Cookies : MARKETS : Shopping for Tradition

It sometimes seems that authentic holiday traditions are vanishing into a sea of mass-marketed styrofoam “gingerbread” men and Christmas tree ornaments imported from China. But cherished old-country traditions remain alive in the shops of a few remarkable food merchants. From their kitchens emerge culinary treasures unlikely to turn up at your local mall--from hand-shaped Italian cookies to nearly an entire village constructed solely from gingerbread and other cookies.

At these businesses, customers return--like family--year after year for their favorite holiday items. For merchants and clientele, custom and ritual are the glue holding generations and the culture together. Conserving their heritage is profoundly more satisfying than an obsession with the bottom line and keeps these people cooking and baking throughout the season.

*

Claro’s Italian Market, 1003 E. Valley Blvd., San Gabriel, (818) 288-2026; 19 1/2 E. Huntington Drive, Arcadia, (818) 446-0275; 101 W. Whittier Blvd., La Habra, (310) 690-2844; 1095 E. Main St., Tustin, (714) 832-3081; 1655 N. Mountain Ave., Upland, (909) 946-2689; 322 S. Glendora Ave., West Covina, (818) 918-8818. Monday-Saturday 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., Sunday 9 a.m. to 2 p.m.

*

“Hand-rolling and shaping cartellate is an awfully time-consuming process,” explains Mary-Linda Daddona, one of the Claro daughters who helps run the fourth-generation family business. All through the month, Claro’s team of skilled cooks makes these Southern Italian, deep-fried wine cookies in small batches. The cooled cookies are dipped by hand in a mixture of honey and vino cotto, a thick grape syrup that translates to “cooked wine.” Every fall, Claro’s makes vino cotto from fresh grape juice, cooking it with slices of quince to a viscous syrup. They sell it by the quart to Italian home bakers, who may use it for panpepato, a Christmas chocolate nut bread, or for cullia, a sweet, wheatberry pudding.

Despite its attention to details, this 45-year-old market is a down-home sort of Italian-American store with sawdust on the floor and Italian joke T-shirts for sale. During the Christmas season the place bustles with a mass of humanity getting ready to celebrate. The Claro great-granddaughters are packing gift baskets, coaxing the cellophane wrappings taut with a shrink-wrap machine that blows hot air. Two women from the neighborhood, deciding on meats for their office deli trays, stand beneath the 550-pound provolone cheese that Claro’s has been aging about two years in the warehouse. In the center of the deli, bakery goods are constantly replenished by the cooks, who periodically carry out fresh batches from the huge catering kitchen at the back of the store.

Many Italians serve fish and seafood, never meat, at cenone, their illustrious Christmas Eve dinner. The week before Christmas, Claro’s stocks all sorts of seafood, as if to replicate the days when Cottio, Rome’s wholesale fish market, was open to the public on Christmas Eve. Theoretically, at least, fish purifies the body. But in the case of Christmas Eve dinner, this is an allegorical notion at best.

“It’s like a seafood banquet,” Daddona says. You can have many seafood dishes, and the centerpiece is often eel (which Claro’s brings in for the occasion). Marinated octopus salad, clams and mussels in a tomato-wine stew, calamari fritti, salt-cod fritters, are all dishes that could be included on the cenone menu.

Italians barely have time to digest their cenone before it’s time for panettone on Christmas morning. Then, for Christmas Day feasts, Claro’s carries baby lambs sold whole or in parts. There is also rabbit in the meat case and veal for a roast. If you want to go whole hog, so to speak, you could order one of Claro’s roasted suckling pigs that has been marinated in olive oil, lemon juice and wine. The roast will surely confirm the Roman adage: “Tutte le feste finiscono a tavola “ (“All celebrations end at the table”).

When Joe Claro opened the store in 1948, the San Gabriel neighborhood was filled with Italians. Claro once had a house behind the business but eventually the store took over the whole property, and when Claro’s customers began to move away, the family accommodated them by opening new branches.

Claro’s everyday supply of Italian ingredients includes their homemade linguine and fettuccine, imported Parmesan and Italian-American cheeses, imported prosciutto, porcini mushrooms dry or in oil, and a full range of cold cuts including a very lean pancetta from Canada. But for Christmas, the following items are traditional.

*

* Cartellate: In Bari, on the heel of the Italian boot--where the family is from--everyone calls these cookies farfalla dolce , presumably because their thin, rolled out-pastry is shaped into a butterfly-like design.

Fried pastries like these were adopted into Sicilian cooking from Arab invaders. When they are dipped in the vino cotto syrup, you can see the resemblance to the fried, Arab-style sweets. But unlike the sugary Arab versions, this cookie has a subtle, slightly over-caramelized flavor, and it’s much less sweet than it looks.

*

* Cucciddati: Possibly a distant relative of the Fig Newton, these fruit-and-nut-filled semi-circular pastries were once made in huge ring or log shapes. In Sicily, where they are sometimes called Buccellato Siciliano (adapted from the Latin for ring), they were an outgrowth of the ornate breads that historically were made for Christmas. Nowadays, cucciddati are bite-sized turnovers filled with raisins, dried figs, almonds and nuts. “It’s important to use the Greek-style string figs, not the soft, sweet California variety,” says Daddona. A tiny sprinkling of colored nonpareils gives cucciddati their festive look.

*

* Ricotta Cookies: Rolled lightly in granulated sugar and topped with half a glaceed cherry, these slightly puffy, almost cake-like cookies are nearly half ricotta. They seem made to accompany coffee or dessert wine.

*

* Assorted Panettone: “Every town and every village has its particular Christmas bread,” writes Carol Field in “Celebrating Italy.” She goes on to explain that the tall, light, yeast-leavened cakes we now know as panettone evolved out of regional fruited breads of the Italian peasants.

One story relates that today’s much-lighter, yeast-leavened panettone came about when a rich young Milanese man wanted to marry the beautiful, but unacceptably poor, daughter of a baker. The young man paid for a supply of the baker’s best butter and fruits, allowing the girl’s father to make a marvelous cake and become rich selling it. The daughter was thus turned into an acceptably well-off bride. Now, millions of panettone are sold in Italy each year.

Claro’s uses such quantities that they have them shipped by a 40-foot container for distribution to all the stores. Their selection of unique varieties is marvelous. “These are getting more exotic every year,” says Daddona, holding up the copper-colored foil-wrapped coffee panettone. Another style, panettone al vino Moscato , is laced with Muscat wine; one is studded with candied chestnuts, and there is a panettone with dark chocolate strips running through it. Farcito di oro is extra rich; it’s made with additional butter.

*

* Seafood: Littleneck clams, mussels, baby octopus, mature octopus and dressed squid, sold for the traditional cenone , can be turned into hearty seafood soups, folded into a seafood lasagne or marinated for antipasti. For your own table, read Michele Scicolone’s “The Antipasto Table”; it has excellent first-course ideas. “Cucina del Mare” by Evan Kleiman includes many good mussel recipes, wonderful seafood soups and seafood pizzas.

*

* Eel: “Once people get over the idea of eel, its mild taste wins over even the most hesitant,” writes Lynne Rossetto Kasper in “The Splendid Table.” Eels are usually sold whole, but Claro’s will dress them for you if you request it. Daddona’s mother-in-law always bakes eel, with the skin on, in a little olive oil. She then drains off the accumulated oil (rich eel exudes oil of its own) and adds a sauce of onion, garlic, tomato and capers. Skewering eel and broiling it has taken the place of the traditional spit-roasting. Kasper’s book offers a discussion on this fish and a recipe for braised eel with peas. A good collection of eel recipes is also found in Richard Olney’s “Provence the Beautiful Cookbook.”

*

* Baccala: Salt cod, as baccala is known, has never found a large following in the United States, but Italians have scores of ways to cook this dense, satisfying fish. They flake it for fritters, stew it in wine and marinate it in oil and vinegar to use in a salad. And it can be sauced dozens of ways. Prior to simmering it, the cod must be soaked to soften and desalinate it. Claro’s sells the traditional dried cod, which needs three days soaking time in three changes of water. They also carry baccala that needs only a 24-hour soak.

*

* Extracts: Claro’s carries a huge selection of flavoring extracts and oils. Many, such as the cinnamon oil and anise oil, give a much richer flavor than ground spices and other extracts. Amaretto, anisette, brandy, strega and rosolia are a few from the selection.

*

* Cardone: Claro’s produce is limited to a small selection of specialties: broccoli di rape, fennel, chicory, baby artichokes and sometimes seasonal herbs. But a fixture on the Christmastime table are cardoons, a vegetable that looks like giant celery stalks and has the flavor of artichokes. One of the best ways to serve cardone is to peel off their strings, slice them and dip them in egg, then flour before frying them in olive oil.

*

German Home Bakery, 2950 Grace Lane, Costa Mesa, (714) 540-0281; Tuesday-Friday 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., Saturday 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. 429-H Shoreline Village, Long Beach, (310) 435-2533; Monday-Sunday 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. 370 Camino de Estrella in Palisades Plaza, San Clemente, (714) 661-9088; Monday-Saturday 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.

*

Throughout December at the German Home Bakery’s Costa Mesa store, a wild array of baroquely iced, cookie-studded gingerbread houses with sweet icicles dangling from their pointed roofs surround the tables where customers have coffee. Lebkuchen in the form of gingerbread boys, girls, stars and Santas turn the small room into a Hansel and Gretel fantasy.

With Christmas decorations everywhere, the shop seems a mini-replica of the Christkindlmarkt in Nuremberg, Germany. There, in a fair-like atmosphere, vendors set up stalls the week before Christmas to sell everything Christmas-related: Christmas trees and greens, shimmery decorations, handmade wooden toys, pottery and other small gifts. Shoppers buy warm, roasted chestnuts or caramelized almonds still hot from the pan and drink a mug of hot, mulled Gluhwein to protect their hands from the frost.

German Home Bakery sells no Gluhwein but they do bake Springerle. Stamped with decorative molds imported from Bavaria, these cookies look like ornamental tiles and taste deeply of the anise used to flavor them. In the glass bakery cases, rich, feathery-textured cakes rolled into decorated Yule logs, bejeweled holiday rum cake and trifle bowls filled with layers of Bavarian creme, rum cake and fruit are all part of owner Oskar Streit’s classical German Christmas repertoire.

Behind the modest-looking shop is Streit’s 9,500-square-foot bakery, which supplies most German shops in the Southland with breads and sweets.

Streit, who trained as a baker and pastry chef in the Black Forest region of Germany, acquired the 25-year-old German Home Bakery in 1976. “It was simply a neighborhood German bread bakery then,” says Streit. He continued to bake its line of wonderful, natural, sponge-risen German breads: the dark, sourdough ryes, the hearty pumpernickel and the round Bavarian-style country breads.

But Streit envisioned the bakery’s larger potential. He added a full line of traditional cakes and pastries, including apple and poppy-seed strudels, linzer torte, Sacher torte and the cakes Germans love with their afternoon coffee and for entertaining. The bakery began to wholesale. Eventually, Streit opened two additional German Home Bakery locations, one in Long Beach and the other in San Clemente.

*

* Springerle: Originally from Swabia, a southwestern German region, Springerle were once made with opulently carved molds and tinted with multiple colorings like old-fashioned photographs. Streit has imported the simpler, more modern, but still very official, Springerle molds to stamp designs into these cookies. Although they look like tiles, they have an airy quality because they are leavened with lots of well-beaten egg. Streit makes a small, square version of the cookies and another, 10 inches high, that makes wonderful-looking Old-World-style decorations.

*

* Lebkuchen: Descended from the decorative breads of centuries past, Lebkuchen, the famous honeyed, multi-spiced, cake-like cookie, rose to its acme in Nuremberg, where the spice trade thrived for many centuries. As with every thing baked in Germany, there are dozens and dozens of Lebkuchen varieties. German Home makes fanciful Christmas figures and houses from a Lebkuchen prepared with honey, rye and white flour and spices.

*

* Gingerbread kits and houses: German Home sells Lebkuchen “gingerbread” houses fully decorated; it also sells kits that you can assemble yourself. With the slabs of Lebkuchen that will become the house walls comes royal icing for decorating and a booklet of design ideas and instructions.

*

* Gingerbread House Classes: Every year, German Home Bakery conducts gingerbread house building and decorating classes. Attendees will soon master the icicle-dripping technique and will have little reindeer prancing on icing in front of their very own buildings. Call for information on these.

*

* Pfeffernusse: With their powdered sugar coating, these highly spiced whole-wheat cookies resemble little snow balls. Many people like to age them with a few slices of apple in a tin. This technique is optional with German Home’s Pfeffernussen , which are not as rock-hard as some home-style recipes produce.

*

* Cookie Teller: Advent--the four Sundays before Christmas--is an important time in the German Christmas ritual. Each Sunday a candle is lit on the obligatory decorative family wreath, and everyone visits relatives and friends. For these occasions it is important to serve your best cookies on a colorful Kuchenteller , a festively decorated plate for cookies. German Home sells a Teller for non bakers--an assortment of decorated sugar cookie cutouts, spritz cookies and many other varieties ready for your plate.

*

* Christmas Trifle: If you bring your own bowl, German Home will fill it with trifle sold by the pound. The dessert layers rum-sprinkled cake with Bavarian cream and raspberry filling and tops it with a paper-thin swirl of white chocolate. The shop also sells the trifle all made up in a bowl.

*

* Christmas Log Cakes: Whether you get the mocha, the chocolate or the white-cake version of this roll cake, it will be anointed with rum syrup, slathered with Bavarian cream and loaded with intensely flavored fruit filling. The logs, frosted in pure butter cream, come gaily decorated for the holiday season.

*

* Christmas Stollen: “You have to let stollen mellow at least a week before it’s ready to eat,” said a German friend. This very regional sweet Christmas yeast bread is always densely crammed with dried fruits and sprinkled with a snowy cap of powdered sugar. Dresden, located in Saxony, became the German city most famous for its particular stollen style, which uses lots of dried cherries. My friend says German Home’s version, with its golden raisins, almonds and candied orange peel, is typically Bavarian; it lacks the strongly flavored angelica that some versions include.

Kept tightly wrapped, stollen will stay edible throughout the holiday season. German Home makes two varieties in several sizes: one with marzipan (which I personally prefer) and one without.

On Heiligen Abend --Christmas Eve--after Midnight Mass, the stollen is ceremoniously cut and, in some families, served with hot mulled wine punch while everyone gathers around the decorated tree to usher in Christmas.

*

* Holiday Cake: This tender, buttery bundt cake studded with golden raisins is soaked throughout with a light rum syrup and festively topped with pecans and red and green glaceed cherries.

*

* Christmas Petit-Fours: One-inch-square mini-cakes with a hint of liqueur and raspberry come enrobed in shiny icing and decorated with Christmas fancies.

*

* Croquembouche: A tower of Bavarian cream-filled cream puffs may be ordered in almost any size. Before placing the final decorations, German Home drizzles wisps of white or dark chocolate over the tower in place of the ritual caramelized sugar. “The humidity does the sugar in,” Streit says.

*

* Christmas Breads: For the holiday table, there’s nothing like an imposing round of country bread for the centerpiece. German Home’s Bauernbrot, a farmer-style rye seasoned lightly with ground caraway, must be the most imposing choice of all. It’s made in 8- or 4-pound loaves, although there’s a modest 1-pound version too. The bread, leavened with German Home’s famous natural sourdough sponge, rises slowly in baskets and is baked in a stone-floored oven. Its rich, nutty, slightly tangy flavor results from these time- and labor-intensive steps.

The bakery makes about a dozen rye breads, including Kumisbrot , a dense pullman bread made from three kinds of rye flour and baked long and slowly in large iron molds that hold a dozen loaves.