13 minute read
All rolled into one by Sandra Cortner
Photos this page, left to right. The potica almost rolls up by itself, with a little help from Trudy Yaklich. Jenica Barrett and Andy Heiser use rolling pins to stretch out the dough. Onalee Barrett Guzy and Mason Suda with pans of rising potica.
Opposite. Cindy Yaklich puts her creation in the oven. The first rise and the finished product, ready to slice and devour. Potica master Bob Oberosler. A tabletop of dough and filling.
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Photos by: Cindy Yaklich, Sandra Cortner and Ruth Guerrieri Barrett
ALL ROLLED
INTO ONE
WHETHER YOU CALL IT POVITICA, POTICA OR SLOVENIAN NUT BREAD, THIS SWEET, FRAGRANT MAINSTAY OF OLD CRESTED BUTTE REQUIRES HOURS OF WORK AND “A HANDFUL OF LOVE.”
By Sandra Cortner
she exclaimed as she carefully opened the foil inside the box from her aunt. It was 1967, and Nettie Kapushion, my college roommate and a Crested Butte native, generously shared her gift with me. We devoured slices of the delicious bread – cinnamon scented, buttery, melt-in-your-mouth and unlike any I had tasted before. Since then, I’ve successfully sought povitica at many potluck tables in Crested Butte. Yet I’ve never seen it in any of my mainstream cookbooks.
For the early settlers of Crested Butte, povitica – or potica – was the quintessential food of Crested Butte, and some variation of this strudel or nut roll was baked for Christmas, Easter and sometimes special occasions. Women of different nationalities – Slovenian, Croatian, Italian, Czech, German – handed down their povitica recipes through
the generations, Nettie’s aunt among them. That’s when everyone in this small mining town ate povitica and klobase (pork sausage) and polka danced together despite differences in culture.
Povitica is a sweet, yeast-raised bread/ pastry, stretched thin, usually filled with walnuts, cinnamon, honey and butter, but alternatively with apple, cream, rum, raisins, cheese or even cracklings. The filled dough is rolled into a slender log, curled into a snail shape, baked in a 10- to 12-inch pan, and then cut into flaky, sweet, moist slices. Cindy Yaklich, born and raised in Crested Butte, described it as “commercial cinnamon bread on steroids.”
Michele Veltri, who co-authored The Crested Butte Melting Pot cookbook with his mother Myrtle Veltri, explained, “Poviti is Italian for ‘something rolled.’” He pronounces the bread poh-vee-TEET-sah. Many shorten it to puh-TEET-sah. The Veltris’ cookbook (published in 1973 and revised in 1986) is a 144-page collection of dishes from early immigrants, and it includes recipes for two strudels and seven poviticas. Those include recipes from sisters Cindy and Trudy Yaklich’s Slovenian grandmother and their great-aunt Karolina Kochevar.
Cindy has their mother Leola’s basic handwritten recipe. “But she made it from memory, and the recipe doesn’t say how long the dough should rise. I found a Slovenian website that filled in the blanks. Growing up, I helped spread out the filling. Daddy’s job was to crack all the walnuts (two pounds!) and get them out of the shells and grind them. I still have their last nutcracker. Thank goodness I can go to Costco and buy a huge bag of nuts. Now I use my Cuisinart to grind them. I believe there is a reason for invention,” said Cindy.
“We had it Christmas morning with klobase sausage. It’s extra special for me because of the history and tradition wrapped up in it. When Mom passed, I thought, ‘I want to keep the tradition alive.’” Cindy added with a grin, “So I told my son’s fiancée she’d have to learn to make it.”
Trudy is a purist when it comes to walnuts. “I use an old-fashioned meat grinder. It releases the oils in the nuts to help keep the bread moist. You can never have too many nuts or too much cinnamon. I like to take the best from the recipes – the ones that call for the most butter and nuts. But not raisins! Our whole family hated raisins. Except for Aunt Karolina, who gave us one with golden raisins each year.”
Cindy experiments with orange or lemon zest. She also pricks the roll every several turns with a cake tester to help eliminate air pockets. “I make two a year: Christmas and
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Sandra Cortner
Trudy Yaklich and Nel Burkett with three poviticas they baked for Vinotok.
one other special occasion.” One of those occasions was her 40th anniversary party, where she served slices of her three poticas; I was a lucky guest and potica sampler.
Bob Oberosler, on the other hand, sticks to his mother Angelina Tomsic Oberosler’s recipe. Of Czech heritage, Angie raised three girls and four boys in Crested Butte and once marveled, “In all the years I baked potica, I only found one child who could make it.” According to Bob, the recipe was all in her head. “If I hadn’t watched her so many times, I couldn’t have done it.” And his first attempts after he married “weren’t so good,” he confessed.
Bob indicated the four- by two-foot table in his dining room where he rolls out the dough on a tea towel every year to make seven or eight poticas to freeze as Christmas gifts. That’s down from the 14 or 15 he used to make for the Gunnison Elks Lodge’s Oktoberfest celebration. The octogenarian uses his Kitchen Aid mixer, unlike his mother, who got eight cups of flour hand stirred and kneaded into the dough along with the eggs, milk and butter. Bob shared Angie’s secret of edging the dough with sour cream before rolling it up around the filling to help keep the cinnamon, nuts, honey, butter, raisins and orange zest from spilling out.
Bob showed me the photo of his mother in the Veltri cookbook where she is rolling out her third potica. Two others are rising in pans in the foreground.
While Bob’s wife was being cared for by hospice, a volunteer watched him make a potica and wanted the recipe. “I told her I couldn’t give her the recipe but we would make one together, reminding the volunteer that in every potica you make, you put in a handful of love. Unless you’ve worked with someone who’s made one, it’s just too hard.”
Not for Susan Anderton, a local artist who arrived from England in 1969. “I was inspired by an upcoming museum function honoring Croatian foods. While searching for a suitable recipe, I looked in the Veltri cookbook. My neighbor Betty Spehar (a Crested Butte native with Croatian parents) told me how to pronounce it.”
Susan followed Donnie Dussart’s raisinrum recipe. “I tried it out on Betty and she exclaimed, ‘It’s perfect!’ The older ladies weren’t up to it any more, so I picked up making it.” She confessed to substituting plain water for the potato water (the slightly starchy water saved from boiling potatoes) called for in the recipe. Yet she did mix the dough by hand. “If you have a whole day, they are fun to make,” she said.
Michele Veltri is also a fan of the Dussart recipe. “I was on the eating end, not the baking end,” he joked. “Crested Butte men were pampered. By the time I was ready to be a student, my mother’s back was hurting too much [for her to teach me].” Michele, a sharp observer, sampled food from his neighbors of different nationalities as he grew up. He and his late mother collected more recipes than they could include in The Crested Butte Melting Pot.
Cara Guerrieri’s great-grandmother immigrated from Italy to Crested Butte, also bringing her recipe in her head. “My family pronounced it povitica (puh-vuh-TEET-sa), and it was a wonderful treat,” said Cara. “My Aunt Pauline [Simillion], Dad’s sister, would make it for us every Christmas. A HUGE half-round of it would arrive at the ranch, and we would eat it for days. With seven of
Ruth Guerrieri Barrett
Donnie Dussart’s recipe from the Veltri cookbook; Onalee Barrett Guzy and Mason Suda finish their roll.
us in the family, that amounted to a large amount of povitica. I remember eating it for breakfast, snack and dessert.
“I think traditionally povitica is rather dry, but my family likes the nut filling to be really rich, thick and sweet. The dough itself is soft and a little sticky compared to other breads. In my sister Ruth Guerrieri Barrett’s family, the annual povitica baking is a family event, which is a pretty good idea because it is quite a lot of work. I put raisins in it, a variation my family likes.”
As I interviewed the bakers, I was puzzled. Some rolled the dough out and others, like Trudy, swore by stretching it. “Too much rolling makes it tough. It’s meant to be stretched to an oval to cover the table in the middle of a room. Women walking around stretch with the back or side of the hand until it’s so thin you can almost see through it,” she said.
Polly Oberosler, Bob’s sister-in-law, elaborated. “It is an art handed down. I am guessing in their home regions and even here in the early 1900s, some flours responded to kneading in maybe vastly different ways.”
In the Scientific American article Polly sent me, I learned that the gluten (protein) in the dough can vary from flour to flour, depending on wheat grains grown by farmers. Decades ago, once the baker figured out which flour gave the best rise or responded to either stretching or rolling, that’s how the recipe was handed down.
“Either way,” Michele said, “after filling, start the roll with your fingers and as you lift the cloth, it rolls up by itself.”
According to Trudy, local women used to judge each other by their potica – whether it was tender enough or tasty enough and not too dry – “just as they were judged by how early they got their laundry out on the clothesline.”
Making potica can be a solitary affair – Cindy shoos out her husband and son until she’s done – or a group effort, as in Ruth’s annual family project, where four people roll the dough out on a large table. Or it can be a learning experience, like when Trudy asked me to help her and Nel Burkett, former curator of the Crested Butte Mountain Heritage Museum, make her traditional potica, combining Slovenian recipes from her ancestors: Marija Kochevar, Karolina Kochevar, Leola Yaklich and Frances Yaklich. We spent the day at her house creating – and dirtying many of her mother’s pans and utensils, all of which I carefully washed and Nel dried. It was a gift to the Vinotok Frank Orazem Storytelling Night. And a gift to me. Nel had helped Trudy the previous three years, but I, being the newbie, started by observing and asking questions. Before long, I was grinding the two pounds of walnuts, taking turns stirring in eight cups of flour and then holding the bowl while Trudy stirred, marveling that all the ingredients fit into one bowl.
Crested Butte natives sometimes describe eating this defining food of early Crested Butte as an addiction. All agree that keeping the old traditions alive – and connecting with family memories – is worth a day’s hard work. b
Read more in Sandy’s books, Crested Butte Stories...Through My Lens and Crested Butte…Love at First Sight. You can find them and the second edition of The Crested Butte Melting Pot at the Crested Butte Mountain Heritage Museum.
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POTICA RECIPE
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Di Bridges Broker Associate 970.901.0888 dbridges@livsothebysrealty.com INGREDIENTS YEAST: 1 large cake compressed yeast (2 oz.) ½ cup lukewarm milk 1 tablespoon sugar
DOUGH: 1½ cups milk ¾ cup butter (1½ sticks) 5 egg yolks ¾ cup sugar 2 teaspoons salt 1 tablespoon vanilla 7 to 7½ cups all-purpose flour (sifted)
WALNUT FILLING: 2 pounds walnuts (ground fine) 1 stick butter (¼ pound) 1 ½ cups milk or half and half cream 2 cups sugar ½ cup honey 1 tablespoon vanilla Grated peel from 1 orange or 1 lemon 5 egg whites Cinnamon
DIRECTIONS
Dissolve yeast in milk; add sugar and combine. Cover and let rise in warm place, about 10 minutes.
Scald milk; add butter. Cool to lukewarm. In small electric mixer bowl, beat egg yolks, sugar, salt and vanilla until lemon-colored. In large bowl, sift 3 cups flour. Pour mixtures of prepared yeast, milk, butter, eggs and sugar into mixing bowl with 3 cups of flour; beat with electric mixer until smooth and elastic. Then keep adding flour and mixing with a wooden spoon until of consistency that dough can be handled without sticking.
Place on floured board and knead for about 15 minutes, adding flour as needed, to make a non-sticking dough. Place dough in well-greased bowl; turn to grease top. Cover and let rise in warm place for about 2 hours until double in bulk.
Grind walnuts in food chopper with finest blade. Melt butter in large saucepan. Add milk, sugar and honey; cook to rolling boil, taking care not to let it boil over. Pour hot mixture over walnuts. Add vanilla and grated peel. Mix thoroughly and allow to cool. Beat the egg whites until stiff and fold into the cooled nut mixture. ROLLING AND BAKING:
Grease well the four 12” x 4” or five 9” x 5” loaf pans. Roll out dough on table covered with cloth, sprinkled well with flour (this amount of dough can be rolled to about 50” x 32”). Spread cooled filling evenly over entire dough, sprinkling generously with cinnamon. (If desired, raisins may be added at this point.)
Start rolling up dough by hand (jellyroll fashion) from the wide side, stretching the dough slightly with each roll. Keep the side edges as even as possible. Prick roll about every several turns with a thin knitting needle or cake tester to help eliminate air pockets. Continue rolling by hand to opposite edge. With edge of flat plate, cut desired lengths. Seal ends more securely by gently pulling dough down to cover ends and tucking underneath when placing in pan. Cover and let rise in warm place until double, about one hour. Bake in preheated 325-degree oven for 1 hour until medium brown. If a glossy top is desired, brush each loaf with 1 egg yolk beaten with 1 tablespoon milk 15 minutes before potica is done.
Sandra Cortner
