with sugar.
“This is how we live the liturgy,” Sister Abigail said.