I began baking Christmas gingerbread in the summer — hoping to unlock my relationship with my parents

This First Person column is written by Agata Antonow, who lives in Hamilton. For more information about First Person stories, see the FAQ.

I set down my bags, peeked into the kitchen and shivered. After spending several years in the Maritimes, I moved back to Hamilton to look after my mom’s home in April. The house was quiet and empty, but it was the kitchen that felt haunted by the past. My mother has a different stove and fridge but the bones of the room are all there. The same wood and white cupboards, the same stainless steel sink and burgundy tile. 

In a flash, I’m eight and watching my late father prepare pickled herring in our kitchen. I turned away from the sourness back then, but today, what I wouldn’t give to have a taste. At nine, I was pleading for peanut butter sandwiches for my school lunch, turning my nose up at beet soups and cabbage rolls. 

Back then, my relationship with Polish food was complicated. Kind of like my relationship with my family. There was absolutely love there, but I also felt pulled in two directions. I was born in Wroclaw, Poland, and moved to Canada with my family when I was four. There was my parents’ desire to hold onto traditional foods and the past and my eagerness as a child to be like everyone else — to adapt to being Canadian, to move forward.

The peeks I had into North American life came through our TV screen — Family Ties, Degrassi, TVO — and I wanted that so badly. The family meals together, the simple arguments wrapped up in 30-minute segments, the bike rides with friends. My parents couldn’t understand why I wanted a life so different than what they and I had. For years of my childhood, my bewildered parents and I see-sawed between affection and arguments about how Canadian I was allowed to be. 

As a child, I couldn’t understand the pull my parents felt to the past and the fear they felt over anything new. As an adult, I wonder if moving back will start to untie some of those knots. 

Hamilton has always been an immigrant town, and now that I’ve moved back I notice this in the grocery stores. On a hot late summer day, I wandered up and down the aisles and noticed cheeses flown in from around the world, Polish ham and cookies from Portugal among other international foods. 

In the local library, I browsed cookbooks and thought of my family’s kitchen. Could I rewrite my story? I thought about the Polish meals I had passed up in my eagerness to be accepted by classmates who ate bologna for lunch and spoke English effortlessly. 

One particular recipe in the table of contents of a Polish cookbook caught my eye: piernik — a traditional gingerbread that takes six weeks to six months to cure before baking. This is a type of dessert that I’ve had in restaurants and stores but that my father, the cook in the family, never made. He preferred savoury dishes — practical foods that would fill our stomachs rather than sweet indulgences.

At that moment, it felt like the right recipe to try to make. Part of it was agency — the ability to make my own choices. Before, I had to listen to stories of our family history and now I could choose to prepare my own food and how I interacted with my heritage. It wouldn’t be spoon-fed. Part of it was grief, too. I can no longer ask my father about his experiences or watch him cook again because he has been gone for more than 20 years. 

Now, it was up to me to create my traditions. 

If it worked out, I would get to create my own tradition at Christmas — something far away from the silent and dark Christmases I remember my parents creating. That was their personal tradition. 

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This recipe for this type of gingerbread dating back more than 600 years feels like the right thing to make now. Time has stretched out for me. I’m no longer chasing the shiny lives I once saw on TV and I’m able to reexamine the fear my parents must have felt when coming to this country — in their 40s, about the age I am now. 

As I stacked books on my shelf and unpacked brown boxes, my piernik dough cured in my fridge, ready to be rediscovered at Christmas. By then it will have changed and grown into something special.

I don’t know how this story ends. My mother and I are polite to each other, but the space between us remains and we don’t talk about my attempts to reconnect with my heritage. 

When I ask her about the past, she gets frustrated and dismisses me with an impatient wave of her hand: “I don’t remember. Why do you wonder about that?” It occurs to me that our positions have changed. While she once looked back and yearned for her former home and I wanted to blaze forward in our new country, now it is she who wants to leave the past behind and I’m the one curious about history. Is this what getting older is?

As for my cake, I hope that my dough becomes something dark and rich and full of warm flavour — something I wish I could share a piece with the girl I once was.  

Recipe for Piernik

Melt 113 grams of dark honey, 70 grams of sweet butter and 57 grams of sugar in a pot. Add 2 teaspoons of cocoa, 300 grams of flour, one teaspoon ground allspice, one teaspoon ground cinnamon, one teaspoon ground ginger, one egg, ½ teaspoon of cloves, a pinch of pepper, ¾ teaspoon of baking soda and a ½ teaspoon of nutmeg.

Let the mixture cure for at least a few days in the fridge, but preferably let it rest for six weeks to six months.

Place the dough in a greased loaf pan and bake at 350 F for 45 minutes or until done. Once cooled, cut the cake into layers. Spread plum jam between each layer and frost on all sides with chocolate. 

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