Kate grew up in Prague, which explains the Czech accent in so many of our recipes. This one is so utterly Czech that even native Praguers will be a little stunned. Not because of the recipe itself, though it really does make a fantastic, ultra-buttery thumbprint cookie with a unique technical twist. It’s the history that makes this cookie special.
The published recipe dates back to the landmark 1826 book by Magdalena Dobromila Rettigová (a/k/a M.D. Rettig), a name that every Czech knows, but also tends to discount. Non-natives may want to think of her as a much loved national Grandma; the old lady you treasure because she snuck you cookies, held you in her lap, and taught you how to handle pets, children, and husbands with a firm but loving hand. It’s an archetype, right?
But here’s the thing. Mrs. Rettigova has held that role in the cultural heart for 200 years and counting.
Wow.
As always, feel free to skip to the bottom if you only want the recipe. This article, even more than most, will cover ground that isn’t directly related to simply making the cookie.
LET’S START WITH THE COOKIE ITSELF
The key characteristics of a proper Thumbprint Cookie are:
- An easygoing flavor that will pair with your jam based filling;
- A tender, vaguely chewy, fine grained texture; and
- Just enough structure to keep a clear dimple in the center when baked as a ball with a deep hole poked inside.
Mrs. Rettigova’s Dimple Cookies (“důlkové koláčky”) feature exactly the texture and structure you want, but also have a flavor that positively screams of BUTTER!!! Butter that pairs extremely well with fruit flavors of every kind, of course. Or can stand on its own.
The Key Trick: Combine Softened Butter With Clarified Butter
It’s a fairly simple procedure. (1) Beat a generous amount of softened butter with an equal amount of clarified or browned butter until smooth, (2) beat in egg yolks one at a time, and then (3) mix in the dry ingredients. All very simple, and totally brilliant.
Our article on Ghraybee, the Middle Eastern shortbread, details my years of frustration trying to incorporate browned butter into a shortbread cookie. The problem drove me mad, and I finally had to settle for simply using it as an icing. The delicate balancing act of Ghraybee offers one way around that diliemma. This cookie is the European solution I never managed to crack.
Yes, it’s also 200 years old and counting. [Sigh]. Don’t remind me. But look at this way: I’ve got a choice between feeling elated to have the answer, or ashamed that I didn’t think of it myself. Thanks all the same, but I’m going with Door #1.
THE ONLY QUESTION: NARROW HOLES OR WIDER HOLES?
There isn’t much else to add, since we’re offering the recipe basically unchanged from the original Czech. The only issue we found goes to personal choice. What’s the balance you want between cookie part and jam part? Here are the two options (you can also vote for “in between” of course):
The wider your holes before baking, the wider and shallower they will be after baking, with the initial difference enhanced by spreading. It really comes down to what you want. I am a jam-first kind of guy. Kate prefers a bit more balance.
(NOTE FROM KATE: I like the fruity notes of jam to pair with my shortbread without overwhelming it. In the past, I’ve removed excess jam out of an otherwise perfect cookie with a spoon. Psst…don’t tell on me.)
Then there is the final option: make a relatively flat topped cookie and then press a dimple in with your asbestos finger when they are hot out of the oven. Yes, it can give you a mild burn on a sensitive thumb tip. Sometimes you pay for beauty. And yes, you can use a tool like the blunt end of a small pestle; if you have one. Just be sure to act quickly! The cookies get delicate as they cool, at which point your effort to push in a dent will start to cause destruction instead.
P.S. These are cookies you fill after baking. Yes, you can do it in advance, but it serves no purpose. The jam condenses and shrinks as it bakes, while also losing its high notes. Here’s an example:
I also believe those high notes matter, at least to my taste. Strawberry jam with a tiny hint of lemon juice or balsamic vinegar? Oh yeah. “How to elevate a childhood favorite into maturity in an instant.”
Apricot with a spice (cardamom!), herb (rosemary!), hint of booze (cognac!), or lemon? 1826, meet 2026. It has no end except the bounds of human creativity.
There are plenty of cookies where a cooked fruit filling is the right way to go, especially if you hope to ship them. This is a different critter. Thumbprints are for eating at home, not shipping out. Though nothing stops you from shipping them empty, of course. Even the most inept, kitchen-phobic bachelor can manage to fill a hole with a bit of his favorite jam!
So much for the actual cookie. Now it’s time for the treasure behind the cookie; an absolutely fascinating bit of history and perspective that most people tend to forget.
Again, head to the bottom if you only want the recipe. What follows is all about history, culture, and why you should go out of your way to give this one a try. It has nothing to do with the actual baking
WHO WAS M.D. RETTIGOVA AND WHY WAS SHE SO IMPORTANT?
(NOTE FROM KATE: Scott doesn’t waste a moment to learn something new from history, and this time period was of great interest to him in college. He’s also a professional storyteller, and thus can’t resist a good opportunity to share an interesting tale. Stories, however, are as important as they are interesting. They teach us much about who came before us, and they help shed light upon the things we do today without even thinking about it. We all stand on the shoulders of giants. For our Czech readers, you’ll note a non-Czech slant to Scott’s view of Czech history. Let’s treat pani Rettigova as one singular dot, and for this time, not worry about the seminal “details” that form the rest of the Czech history puzzle. Enjoy!)
Hmmm… Let’s start by setting the scene.The girl who would grow up to become Mrs. Rettigova was born in 1785 to a German speaking, very assimilated family named Artmann. They lived in a 500-person village located in the northern quarter of Imperial Austria that would later become the Czech Republic.
Austria in 1785 was the world of Mozart’s prime: a country heavy with tradition, and organized around an ancient, universally accepted, divinely inspired social order that began with the Emperor and moved on down. Loyalties were more medieval than modern. The ran to your patron, and from him on up to the imperial person. There were no amorphous concepts like a political state or ethnic group with the sole exception of religion, and the hellish wars of the 1600’s had left so deep a mark that smart people did their very best to avoid it. Citizenship and self image had precious little to do with a common language or a common history. Your “team” was your fellow imperial subjects, plain and simple.
(NOTE FROM KATE: this is what I mean about a non-Czech attitude. Those of us who grew up with Czech history will be saying, “But what about Charles IV, the Holy Roman Emperor and king of Bohemia? What about the Czech lords who elected their own king after the turmoil of the Hussite wars?” Not relevant. In Magdalena’s time, these events were esoteric and forgotten by all but literate historians. That’s the point. If a Czech person wanted to show how worldly and educated they were, they spoke and wrote in German.)
Recall too that Austria, a/k/a the Holy Roman Empire, had been one of Europe’s great powers since the fall of Rome, second only to France and at least the peer of Great Britain. Prussia and Sweden up north had famous armies too, while Spain was a declining but still great power in the far west, and the Ottoman Empire a historic menace to the south. Neither Germany nor Italy existed as a political unit, and no one but wild eyed, fantasizing academics bothered to dream about that kind of unification. They were mere “geographical expressions” as one of the era’s most famous politicians quipped later on.
That was the world this baby was born to enter. The first real stirrings of change occurred in 1792, when she was seven (7) years old. How can I bring home the enormous weight of what was coming down the historical turnpike? Let’s try this:
Imagine what life would be like for a girl in rural Ohio if Communist China suddenly threw off its chains and declared itself to be a new and radical democracy in the model of ancient Athens. That’s a pretty good analogy of what the French Revolution meant to people in the rural villages of central Europe. Or it would be if you could spice that impact up because the current queen and king of “China” happened to be the sister and brother-in-law of your own “President.”
These great events would have been a consuming topic of conversation for the grownups, but only a background noise for our little girl and her daily life. Seven year olds care more about playtime than the storm clouds of war on the horizon.
A few months later the deposed French king and queen tried to flee to Austria, and were recaptured. The revolutionaries had them beheaded in a public square just as she turned five. Monarchs fed to the same guillotine as common peasants! Shocking! But still just loud and urgent grownup talk from her perspective.
Her Emperor immediately declared war on France, Prussia joined in, her local “big kids” started to talk about military careers, and the atmosphere got ever more intense. Children her age would have been sent out of the kitchen, rather than assuming they’d just be bored.
The Reign of Terror began ran from ages 8-9 (the age of a typical American 3rd- to 4th-grader). While that went on, Austria and Prussia used the distraction to launch a joint invasion. It enjoyed enough initial success to make Great Britain and Spain join in for their fair share of the soon-to-be-carcass. Which meant that all of Europe had come together in a loose alliance against divided, self-consuming Revolutionary France. What else could happen but victory, soon and profound?
They all found out as she went the preschoolers started to see her as one of the Big Kids. France rallied enough to bounce the Prussians out of the war, though she managed no more than a desperate draw against Austria. The world went into 1794/95 (age 9-10) with the other Great Powers beginning to close their own nets. Victory still seemed inevitable, however stubborn the French mob had turned out to be. The war’s end, right there on the horizon… only to vanish with the rise of an unknown, undersized, provincial artillery officer who’d grown up on some tiny islet in the sea. Over the next half decade Napoleon Bonaparte took over the French command in Italy, proceeded to disgrace army after army, finally driving on to dethrone the Pope himself. Absolutely historic routs, which kept piling up until a final French triumph at the soul crushing Battle of Marengo in 1800. That year, Magdalena turned 15 and could start to be viewed as marriageable.
From here we can speed up a bit. Her Emperor and the victorious Napoleon declared an uneasy truce. Everyone knew it was more of an ‘armistice’ than a ‘peace,’ however, and so it proved. War renewed a few years later, only to end when she was 20, with Bonaparte’s legions sweeping across the continent to humble, humiliate, and crush the combined armies of Austria, Prussia, Sweden, and Russia. Every king but the Tsar was forced to surrender, and he would have too if Moscow wasn’t 1,200 miles (2,000 km) away from Vienna, off in the middle of nowhere.
(NOTE FROM KATE: it’s well-known that Napoleon’s armies looted a lot of art from Czech castles and churches. It is less known that they had absconded with half the nascent nation’s supply of vowels. This is why Czech has many words with only one vowel in them, and some with none at all! But look at French. They have so many, they can’t decide which ones to keep silent.)
Austria, along with everyone else, became a grudging vassal state, and the tide of revolutionary ideas began to flow from Paris unimpeded. The main treaties establishing a new world order were signed when Magdalena was 22 and 24, respectively. She married at the age of 23.
THE CHANGING LIFE OF THE NEW MAGDALENA D. RETTIGOVA
Magdalena wed an aspiring, politically active attorney named Jan Alois Sudiprav Rettig in 1808. The marriage, even now, seems to have been a love match as well as a deeply felt partnership. Jan had grown up in the same whirl of events as his new bride, and now grew entranced with the world of international thought.
Opponents gave credit for the French victories to Napoleon’s military genius, but the French themselves (including Napoleon) disagreed. They insisted that their true advantage came from the bottom up, not the top down; a hitherto unknown esprit de corps based on their common loyalty to la belle France et la révolution. This, they said, made even amateur French militiamen into better soldiers than any professional troops in service to old fashioned kings.
Intellectuals like Attorney Rettig called it “Nationalism,” and defined it as “loyalty to a nation and its ideals instead of a person.” One pictures the 25 year old Jan sitting in a cafe and pondering all these great events with like minded friends. “If there is a French people and nation, what is mine? It isn’t this defeated emperor of moribund Austria. Aha! My people date back to the great Slavic migrations of the Dark Ages. And who led those? King Lech, who began the people of Poland; his brother Rus, who created an empire from Estonia in the west, to Moscow in the east, and on down to the Ukraine; and finally King Czech, who created Bohemia and Moravia. That must be where I truly belong.”
(NOTE FROM KATE: This is really pushing my Czech buttons. Arrgh!)
Jan Rettig spent the rest of his life working for a renaissance of the old Czech culture, with the wholehearted support and assistance of his loving wife. They became the regional version of what we would call a Power Couple. It began at home, of course. Jan had grown up in a bilingual household. The couple now decided to speak only Czech within their walls. Magdalena learned this new-to-her language quickly, and from then on used her middle name Dobromila (literally “lover of good”) rather than the first name she’d gone by as a girl.
Her “M” period ended, and the “D” period began.
THE WORLD OF M. DOBROMILA RETTIGOVA TO AND AFTER THE FALL OF NAPOLEON
Napoleon’s reign finally came to a conclusive end half a decade later, with the 1815 Battle of Waterloo; an event that took place in the same year that M.D. Rettigova turned 30.
Stop and think about that. Her entire world, from the age of 7-30, had been formed during and by the political and social upheavals wrought by the French Revolution. The years of her childhood playing with dolls; the years of her adolescence; her marriage with a man she loved; and on into motherhood. (She eventually gave birth to 11 children, 3 of whom survived to adulthood).
The wars may have ended in 1815, but the Rettig family had been changed from its roots on up. The fall of France did precious little to weaken their devotion to the idea of a Czech People whose ancient roots predated any allegiance to the rulers of Austria.
Speaking of which… Austria came out of all this history as master of an enormous, polyglot empire more or less comparable to its possessions before the eruptions in France. Austria also wielded dominating international power due to the personal influence of its legendary chancellor, Klemens von Metternich. A man who soon proved to be one of the most brilliantly conservative, backward-looking minds the world has ever known.
(NOTE FROM KATE: While doing research for a book set in the Balkans, I learned that toward the end of WWI the former Yugoslavia was home to at least 33 languages, many of which are now considered dead.)
Metternich created, or at least to codified, the idea of a balance of power across the continent. Under his influence, the larger states agreed to join what he called the “Concert Of Europe”; an alliance aimed at maintaining the status quo. The events of France’s Revolutionary Era had lasted for a bit more than 20 years. Metternich’s repressive counter reaction would go on for more than 30.
[OBSERVATIONS FROM THE FUTURE: the “System of Metternich” inside of Austria persisted until a series of attempted revolutions in 1848. The Hungarians basically won in the east, causing the country to be renamed “Austria-Hungary” with the Emperor being titled as the king of two lands rather than a singular one. The Czech effort at independence failed, and they remained the Kingdom of Bohemia with the Emperor of Austria-Hungary being the automatic King; just as things had been since the Battle of Prague in 1621. Only WWI finally shattered the empire completely.
M.D. Rettigova died in 1845, so these pivotal events all took place after she was gone.]
With Napoleon exiled and Europe acting in concert, Metternich turned his attention to the nagging problem of stability inside the Empire. History shows that for all his flexibility when it came to tactics, there was an overarching principle: he wanted to erase the French Revolution, and turn the clock back to the world as it existed in 1791. Politically and socially. And Chancellor Metternich was willing to do anything – anything at all – to accomplish that goal. His army of secret police was only the tip of the proverbial iceberg.
You can see how much danger this created for a politically active, reform seeking couple like Mr. and Mrs. Rettig. But they were not the types to knuckle under. Mr. Rettig soldiered on, plotting with extreme caution behind the scenes. They could not oppose the political realities. Not with any hope of survival, let alone success. Thus most of his efforts would have turned toward building a groundwork for future changes. He and his fellow radicals began to promote things like academic study into the Czech language and history, promotion of Czech arts, research into Czech folklore, and education of the upcoming generations. Etc. Much the same sort of things, in fact, as the Grimm Brothers were doing in Germany, and others would soon be doing across the continent.
(NOTE FROM KATE: The Bible had been translated into Czech during the Hussite wars, and one of the concessions of the 1621 Hapsburg takeover had been the continuation of sermons in Czech as well as Latin. This made it much easier to resurrect the language that it would’ve been under other circumstances.)
Mrs. Rettigova? She established a school to teach young women “how to keep their husbands happy.” What could satisfy Herr Metternich more than a traditional focus like that? Not much, which is no doubt why the school survived even though the classes were taught in Czech (with German as a fallback), with materials written in Czech, recipes that dutifully used local Czech ingredients, and so on.
It was “soft power” at its finest, and it worked far better than any of the abortive political battles fought by her (no doubt very happy) husband and his friends.
Notice those years? The artist painted this a full 40 years after M.D. Rettigova died. Her work carried that much cultural weight.
In 1826, at the age of 41, M.D. Rettigova published her Czech-language treatise “A Household Cookery Book,” which she revised and expanded over decades of later editions. That book served as an essential text for every Czech household in the century that followed, even though her specific advice grew ever more dated. There wasn’t even a remote competitor on the culinary side until the 1920’s, after the nation of Czechoslovakia had come into being, and the impossible dream achieved.
HERITAGE
Modern Czechs view Rettigova (largely known by that single name) as a sort of cartoon exemplar of a bygone and not-so-nostalgic age. “You can’t even use that book anymore! Every recipe starts with a pound of butter and half a dozen eggs. Who eats like that? And come on! ‘How to keep your man happy’? Really? Who wants to push that view of womanhood in the modern world? Haven’t we evolved a bit in the 193 years since she published? M.D. Rettigova was a lovely lady for her time, and my own great-Grandma mother swore by everything she wrote, but we need to look toward the future.”
I won’t disagree with any of that. Times really have changed, and I believe for the better. But I strongly disagree with waving a dismissive hand, and walking away after finishing that statement. It’s unfair, shortsighted, disrespectful, and just plain dumb.
Consider this: Your own beloved Grandma does not control your life. Nor should she. And you certainly wouldn’t agree with all her values and viewpoints, nor she with yours. But did she matter? Does she matter? You’re darned right she does! She and her equally old fashioned peers created the paper and ink you are using to write your own life. There’s no getting around it.
Think on it from this angle too. Are you old enough yet to be into your own parenting and grandparenting years? If so, I’d bet money that you occasionally stop and wonder if you are living up to Grandma’s example. It’s just the way we are.
CONCLUSION
Magdalena Dobromila Rettigova, born a solid quarter-century before Abraham Lincoln, has served as the national Grandma of the modern Czech nation for coming up on 200 years. It’s soft power, not hard. The stuff of homes and community centers more than parliament buildings and cathedrals. But it’s power nonetheless. Power right down at the core of Czech society. Power that has made, and continues to make a difference in hundreds of millions of lives.
She mattered, and mattered a lot. And this is one of her very best recipes. It doesn’t get more “heritage” than that.
Even if it does start out with the better part of a pound of butter and three large egg yolks.
Enjoy!
