Directions: |
Directions:David: Let me tell you about Dale Avenue, mid-1950s and Galettes. This is a story of a young pre-teen, given the responsibility to bake some of our favorite Christmas cookies. And the baking was very time consuming because I could only bake two cookies at a time.
For some of the young people on this email list, you may not even know what a gallette iron is or how to use it. You may not even know what galettes are. So, let's start with that.
These are Belgian cookies. They are not waffles, or French waffles or Belgian waffles. They are Belgian cookies made in a special iron that has an interior that looks a little bit like the inside of a waffle iron, but with smaller indentations. Our galettes should not be confused with the traditional French galette, or Breton galette. That is more like a thick crepe or pancake baked around savory fillings, like meat and vegetable pies. Our gallette cookie is more akin to the Galettes campinoises, which is described as "a type of galette or waffle popular in Belgium." So, when speaking about gallettes, you must re-educate someone who says, "I love French galettes or I love Belgian waffles."
Not being an Italian cookie, you may wonder how some of the Italian families in the Clarksburg area came to adopt the galette as a family tradition. I think that we got into galettes in Clarksburg because of the many glass factories in the area.
Yes, one time, glass factories, making flat (plate) glass, blown or molded commercial glass (pitchers, drinking glasses, containers, bottles, jars) and decorative blown art glass were in abundance just in Northern West Virginia. It is amazing to look at the near non-existent glass industry in the U.S. today and compare it to Northern West Virginia back in the early to mid- 1900s. (I could talk about the abundance of sand and energy in the area as the reason we were a prime location for glass, but that is another story.) From the late 1800s to close to 1950, Clarksburg had 39 glass plants; Fairmont, 29; Morgantown had 28 plants; Weston, 24; Salem, 18; Star City had 11; and Mannington and Buckhannon each had 10. All gone.
So what, you ask, did glass factories have to do with galettes? Well, just be patient and I will tell you.
Many glass workers in the Clarksburg area had immigrated from France and Belgium. They settled in areas like Adamston, Glen Elk, and Norwood. They lived near many Italian immigrant families and they shared their food heritage with each other. Due to this connection, we discovered the galette. And a new "Italian" tradition was born.
The galette iron is a cooking instrument that requires expert handling skills. Some think that you can try an electric galette maker or even substitute an electric waffle iron. True, you can make a passable cookie in such modern cooking devices, but the true aficionado of the Belgian galette must master the hand-held galette iron. Kim has sent some pictures. The iron has two plates, flat on one side and waffled on the other. They are joined by a hinge and close together like a clam shell. The long handle on each plate is used for holding it together, holding it on a stove, and flipping the sides over to cook from both sides. We had a gas stove in the 50s, and that was best for heating the iron and cooking the galettes. Later, we got an electric stove and with trial and error learned to use the electric burner to heat the iron.
The iron holds two dollops of batter, each about a tablespoon size. You heat the iron (no temperature gauge, just feel and practice), drop the batter on the iron, close it, and hold on the burner around a minute. Then, turn it over and hold the other side on the burner about a another minute. If you had the temperature of the iron right, you have two baked galettes. Open the iron, flip out the galettes onto a cloth covered cookie sheet and repeat the process. If you miss guessed the temperature, you could have a half raw galette, or a badly burned galette. Total time to reheat the iron, put in the batter, bake and empty, was almost 4 minutes.
We made around 80 or 90 galettes with each batch of batter. Taking almost 4 minutes to make two cookies meant that a baking required almost three hours of standing at the stove, filling, side one baking, flipping, side two baking, emptying, and reheating. Over and over. My mom was the master galette maker in our house, but I got the job in the mid-1950s. While she was doing other baking, I got to make the galettes.
As you can imagine, when a 12-year-old embarks on a project that is measured by the pile of cookies building up, he wants to see the pile increasing. After all, the goal was to have a big batch of galettes that would last us more than a day. I was very protective of my galettes, protecting them from marauding galette scavengers. And I was faced with three. My dad was the alpha, not to be denied. Richard, a close second, also not to be denied for a different reason. Then Sam, not aggressive, but sympathetic and engendering sympathy even as I saw my early cache of 8 galettes, that had taken 15 minutes to accumulate, quickly disappear.
My dad would always start it, coming into the kitchen with: "Smells good. But are you sure you are getting them done all the way through. If that iron was not hot enough, they may be undercooked in the centers. I will test them for you.” One galette would disappear, followed by "OK. Good job. These are just right." As he grabbed one or two more for good measure and headed out of the kitchen.
Then Richard. "Hey Dave, you can't let him have a taste without sharing with big brother. I want some. OK!" Notice, I did not use a question mark after "OK." Richard was not asking, he was telling. And I wasn't going to throw myself over a pile of 6 galettes and protect them.
Then Sam. "Can I help? If I help, maybe I could lick the bowl, maybe, huh?"
And I would just give in and say --- "No. You can't help. This is a one-person job. But go ahead take one." And Sam was good. If I said take one, he would probably take only one.
By then, I may have been able to make 4 or 6 more and was almost back to where I had started, but I knew that this was not a process that could be sped up, and hoped I could get up to around 20 cookies before the scavenging repeated.
But the house was full of the smell of my galettes and my mom's pitta piatta and candied fruit and nut cookies, while we were listening to Tom Mix, Sky King, and Roy Rogers on the radio and waiting for Santa coming on the radio to read some of the letters he had received. And we knew that if our scavengers let us finish the baking, we would soon take some of those baked goods around the corner to Nonni's house and be rewarded with frittis, pizza a liche (anchovies), calamari marinara, and some of the best pasta with tomato sauce ever made.
Simpler times. Good times. |
This recipe for Galettes and MORE is from