A month before Christmas 2022, I arrived at my parents’ house to make the nut rolls – small, cookie-sized logs of rich pastry that melt in your mouth, the dough shoved full of a sugary maple-flavored walnut filling and sprinkled with powdered sugar.  My mom has made the nutrolls for as long as I can remember. When I was a child, she ground the nuts with a hand grinder that clamped on the side of the kitchen table – meticulously picking out pieces of shell as she worked. The food processor does that job now but the making of nutrolls is still a time-consuming task – one that requires mixing and rolling and measuring each square of dough with a ruler.

My mom always made the cookie version for Christmas and traditional long rolls, which have a bread-like yeast dough, for Easter. The recipes originated with my maternal great-grandmother, a Polish immigrant, and were then handed down to her daughters – Stella, my grandmother, and Josie, my great-aunt, who was known for her baking skills. My mother perfected the nutroll recipes and often gifted tins of them at Christmas. I helped her make them for years, but now she was entrusting me with the sweetness.

My dad sat at their kitchen counter, anxiously awaiting his role as taster. My mother watched me pull some supplies out of a reusable shopping tote – my apron, the containers of nut filling, four discs of dough wrapped in plastic wrap, and my Nana’s rolling pin. Our roles are reversing as my parents age. My mother always had the dough and filling made before our rolling day; now I prepare it. She eyed the rolling pin and said, “I hate that thing. I’m glad you have it,” referring to the sheer weight of the rolling pin and the fact that her smaller version has handles that spin.

I love this rolling pin. I love that it belonged to my paternal great-grandmother, Nana. I love how the heavy wood sinks deep into the dough, and how I have more control over its rolling because the handles don’t turn. I love how smooth it feels, worn and almost warm. I love that I can use it to make things my family loves, just like she did. I love the space that it takes up in my kitchen drawer.

I don’t know how old the rolling pin is. My Nana was born in the 1880s and immigrated from Austria to the United States when she was 15. She worked as a cook for a family in Pittsburgh before marrying my great-grandfather and raising three daughters in Brackenridge, Pennsylvania, a steel mill town on the Allegheny River. Did the rolling pin come with her from Austria (romantic notion but doubtful)? Did she use it when she worked as a domestic? Was it a wedding gift? Was it something she bought for herself to make the thin Austrian noodles that filled her bowls of chicken soup? Not knowing makes me sad.

I don’t know what kind of wood it is made of – the wood grain resembles a $75, cherry, Shaker-style rolling pin that a Vermont Company sells.  I do know that I have inherited an heirloom, and I cherish it – the connection to my Eastern European heritage and my Nana.

 The rolling pin and some other items of my Nana’s that now reside in my home – two pink Depression glass bowls, a China terrine with delicate little pink flowers that she always put mashed potatoes in, three Corning ware cornflower baking dishes, a grooved wooden bowl and a potato masher, a two-piece glass Madonna votive candle holder, antique metal porch chairs – connect me to her in a tangible way. These material items allow me to cast a net into my past so that I can catch a glimpse of my future. My heritage is Slovak, Austrian, Polish, and German – but my cache of inherited items is Polish and Austrian, which has helped me to forge a stronger identity with those cultures. When I make pierogi, I read the green recipe card in Grandma Stella’s handwriting and roll the dough with Nana’s rolling pin – Poland and Austria bound together in flour and egg, potato, and cheese.

My first attempt at making homemade noodles did not go as well as I expected. Without my Nana’s recipe, I had to rely on recipes I found online. I struggled to get the dough to the right consistency – first, it was too sticky and kept clinging to my hands and the rolling pin, then it was too tough as I added flour to make it workable. The bottom line with noodle or pierogi making is that you usually can salvage it – eggs, flour, and salt, and maybe some dairy, cut or pinched into boiling water usually results in something edible – it’s just a matter of the texture.

 My wide egg noodles didn’t give me the same satisfaction as my Nana’s. My husband and kids said they liked them; my granddaughter gobbled them up, but they tasted heavy and tough to me, nothing like the light, airy, thread-like noodles my Nana made for her homemade chicken soup. I tried to describe them to my family. “They were very thin, maybe like angel hair,” I say, knowing that they weren’t at all like angel hair. A German company, Bechtle, offers something that looks like them, but they don’t have the texture that Nana’s did. Somehow, her noodles were wispy thin but had that chewy texture that had to stop at your teeth before sliding down your throat with a slurp of the savory chicken soup.  I can’t imagine how she rolled and cut such delicate noodles. I don’t have the patience that she did.

Nana never returned to Austria, never saw her parents again, but many of the things she cooked must have originated in the farmhouse across the ocean – the noodles, her wiener schnitzel, thinly sliced pieces of breaded veal known as the national dish of Austria, her cucumbers and 12-egg angel food cakes.

She cooked elaborate dinners for our family when we made the two-hour drive to her home in Brackenridge, Pennsylvania. We would pull up to her two-story house in our green tank of a car. She would come out on the porch to greet us – always wearing a housedress with an apron and black sensible shoes. She seemed so in charge of everything to me then, but now, when I remember her, I can see the stooped back, the knotted fingers, and the way she shuffled a little when she walked. In my 10-year-old memory, she was there to scoop us into her warm bosom, the smell of dinner wafting out into the street which ran straight into the steel mill where my great-grandfather (who died when I was a baby) worked as a foreman. The smell of Nana’s cucumbers – sliced thinly then left to linger in salt for hours before being drained and dressed with white vinegar, pepper, and oil – hit our noses as soon as we opened her front door; the earthy, fresh, clean scent would wrap itself around the deeper smells of the sautéed breaded veal, roast turkey and boiling potatoes. The inside of her narrow two-story house would always be ready for us – as if she had spent days preparing for royal guests. I remember a neat, clean house, everything in order, dinner cooking in the tiny kitchen no bigger than my pantry, the table set with a tablecloth, China, and silver, my dad’s dad and my Aunt Louise, a sister of St. Joseph, always dressed in their Sunday best to greet us. My dad, whose mother died when he was young, was cherished by all three of them, and that extended to my mother, my brothers, and me. It was a place where we felt cherished.

While Nana cooked and my parents visited, my brothers and I explored the house and played in the yard or on the awning-covered front porch, Allegheny Ludlum Steel just a few blocks away. Rose bushes lined her tiny fenced-in backyard, Rose Milk lotion sat on her bathroom sink, a vintage comb and mirror set decorated her bedroom dresser, an old hand-crank wash tub hid in the basement, Lawrence Welk sang from the box-style television, the Blessed Mother stood in a niche in the wall. There were so many things about my Nana and her home that fascinated me and maybe it was the fact that my dad had spent so much time in this house, this town, while he was growing up, and yet we were only there a few times a year.  

My great-grandmother kept her recipes of her homeland in her head and on our table. She never wrote down any of the recipes and never said anything about those she had left behind in Austria. She came to America and became American. And yet, the food reflected her heritage.

I roll out my pierogi dough, the crust for apple pie, and nut roll dough with her rolling pin. The smooth knob handles that are a part of the piece of wood glide on my palms as I push the rolling pin’s heavy weight across the dough. I can’t use it without thinking about my Nana’s hands – knotted with arthritis – gripping the same knobs, pushing the same wood weight into her dough. How did she get her egg dough paper thin and in a perfect rectangle so that her noodles would all be uniform? Did she put the weight of her body into it? Did she flour the rolling pin? Did she wash it with soap and water, or did she wipe it carefully with a damp towel? Did it sit on her tiny countertop or was it hidden away in a drawer? Did she pound her veal and chicken with the rolling pin, or did she have a meat mallet? There are so many questions that I wish I would have asked. My mother tried to get her to write down her recipes, but she would always say, “Oh, honey, it’s just a little bit of this and a little bit of that,” listing the ingredients but never really explaining her methods.

A slice of Austria sat on that table in a steel town near Pittsburgh. I wish we had done a better job preserving it. My parents visited Austria after they retired. They tried to find the village where my Nana’s family lived, but the original name no longer exists – the landscape and borders of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Czech Republic, changed so many times, especially during the World Wars when entire towns were eliminated.

Nana always packed brown paper lunch bags full of car treats for the ride home – an orange, Wise potato chips, and Goetze caramel creams. The sound of the bags and candy wrappers crinkling in the dark car on the way home still reminds me of how simple love can be.

When my husband and I adopted our first daughter, my mother decided that she wanted to be called “Nana,” maybe in part because her mother, Stella, was called Grandma and she was still living then. But when I asked her, she said it was because of the way our Nana had cared for us, the way she had fed us.

As my parents age, I reluctantly see how our roles are shifting. Once my Grandma and Nana were the ones who gathered the families, cooked the dinners, then, for many years it was my mother who hosted every holiday, every dinner – the grandparents coming to our house when it became too much for them to host the celebrations. Now it is my turn, the only daughter; my brothers are happy to let me have the reigns. I am a good cook, and I am used to feeding a clan but sometimes I just want someone to drive me to Nana’s house where I can peer up at the beautifully set table and smell the veal and gravy waiting to be served.

 My Nana never seemed flustered to cook for all of us, though she was at least 80 when she was serving us those big dinners. My mother worked more than 40 hours a week as a home health nurse administrator, but still managed to pull it all together for every holiday in a seamless fashion. I miss my grandmothers, their steady faith, their endless love, their connection to a deeper heritage. I miss going to my parents’ house for Christmas or Thanksgiving, our kids lining up on the couch for a photo.

The nutrolls were the final cooking tradition my mother entrusted to me. In December 2023 the annual nutroll making tradition moved to my house. My mom, frustrated by the hurdles of aging, quipped, “I’ll just be in your way. I won’t be much help.” But as I began to roll out the dough, her hands remembered. She smoothed my rectangle and advised more precision. She picked up the ruler and began plotting the grid for the cookies.

 I held tight to the rolling pin, knowing someday it won’t be in my hands either, that the role of host and matriarch will be passed to one of my daughters. I’m not ready to let go.