An Ode to Christmas Stollen

When does the holiday season begin for you? Is it the Macy’s Parade? The first frost? The late summer unveiling of icicle lights at Home Depot?

My earliest happy harbinger is the arrival of the Vermont Country Store Christmas catalog.* Christmas is, among other things, a warm bath of nostalgia, and no one does nostalgia better than this nearly 80-year-old company. Give me the bubble lights, the ceramic trees, the NOEL angel candle holders. I want it all. A silver tinsel tree with lighted color wheel? Sign me up. 

And then there’s the food. When I was a kid, I marveled over the bundt cakes, the five-pound fruitcakes (were they good? They looked good), the plum puddings and mince pies. These foods were exotic, relative to my family’s Italian-American traditions. Especially the German and Scandinavian foods. What were lebkuchen? They were also some of the most impressively packaged treats I’d ever seen. A tin of gingersnaps could live on my counter year-round. And the Original Dresden Stollen came in a royal red tin adorned with various seals of authenticity attesting to its having been made in the city of Dresden by an official stollen baker.

In recent years, I’ve taken to making my own stollen. It’s a fun project on a December weekend. But when the VCS catalog landed in our mailbox this year, I remembered eight-year-old me pining over those unknown foods and thought, you’re all grown up now. And you have a credit card.

Now the Dresden stollen is on my kitchen counter, being consumed one delicious slice at a time. I love the thick layer of decorative sugar, the enriched dough studded with rum-soaked sultanas, candied citrus, and almonds. Slices are best served warm and actually benefit from ten seconds in a microwave or a quick pass in your toaster. 

This recipe dates back to 1474, but in earlier decades stollen (pronounced shtoll-en) was a simple bread of oil, water, and flour to be eaten during the period of fasting that preceded Christmas. Eventually, the food-savvy people of Saxony paid a tax to the Pope to allow them to add butter to the bread and the recipe evolved and improved from there. Now, the bakers of Dresden make a three-ton stollen every December that they parade through the city and sell off for charity. But I don’t have to travel to Germany this year. I get a taste at home, by way of Vermont. 

*I should note here that Vermont Country Store is a Yankee advertiser and sponsor of our public television show, Weekends with Yankee, of which I am a co-host. My feelings about the store, however, pre-date my employment at Yankee and are entirely sincere.