“Did great-great-great grandfather Conrad Renzel leave behind any of his recipes?” my son Michael asked hopefully. I had just been telling Michael all about Conrad’s start as a penniless immigrant German baker in 1860s San Jose, California. I continued the story with how Conrad had worked hard, first as an itinerant baker selling his goods from a horse cart, then as a bakery and grocery store owner that had started the Renzel family on a path to prosperity. Michael himself is no slouch in the baking department and is always interested in trying new and different recipes. Baking up an antique confection that his 3X great grandfather Conrad might have sold off the back of his horse cart is squarely in Michael’s bakehouse. “Sadly, no,” I answered with a sigh. “Conrad did not leave behind any recipes that I know of.”
But I was mistaken…
About two weeks later, I found the sheet. It was in an old folder my mom’s cousin Mary Renzel had given me about a decade ago, tucked between a handful of thin yellowed onionskin letters sent to Conrad, and their handwritten translations. The aged paper was blue and lined. On it, scrawled in pencil in faded German handwriting, was what looked like two recipes written in three sections. The paper was stained on the edges with what appeared to be dried batter. Batter stains are always a good sign. It means the recipe was well used and therefore worth making.
Could I bake this 150-year-old recipe?
I thought to myself, “How cool would it be to bake up one of Conrad Renzel’s recipes, about 150 years later?” But first, I had to decipher it!
So I set to work to translate the recipe into modern English and modern cooking measurements. I confidently armed myself with my usual tools for such a translation – my German handwriting key, which showed me how old German letters were shaped, my iPhone Translate app, a year of college German taken 35 years ago, and the secure knowledge that there are only so many baking ingredients with sugar, butter, flour and eggs being the most common. My plan was to figure out one word at a time, letter-by-letter, using my German handwriting key, then put the word into the Translate app to get the English name or ingredient. This translation strategy was one that had worked for me before for simple German documents. Surely, this sparsely worded recipe would be a cakewalk to translate by this method too.
But it wasn’t as easy as that…
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