German Scrap Cake

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Mary from Indianapolis.

Well, hello, Mary. How are you doing?

Just fine, thank you.

What can we help you with, Mary?

Well, my question is based on a childhood memory.

I remember when my mother was making pies. She would trim the pastry and give me the trimmings, let me roll them out, sprinkle them with cinnamon and sugar, roll them up, and we’d bake them. And she called this ratzakuka.

Now, I just accepted that was the name for it and never really thought much about it. And later on, I ask a few people, nobody had ever heard that term before for those. Now, I know my mother didn’t make it up. I think she had gotten it probably from somewhere. I have no idea how it’s spelled, but it’s just come to mind lately, and I was wondering where could that have come from?

So it’s leftover pie dough, right?

Yes.

My mother did it, and I loved it, and it was the best thing ever. The trimmings around the edge, and she would put a little butter on it and then the cinnamon sugar, and bake it for just a couple minutes, and they’d come out, and it was almost better than the pie. Really, it was that amazing. And because she would, like, hand it to you hot off the pan. And I actually got to do it, so it was sort of my part.

Yeah.

Right.

You helped. And you’re in the kitchen having a snack. It feels illicit because it’s not, like, after a meal. And she called it ratzakuka.

Ratzakuka.

Ratzakuka.

If I had to spell it fanatically, I’d say R-A-T-Z-A-K-U-K-A.

Now, I was talking with one lady, and she said that the German word, there was a kuchen or something for bread. And I don’t know any German. My mother did not speak German, though her grandparents came from Germany.

Well, I think that might be the key. The closest thing I can think of is Reste Kuchen. Leste in German means leftovers. The rest.

Okay.

The remainder.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So you might call it, yeah, in English, I guess, you know, leftover cake.

Yeah.

And it might be sort of a corruption from, you know, what she heard when she was little and she didn’t quite get the, you know, the full sound of it. So that could be it.

Yeah.

So Kuchen can mean cake, right?

And some other things as well.

Right.

Right.

But this kind of particular cake is made out of leftover ingredients that you have, like maybe after the Christmas baking season, you have a bunch of raisins, you have a bunch of almonds or coconuts or something like that. And so they’re different every time when you make them.

And what is that word?

Restakouken?

Restakouken.

That sounds very close. That sounds like a winner to me. I would bring a bell if I had one.

Yeah, R-E-S-T-E, Kuchen, K-U-C-A-T-E-N.

Now, in English cookbooks that have German recipes, we often take the word kuchen and do other things with it, right? There’s like a kuchen dough, and there’s kuchen pastries and kuchen cakes, right? And so we’ve kind of generalized this term away from the original German.

I wonder if she got that from her grandparents. Wouldn’t that be lovely to find out that your mother taught you a word that she learned from her grandparents? So that’s, what is that? How many? That’s four generations. That’s great.

Yes, yes. And, of course, my kids don’t remember it, but I think I will, with my grandchildren, re-insist on it again.

There we go.

That’s perfect.

Sounds great. I love the continuity of it, right?

Yeah.

Now I have the correct. It’s rest instead of rats. It’s rats.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You can look it up online. There are lots of pictures of restacookas.

Oh, great.

Okay.

Well, thank you very much. I appreciate that.

All right. If you make some, we want some.

Definitely.

Oh, okay. It might be a little cold by the time they get there. I think we need you to come out here to California and make them for us. They’re not very good for you either, I might add.

Well, that’s okay. At least an Instagram of them, right?

At least an Instagram.

Mary, thank you so much.

Thank you very much.

All right, take care now.

Bye-bye.

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