Where Is My Home?
How a casual interest in kolaches got totally out of control.
Photographs by David Strohl
My grandmother made two kinds of kolaches. They were equally threatening. One had a prune-and-apricot filling, the fruit stewed together into a dark spackle that rested inside a shallow depression on top of the pastry. The other contained a poppy seed paste, hidden inside a plain mound of dough, that was even darker, even gunkier. The pungent smell of those kolaches, their suspicious texture and strong, complicated sweetness, were too much for a finicky young eater like myself. I tried them once or twice, and that was enough. It was not just the way they tasted but what they evoked: a world far older than my own, a dark age and a distant place that seemed to think it had some claim upon my soul.
My grandmother’s married name was Gladys Berney, but she had been born Gladys Lednicky. Her parents had grown up in Czech villages only a few miles apart but did not meet until they had emigrated separately to America and settled in the Midwest, where they were married in 1885, in Buchanan County, Missouri. She was an industrious woman with cat-eye glasses who gave book reviews for local women’s clubs and was once named Oklahoma’s “Mother of the Year.” I can remember her sitting at her kitchen table in Oklahoma City—where she and her husband moved the family in the thirties—talking on her red Bakelite telephone to her mother, gossiping rapidly in a baffling language she called “bohunk.”
I don’t recall being particularly curious about this language or why she would be speaking it. And for the next half century or so I lazily remained indifferent. I knew more or less that my ancestors came from a region of the world that had once been part of Austria-Hungary, and after the First World War had coalesced into Czechoslovakia, and then after the fall of communism, in 1989, had become the Czech Republic. But as far as I was concerned, it was still a fuzzy, medieval-ish land. I grew up in midsized cities (Abilene, Corpus Christi), not in roots-conscious big-city neighborhoods or rural communities. My world was a striving postwar America of blank cultural cohesion. Ethnically speaking, I had always felt like nobody in particular, a product of the casually mongrelized white middle class—in my case part Irish, part Scotch-Irish, and part murky middle European. To the degree I ever embraced any of these splintered identities, it was the Irish part—not the Czech—that had appealed most to my carefully cultivated, broodingly romantic soul. But DNA doesn’t lie. When I looked in the mirror, I saw not some tortured black-haired Irishman but the generic round face, bald head, and mushy features of an Eastern Bloc apparatchik.
I don’t think I ate a kolache between about 1954 and sometime in the mid-eighties, when my Uncle D. D. baked a batch for Christmas using my late grandmother’s recipe and sent them around to the rest of the family. People use the word “Proustian” to describe the sort of sensation I had upon encountering these kolaches, but for the adjective to have real meaning, it helps to go back to the famous passage, early in the first volume of Remembrance of Things Past, where the author describes the experience of rediscovering the texture of his childhood through the taste of a madeleine cookie dipped in tea: “I feel something start within me, something that leaves its resting-place and attempts to rise, something that has been embedded like an anchor at a great depth.”
My uncle’s kolaches were round, rather flat, formed irregularly by hand, and baked to a deep brown. They came in a cardboard mailing box, layer after layer of them—prune and poppy seed—wrapped in aluminum foil. Unwrapping that foil released a smell, or rather an intricate tapestry of smells, that transported me instantly into the precognitive mist. I had just discovered the Dead Sea Scrolls of my childhood.
My way of pulling at the anchor was to begin making kolaches myself every Christmas. I worked from my grandmother’s recipe, written in her own hand. It required some serious parsing and occasioned a few double takes. (The directions for one step read, “After they bake—put butter over top—I do + momma died.”) The recipe, I was cautioned by my uncle, is a Lednicky secret, though I think I can reveal that at one stage it calls for a box of crushed vanilla wafers.
I was able to approach but never quite attain Nana’s standard. Making kolaches is hard. A famous Czech proverb, printed on pot holders and refrigerator magnets, confirms my own experience: “Bez práce nejsou koláče” (“Without work there are no kolaches”). First, there is the time-consuming process of making the dough, which involves an afternoon’s worth of mixing flour and eggs and sugar, scalding milk, and melting butter, then kneading it, letting it rise, punching it down, letting it rise again, and rolling it out onto a floured surface, only to discover at the end of the procedure that you’ve left out a crucial ingredient—yeast, perhaps. There is also the filling to prepare, the endless stirring of the pot that holds poppy seeds and milk and flour and sugar as you wait—hope—for it to resolve itself into the proper speckled paste. Meanwhile, on another burner, the dried prunes and apricots stew together in a saucepan, a bubbling tar pit that you have to keep a careful eye on as it cooks down, until finally it is pliable enough to mush together with a heavy-duty whisk. Then you have to make popsika, the sugary, cinnamony, vanilla-y topping, and then comes the tedious, origami-like hand-forming of the kolaches themselves, an art that I have humbly accepted I do not have the patience or remaining lifetime required to master.
For years I continued to make my kolaches without much encouragement. My children, when they were young, sampled them in the same grudging way I had. Now that they are grown, they claim they like them, but I know it’s only a nostalgic tolerance. I’ve taken my kolaches to office parties and other sorts of gatherings, and the approbation I’ve received has been on the polite side. No matter: it’s my own personal recherche du temps perdu thing, the hunt for something long misplaced, or something yet to be discovered.
What exactly is a kolache? Although a friend of mine recently confided that he thought the word referred to a type of shoe, this is not a question that needs answering so much anymore, particularly for people from Fayette or Lavaca or Caldwell or Austin or McLennan counties, or any of the other blackland prairie regions of Central Texas that were home in the nineteenth century to a steady influx of Czech emigrants. Throughout this territory, bake-offs and festivals and eating competitions have helped leverage the kolache from an obscure ethnic staple to a ubiquitous comfort food. Even if you’re nowhere near the Czech belt, you’ve probably encountered chains like the Kolache Factory or the Kolache Shoppe or Lone Star Kolaches.
The word is a corruption of the Czech koláč. (The plural is koláče.) I can remember my grandmother pronouncing it the correct way: not “kuh-lotch-y,” as we say it, but “koh-lotch.” The Czech word from which it derives, kolo, means “wheel.” Home-baked Lednicky kolaches were decidedly round, but most commercial bakeries these days squeeze the kolaches so close together on their trays that they bake into puffy squares.
As I understand it, “koláč” can be justly applied to many forms of Czech pastries, but at least here in Texas most people understand “kolache” to mean a springy mound of sweet dough with a declivity on top containing a dollop of some sort of fruit and a sprinkling of the streusel-like popsika. The fruit is almost always in plain sight, often sharing its little foxhole with a dab of cream cheese, but if it’s a poppy seed kolache, the filling is usually tucked away within the dough. That’s also the case with sausage kolaches, which are the best-selling variety in Texas.
For a long time I thought kolaches were more or less my family’s secret—that’s how blind I was to the Czech culture all around me. Then about fifteen years ago, my mother moved to Houston from Corpus Christi, and I began driving regularly from Austin to Houston on Highway 71 to visit her. I soon discovered that along the way there were several places to buy poppy seed kolaches, her favorite. I alternated between Weikel’s, a little gas station–bakery combo on the outskirts of La Grange, and Hruska’s, fifteen miles farther down the road in the tiny town of Ellinger. At that time Hruska’s inventory seemed to be evenly split between kolaches and scrapbooking supplies, but when they put up a billboard proclaiming “Awesome Restrooms” and then began expanding by several thousand square feet, it became pretty obvious they were gearing up to fight the kolache wars in earnest. Weikel’s responded by completely tearing down their building and replacing it with a truck-stop-size kolache palace, with even awesomer restrooms featuring the best automatic hand-dryers in the Texas Czech Republic.
Although the kolaches I ate at Hruska’s and Weikel’s were perfectly respectable, they didn’t carry the ancestral charge of the ones that my Uncle D. D. had made. Nobody likes a kolache snob, but that’s what I had become. A part of me was resentful that the sacramental snack of my childhood had been so brazenly loosed upon the world, but another part of me was curious enough to learn more about what it had become—and why it mattered to me. I set out upon the kolache trail to find not merely the best but the most resonant, the most redolent—in a word, the most Lednickyian—kolaches on earth.
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