Thursday, October 15, 2009

Making Bierochs


Today I made bierochs (beerocks - a German cabbage and hamburger filled roll). I once told my grandson they were called that because the dough has beer in it which was, of course, patently untrue but a deliciously wicked fiction as they do taste yeasty. I love the way these smell when they are baking and relish the fact that this recipe will feed a kitchen full of hungry folks plus a pan of sweet rolls for breakfast the next morning since the dough is a sweet one and I never seem to have enough meat filling for all that dough. Dried cranberries replaced the raisins in this batch of cinnamon rolls. Yummy.

These frugal satisfying rolls are not new. Along with hard red winter wheat and industrious, peaceful ways the Molotschna Mennonite immigrants brought bierochs to Kansas where they were often brought out and served to the men in the fields by the farm wife.
The history of these Mennonites is the old, old story of our nation, the story of a christian group of people seeking refuge here from the persecution not just from other religious groups but from other christian groups, seeking the peace to worship as they believed right, seeking the freedom not to bear arms against another human, seeking asylum from the persecution of a state ordained church (Czar AlexanderII had a slogan, “One Czar, one religion, one language.”)and most especially looking for a government to protect them as they exercised their liberty of conscience.
I'm thankful, once again, that our forefathers chose to protect this liberty for us all by agreeing with Locke that the care "of every man's soul belongs to himself, and is to be left to himself ".