My grandmother’s walnut tree didn’t survive fires and floods – but she left us a recipe for hope | Ana Schnabl

The tree's owner handed down the secret of the world's best Slovenian walnut roll - and a culture of safeguarding all life

My grandmother loved baking and was, therefore, an excellent baker. I can still see her massaging flour, sugar, eggs, yeast, butter and milk into dough and injecting the pastry with apricot jam to make buhteljni. I remember devouring her apple pies, pear pies, blueberry strudels, half-moon-shaped vanilla biscuits called kifeljki, quark rolls generously topped with cream, and fried yoghurt pastries, known as mike (little mice), while always wanting more. I can still hear her saying that to her, a sustainable farmer, baking was the closest she could get to the world of art". I regret never telling her that even though she wasn't graced with the life of an artist, she was nonetheless weaving something larger than her: a culture.

Maybe she understood what she was doing after all. Once, she instructed me to never follow her recipes, but instead to adapt them however I saw fit. A culture, she was essentially saying, should be modified in line with the tastes and needs of the times.