"Jenn" wrote:

<snip>

> My question is what is the yeast in this recipe for? I can't understand
why
> it's there! I was thinking about making up a batch this weekend w/o the
> yeast to see how they turn out. There is no resting or letting anything
> rise involved with this dough. My grandma isn't around anymore, so I
can't
> ask her (although I am going to be attending a John Edward seminar in May,
> maybe she'll let me know then!! lol). Anyway, if anyone can let me know,
> I'd like to hear from ya. I'm really just curious.

The yeast belongs there if the dough is meant to be sweet buns that cradle
the filling and puff up around it in cooking, as opposed to other recipes
for flat cookie-like kolachke which don't rise and work more like tulipe
baskets to hold fillings.

I have a collection of recipes from my grandmothers, greatgrandmothers,
aunts, great aunts, great great aunts... One thing that impresses me greatly
about them is how much important information was left out of them! It wasn't
that they wished the next generation of recipe users ill luck or anything
like that. It was because a great deal of paper, ink and time could be saved
by not reiterating directions which were at the time common knowledge to
every housewife and housewife in training*. In my grandma's day, everybody
knew that yeast dough had to rise twice before baking. I suspect that is the
case with your grandmother's recipe for kolachke.

<*lots of these recipes have baking directions that specify "fast oven,"
"slow oven," "hot oven" and other temperature approximations in use, some of
them don't have directions for the actual baking at all, one is a bread
recipe measured in "spadefuls," and there is a very old and faded sheet of
handwritten instructions for banking wood and coal fires for best oven
temperature control>