NEW YORK CITY (TND) — Some of the first signs of the holiday season reach the nose before the eyes — the potent scent of evergreen trees drifting all the way down the street from their sidewalk set-up at the next corner, for instance, or a distinct whiff of peppermint usurping the pervasive pumpkin spice aroma of fall at the local coffee shop.
Depending on the seasonal baking traditions of a particular family, there might also be the fragrance of freshly baked cookies filling the kitchen and seeping into neighboring rooms as an early emblem of Christmas to come. It could be the marriage of molasses and warm winter spices on a cookie sheet lined with rows of faithful gingerbread men, or maybe the buttery vanilla of a batch of sugar cookies growing all the more tempting with each minute that they occupy the oven.
Luckily for me, my dad always made both, and along with the smells came familiar sights and, of course, those tastes that I quickly learned to crave year after year.
Decorating sugar cookies shaped like snowmen and Christmas trees became a major operation, and my slow and deliberate artistic efforts always gave way to more hurriedly tossing sprinkles onto the remaining shapes when it came time to put them in the oven. And the gingerbread men and women, their eyes and buttons dotted with raisins that I never ate, would sit by our staircase in cellophane bags tied with red ribbons for most of the holiday season. Only after my parents’ holiday party, at which each guest was sent home with multiple cookies, was I given free rein to consume them as I pleased.
If I had grown up in the Philippines instead of Baltimore, I’d know that Christmas was approaching not by an oven full of gingerbread, but from the steamers of puto bumbong that would pop up next to churches, spreading the inviting scent of banana leaves and butter throughout the fresh air of daybreak and satisfying the appetites of all who attended the early morning masses of Simbang Gabi.
In Sweden, it's saffron buns with raisins, served on the Dec. 13 feast day of Saint Lucy, that mark the start of Christmas. The spiced buns, known aslussekatter and tinted yellow from the saffron (sometimes with help from food coloring, to cut costs), are carried in a procession that celebrates the light of Christ defeating the darkness.
And if I was of Greek descent, it would be the melomakarona that signified the arrival of the holiday season, beckoning me with their honey-soaked moistness to eat just one more cookie, and possibly another after that.
Even for someone who is several steps removed from their cultural background, the holiday season is often still marked by its unique capability to unearth those age-old traditions that have managed to withstand the test of time. The sense of stability that can easily arise from the consistency of repetitive rituals means that a celebration of the past is more than likely to accompany the presents of, well, the present. So as boxes of old-fashioned ornaments, so lovingly passed down from one generation to the next, are pulled from the depths of the closet, festive family practices and culinary customs are dusted off, too.
But when considerable geographical distance separates someone so significantly from their roots, not every holiday tradition will be able to travel halfway across the world with absolute ease.
For Augelyn Francisco, co-owner of a Filipino restaurant called Kabisera on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, keeping a firm grasp on her ties to her childhood in the Philippines is of the utmost importance.
Her efforts to do so, from the traditional Filipino pastry selections that she serves at Kabisera to a never-ending stream of collaborations with other businesses in the community, unambiguously convey her reverence for the chain of islands in Southeast Asia. In 2020, Francisco opened up her outdoor space for a series of pop-ups that aimed to provide ample support — and serve as somewhat of a launching pad — to Filipino chefs and vendors grappling with the challenges prompted by the pandemic. And just this week, she pledged to donate 20% of the restaurant’s ube latte sales to typhoon relief efforts back in her homeland, with a goal of selling 200 lattes a day for 10 days straight.
Keeping her son connected to his cultural heritage has also been a top priority for Francisco, and now that he’s old enough, she frequently assigns him small tasks at the restaurant. Francisco fondly recalls bonding with her own mom at a young age by helping her to make sticky rice cakes called palitaw, and she hopes that her son will one day cherish the time he has spent alongside her at Kabisera.
Yet no matter how fervently Francisco attempted to honor Pinoy traditions in New York City through Kabisera’s initiatives and her tireless collaborative spirit, she failed to find any preexisting efforts to bring one of the Philippines’ most beloved Christmas customs to her surrounding area.
In the Philippines, the Christmas season spans several months. The predominantly Catholic country, one of only two in Asia, begins a countdown to the December holiday on Sept. 1, kicking off a celebratory period that lasts throughout the rest of the “-ber” months. So while most New Yorkers in early September are either refusing to accept that the end of summer is nigh or eagerly arranging their sweaters while sipping on pumpkin spice lattes, Filipinos have already fast-tracked their way to Christmas carols and holiday decorations.
But for puto bumbong, most will wait until mid-December.
Each year on Dec. 16, Filipino Catholics attend the first in a series of nine masses leading up to Christmas. The religious ritual, called Simbang Gabi and introduced to the Philippines by Spanish friars in the 16th century, requires churchgoers to leave their homes even before the true crack of dawn for devotional celebrations that can start as early as 3 a.m. It’s said that those who faithfully attend the novena masses will have their prayers answered at the end of the nine-day period.
Once each mass concludes, it’s time to buy holiday treats from vendors who, in anticipation of the hungry crowd, construct temporary food stalls on the church grounds. In terracotta pots lined with banana leaves, coconut rice cakes known as bibingka are plentiful. A ginger tea called salabat is a fine choice of accompaniment; so, too, is Filipino hot chocolate, or tsokolate. And if anyone prayed for puto bumbong, their wish will immediately be granted, no nine-day wait needed.
Thoroughly emblematic of Christmas in the Philippines through its unwavering presence at Simbang Gabi, puto bumbong is a street food made by steaming a mixture of rice in a bamboo tube. It stands out through both its specialized cooking vessel, a steel or tin steamer called a “lansungan” with several bamboo tubes sticking out of dedicated spots, and its vibrant purple color that traditionally comes from the ratio of white glutinous rice mixed with a deeply colored heirloom variety known as pirurutong.
Occasionally, pirurutong, not always readily available and usually with a price to match its limited supply, is eschewed in favor of using purple yam instead. This substitution becomes more customary in places outside of the Philippines, where there's an even lower chance of easily sourcing pirurutong.
When Francisco decided to make puto bumbong at Kabisera in 2020, she ordered a molder from the Philippines. It arrived in September of that year, which gave her all of the “-ber” months to perfect the technique before the delicacy’s December season began.
“From September to December, I tried to cook it at least once a day,” Francisco said.
She quickly understood why no other restaurants in New York City or the surrounding area served puto bumbong. The process of making the purple rice cakes, which had looked so easy to her when expertly executed by Filipino vendors in the churchyard, was, as Francisco put it, “no joke.” Perfecting the recipe to fit her expectations was a long journey of trial and error, and handling the steam-filled tubes required a careful precision that could only be learned through constant practice, which meant that Francisco burned herself time and time again during her early attempts.
Even after Francisco finally reached a point of satisfaction with the recipe, there would never truly be an end to the work involved in making puto bumbong.
It takes a lot of effort and manpower,” she said.
Just as the pandemic inspired Francisco to experiment with puto bumbong, it motivated the Twister Cake team to add traditional Romanian baked goods to the menu beyond their signature chimney cakes.
The Queens-based company began with founder Radu Sirbu’s desire to share the hollow cylindrical cakes that he ate growing up in Romania with sweet lovers in the United States. The dough that Sirbu uses for his chimney cakes follows the recipe taught to him by his grandmother, ensuring that Twister Cake does justice to the 400-year-old Transylvania pastry.
That same level of authenticity comes through with the bakery’s beigli, the first pandemic-prompted addition to their menu. Diana Moldovan, marketing manager for Twister Cake, recalls her mother baking beigli, a rolled pastry typically filled with walnuts or poppy seeds, as a special holiday treat on Christmas and Easter.
She had the recipe from her grandmother. My great-grandmother worked for an Austrian family during the Austro-Hungarian Empire, so she got the recipe from them,” Moldovan explained.
Because the family recipe dates so far back, it includes no precise measurements, instead calling for a spoonful of this and a spoonful of that. Thus, it was up to Sirbu and Moldovan to identify the correct proportions of ingredients to properly replicate the beigli from Moldovan's childhood.
The most difficult part, though, of making the rolled pastry is perfecting the ratio of dough to the filling.
“The dough has to be really thin, because you have to let the filling take the lead. The perfect beigli would have more filling than actual dough,” said Moldovan.
Beigli, which can also be spelled as “bejgli” or “baigli,” is ubiquitous at Hungarian and Transylvanian households during the holiday season, whether purchased at a cukrászda, bought by the slice at a Christmas market, or baked in a grandmother’s kitchen.
Its exact origins are up for debate. Poppyseed rolls are eaten in a variety of different cultures, from Polish to Russian to Croatian, but the dessert most commonly credited as the inspiration for the Hungarian beigli is a Silesian-filled roll. The other prevalent theory links the modern-day beigli to Armenian cuisine.
From its vague beginnings, the beigli would surely have grown to its current level of popularity on the merits of its irresistible taste alone, but it was aided in its journey by an old European belief that poppy seeds will bring good luck to a household into the new year.
Twister Cake Bakery ships their 13-inch, one-pound beigli nationwide and, true to custom, sells a poppyseed version and a walnut version; both are made with a homemade filling. Personally, Moldovan prefers the walnut-filled beigli, but her two children prefer the poppy seed, a fact that shocks her due to the polarizing nature of poppy seeds. Debates over the best beigli filling are not restricted to the Moldovan family but can be heard in households across Hungary and Transylvania.
At the recently opened Agi’s Counter in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood, limited quantities of beigli were available for the holiday season — walnut only. The layers in executive pastry chef Renee Hudson's interpretation are made with roasted walnuts, dried fruit, and citrus zest.
Year-round, the airy spot owned by chef Jeremy Salamon has another festive Hungarian dessert on the menu. Salamon, whose love for Hungarian cuisine was inspired both by his Hungarian roots (the restaurant is named for his 94-year-old paternal grandmother, who is Hungarian) and by his travels throughout the country, looks back fondly on afternoons spent at the iconic Café Gerbeaud in Budapest.
I would spend my afternoons with a slice of Gerbeaud, a cappuccino, and a book religiously,” he said.
Somewhat of a cross between a cake and a cookie, Gerbeaud cake combines layers of apricot jam and walnuts with a chocolate coating on top. The dessert is named after a Swiss-born confectioner named Emil Gerbeaud who first opened his own confectionery in France before cementing his reputation as a legendary chocolatier and patissier in Hungary, and although it’s not served strictly at Christmastime, it has become an essential part of Hungarian cuisine during the December holiday.
When Salamon opened his Eastern European-inspired lunch counter in November, Gerbeaud cake was the first dessert he asked Hudson to create. “It's one of the most iconic Hungarian pastries and really felt like the perfect foundation to represent the rest of our menu,” said Salamon.
Hungary has its beigli and its Gerbeaud cake, Sweden has its saffron buns, and Greece has its melomakarona.
In Greece, the traditional oval-shaped, honey-bathed cookies are served primarily around Christmastime, but at Pi Bakerie in New York City, they’re always available. The centrally located Manhattan bakery attracts its fair share of Greek housewives seeking melomakarona in December, but there are also many shoppers who come from the wide variety of cultural backgrounds expected of such a diverse city and have no idea that there’s a “correct” time of year to enjoy melomakarona.
But the thick of the holiday season does provide a good excuse to eat cookies (and nothing but cookies) for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and Regina Katopodis, the Brooklyn-born owner of Pi Bakerie, makes sure that her shop is churning out enough batches of the hand-mixed treat all month long to satisfy her customers’ needs.
There's not a Greek table on this earth that doesn't have melomakarona during the Christmas and New Year's holiday,” she said.
As the name implies, Pi Bakerie sells plenty of pie, both the savory sort involving ingredients like spinach and feta and the ones better suited to dessert, like an orange phyllo pie soaked in syrup and a gluten-free chocolate pie. The bakery also offers quite an assortment of traditional Mediterranean confections, the cases along the route to the counter boasting buttery almond cookies called kourabiedes and crescent-shaped walnut pastries known as skaltsounia.
But even with all of the treats that the Mediterranean region has to offer, Katopodis can’t sing the praises of melomakarona enough.
She’s also refreshingly unabashed in claiming that her bakery’s melomakarona is the best that she’s ever tried. “And I’ve tasted a lot of melomakarona,” Katopodis, who was raised in a Greek household in Brooklyn and spent 20 years living in Greece, emphasized.
The trick that makes melomakarona, whether Pi Bakerie’s version or otherwise, so irresistible is a classic method for most Greek pastries. Typically, the country’s baked goods either involve a hot cookie dunked into cold syrup or hot syrup poured onto a cold cookie. For melomakarona, it’s the former — as the cookies are baking, their cold bath is prepared.
As for what makes Katopodis’ cookies the best of the best?
“We're very particular about what we put in it,” she said. “It’s semolina flour, orange juice, nutmeg, cinnamon, and Metaxa, which is a Greek brandy.” Then, there’s the simple ingredient list for the syrup in which the cookies are dunked: Water, pure Cretan honey, and a cinnamon stick.
Katopodis describes baking as a profession that she was “more or less thrown into.”
When she lived in Greece, Katopodis served as the president of the American Women’s Organization of Greece and found a sense of purpose through her involvement in the volunteer-based organization’s philanthropy efforts. Upon returning to New York City, she was worried that her life would quickly feel less meaningful. So, Katopodis opened up bakeries — first, Artopolis Bakery in Queens in 2003, followed by Pi Bakerie across the East River in 2014.
Providing New Yorkers with delectable sweet treats has given Katopodis the satisfaction that she sought after her return to the states. “I'm just so happy that we're introducing people to traditional, artisanal, handmade pastries in the way they appear in the Greek household,” she said.
And with decades of experience living in both New York City and Greece, Katopodis has discovered that families of Greek descent living stateside find even more meaning in the melomakarona than do those residing in Greece.
It's amazing how the Greeks here keep up with their traditions even more than they do there,” said Katopodis. “It's as if they miss something, and they just want to keep the culture alive.
Sirbu and Moldovan also found a fertile market in the United States for their traditional Transylvanian-baked goods, which has encouraged them to add more options to the menu beyond the beigli. But both types of Twister Cake's beigli have remained popular to those looking to reconnect with their roots through culinary traditions.
"Our products, because we're from Transylvania, cater to both Hungarians and Romanians. So when they find us online, they order one of each," Moldovan said.
At Kabisera, puto bumbong is only sold when it’s at its most seasonally appropriate. For the past two Decembers, Francisco has concocted her labor of love for the Paskong Pinoy block party held outside of the restaurant. The annual block party is a celebration of the community that Francisco, along withProject Barkada, managed to cobble together during a period that could instead have been marked by isolation, as well as all things Filipino at Christmastime. The entire block, not just the space directly in front of Kabisera's storefront, is decorated with Christmas lights and lanterns called parols that can be traced back to the Spanish colonial period of the Philippines and the light sources characteristic of Hispanic Christmas processions.
There are also workshops that teach attendees how to make a parol of their own. Made out of materials like bamboo sticks and cellophane, parols are a symbol of hope and joy in the Filipino culture.
Both years, there has been a bountiful selection of food at the Paskong Pinoy block party, from Filipino tres leches cakes to aminced pork and chicken liver dish called sisig. But even with the abundance of options, the puto bumbong is, understandably, a huge hit, and Francisco has had to limit the amount that each person purchases.
Some people would like to buy ten orders of it, but I want to make sure that everyone in the line gets to at least try one,” she said.
Despite the high demand, there is no profit to be made from the tubular treat, due to the laborious process necessary for its creation. But for Francisco, the unavoidable effort of selling puto bumbong pays off in a way that’s far more valuable than any amount of monetary gain could ever be.
Really, it's for cultural representation, because we wanted the neighborhood and the Filipino Americans here to experience the real Christmas spirit,” said Francisco.
And as travel back home remains a distant dream for many Filipinos in New York City during the continuation of the COVID-19 pandemic, holiday rituals reminiscent of their roots may take on an additional tone of importance this year. The same goes for those of any cultural background who choose to embrace childhood customs to enjoy the sense of comfort that generally emerges hand-in-hand with such moments of nostalgia. In times of uncertainty, the importance of tradition can be especially potent.
But anyone who has the chance to try puto bumbong — or melomakarona, or whatever delectable dessert from another culture comes their way — absolutely should. And maybe this will be the year that a tasty new tradition is born.
