Eating “Wood Shavings,” a.k.a. Hobelspäne

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Lisa.

I live in Paris, Kentucky.

Hey, Lisa.

We’re glad to have you.

Well, I was interested in finding out if you knew anything about a kind of cookie we used to have at Christmas.

It’s called Hobel Schweine and it’s got one of those little double dot things above one of the letters, I’m not sure which one.

But I was just interested in finding out more about it.

It’s a cookie we used to have at our friend’s house in Miami at Christmas every year.

I just wanted to find out if you knew anything about it.

I can’t find out anything about it.

Hobel Spain.

It’s got some German roots.

Mm-

So is it their family that’s got the German heritage or yours?

Theirs.

Okay.

Yeah.

We used to go over there every Christmas and they introduced us to it and then we learned how to make it.

It’s a little complicated but it’s really cool.

In in in brief, how do you make them?

Well it’s like mostly dough with butter and a little bit of lemon and a little bit of rum and you cut it into a rectangle like about inch and a half by three or something like that and then you put a slice down the middle vertically and then you fold one end through it so it looks like a little bow tie, and then you deep fry it and then you cover it with powdered sugar.

Yeah.

So the word that we’re talking about here, Hovoshweina, is H-O-B-E-L S-P-A with two dots on top of it and then N-E.

That’s the plural form.

The singular is Hobelshpan.

And you know what it translates directly as?

Wood shavings.

Or planing chips.

Because they look a little bit particularly in some other varieties of this of this dessert, they look a little bit like the shavings that you get when you smooth the surface of wood with a plane.

And sometimes they’ll be called hobel sharten with about the same meaning, basically meaning planing shavings, that sort of thing.

And so that shavings refers to that twisted shape that they get.

And some of the other varieties, instead of putting kind of the leg of the rectangle through the slit that you made in the dough, you actually just put a couple slits and the the frying or the baking of them, ’cause they’re you can do it both ways depending on your recipe, will naturally make them curl up like a shaving of wood.

Interesting.

I have never heard of anything like that.

And so I think I’ve got something that will blow your mind.

I found a recipe for this from 1795.

No way.

In a book from Laura Saxony, a cookbook by a woman named Frederica Luis Luffler.

And she has a recipe, and it sounds so much like yours and I’ve translated it here but basically you take the dough from two eggs and a nut of butter as she phrases it flour and a little salt and roll it out and then when it’s hardened a little you cut two finger widths of them with a baking wheel and then you bake them in a a little bit until they’re light and yellow and then sprinkle them with sugar.

And that sounds a lot like your recipe.

Huh.

Yeah.

That is really interesting, although I never considered baking it in the oven.

Yeah, but I bet it’s a little healthier, but that which is not very German of them, because the Ger Germans say, How can I add more fat to this recipe?

I come from German heritage on two sides and let me tell you the tendency towards fat baked goods is very, very ingrained.

That’s pretty funny.

It does have six tablespoons of butter in it absolutely i saw i saw one recipe that was literally a pound of butter that is a lot of butter wow that is i’m gonna give you a word, Lisa that you, can Google.

And it’s it’s for the category of this German baked good and for deep fried stuff.

And it’s Schmolzgebeck.

S-C-H-M-A-L L Z G E B A with two dots on it.

Although you can leave it off for Google doesn’t care.

C K Schmaltzkebeck.

And you’re gonna find tons of recipes and variations from all over the German speaking world.

But not only that, but from from nearby countries like Hungary and Poland.

Another word that I really loved was Smolskbeck Schreifen and it basically means lard pastry strips.

They’re not shy about saying that there’s lard in there instead of but You know, I live in eastern Kentucky and they said if they knew what was lard was they’d put it in a pan and fry it.

Where people do just literally eat fried fat.

That’s just yeah that’s what they had.

That’s what they ate.

Absolutely.

Sounds delicious.

Well Lisa, happy baking.

Yeah, good luck with that.

Well, thank you so much.

We love your show.

We listen to it every week.

Thank you.

Thanks, Lisa.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.

Bye.

Although it’s in ancient German and the old style script.

We will link to that the cookbook from seventeen ninety five so you can take a stab at it yourself and we’ll of course include the recipe in English on our website at waywordradio.org.