Asking immigrant Jews fresh off the boat from Europe, if they are familiar with the dish strudel, is like asking an American if they are familiar with the staple dessert, apple pie. Though I am third generation Texan, I am like one of these immigrants. When my great-grandmother, Libby Plantowsky, arrived in Galveston, Texas in 1910, she brought along her European ancestors’ culinary skills. Upon arrival in Galveston, my great-grandmother planted two fig trees. From the figs that her fig trees nurtured, her famous strudel recipe was born.
My great-grandmother’s strudel consists of three layers of dough that sandwich preserves, nuts, and lots of cinnamon and sugar. I recently discovered that the dessert that my family has been calling strudel for almost one hundred years does not fit the criteria of a typical strudel, which is a spiral shaped pastry consisting of dough and filling. I learned that our strudel is actually more similar to another European pastry called fluden, which is a layered pastry also made up of dough and filling. After researching both pastries and then comparing them to my family’s strudel, I concluded that neither of their descriptions match the dish that I am familiar with. Strudel and fluden, possibly having evolved from the same dish, contain many similarities. I realized that my great-grandmother’s strudel recipe might in fact be a combination of both.
American Jews consist primarily of two groups—Ashkenazim, who originated in Germany and France, and Sephardim, who originated in the Iberian Peninsula. When both groups were forced out of their respective homelands, the majority of Ashkenazic Jews settled in Slavic regions of Eastern Europe, like Poland and the Ukraine, carrying their culinary knowledge with them (The World of Jewish Cooking 2).
A central theme of Jewish cooking in the Diaspora is adaption. While Sephardic Jews swiftly picked up culinary techniques from their new residing countries, Ashkenazic Jews were faced with a greater difficulty. Jews of medieval France and Germany found themselves in a difficult situation because their non-Jewish neighbors ate an ample amount of pork and shellfish, fried their food in lard, and often times prepared dishes that contained both meat and dairy products—all which are forbidden according to the Jewish Bible (The World of Jewish Cooking 3). As a result, the Jews of the area had to be creative in accommodating their food restrictions in accordance to the available resources. Thus they were less influenced by the surrounding peoples’ culinary practices. The variety of recipes created, became what Americans call today, typical “Jewish food.”
Jewish life consists primarily of rituals and traditions. Linked to these Jewish rituals is food; in the Jewish culture food is considered both a physical and spiritual support. Food has a major role in the weekly observance of the Jewish Sabbath, holidays, and festivities by elevating each of these momentous occasions. These traditional recipes provide the new generation with a connection to the past. Nowadays, the once vibrant and large Jewish communities that existed throughout Eastern Europe exist primarily in the traditions and recipes continued by their descendents.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines strudel as “a baked sweet of Austrian origin, made of very thin layers of pastry with a filling, usually of fruit.” The OED also notes that the etymology of the word, strudel, is German and translates to an “eddy” or “whirlpool.” This translation is suitable to the pastry’s appearance since strudel looks like a spiral of dough and filling. The roots of the pastry, presently known as strudel, emerged in Asia over a thousand years ago. The Encyclopedia of Jewish Food provides an anecdote regarding nomads of central Asia. The nomads would roll out the dough of unleavened bread into very thin sheets and shape them into loaves. Since these loaves would last for long periods of time, the women would prepare them in large batches to last their families while on their month long journeys. The Turks then named these loaves yuvgha and brought them along the Silk Road.
Picture of strudel by: http://www.listoid.com/image/105/list_2_105_20101125_062527_623.jpg.
Towards the end of the 15th century the Ottoman bakers began improving the recipe by adding oil and stretching the dough even thinner and renamed the dough yufka. Turks continued modifying the dough by adding more butter, oil, and various fillings and eventually introduced the new pastry throughout Europe. The pastry’s popularity spread to Austria where it was renamed strudel, “perhaps inspired by a large vortex in the Danube River upriver of Vienna” (Encyclopedia of Jewish Food). Strudel’s adaption into Jewish cuisine arose “since many of the professional bakers of Austria were Jewish, strudel early on became a part of the Ashkenazic repertoire” (Encyclopedia of Jewish Food). According to the Encyclopedia of Jewish Food, the earliest strudel recipe is a handwritten recipe from Vienna, Austria, dating back to 1696. As the dish began to grow in popularity, recipes began making their way into many German cookbooks in the early 1800’s. In close to a century, the pastry became almost ubiquitous amongst Jews of German origin.
Strudel makers take their strudel making very seriously “working the dough with gentle precision until stretched thin enough to read a newspaper” (The World of Jewish Cooking 342). Some even say that “the ultimate quality of a housewife’s culinary skills was judged by her ability to make strudel ausgezogen (pulled by hand)” (Encyclopedia of Jewish Food). There are many varieties of strudel ranging from savory to sweet and the Encyclopedia of Jewish Food notes that both the Hungarians and Austrians claim to have invented the famous apple strudel. Because of the laborious work that strudel making entails, housewives typically only bake strudel for special occasions. Occasionally strudel can be found in American bakeries today however, the popularity of the dish has vastly decreased. Today strudel is commonly associated with Pillsbury’s toaster strudel and bears little resemblance to the European strudel.
The Encyclopedia of Jewish Food defines fluden as a “layered pastry with filling” (Encyclopedia of Jewish Food). Fluden originated in France and is also known as Hungarian, flodni and Romanian, flandi. Fluden “derived from the Late Latin fladon (flat cake), itself from the Old High German word flado (flat cake), which is also the source of the name of the French flan (an open-faced tart) and Spanish flan (baked custard)” (Encyclopedia of Jewish Food). The Encyclopedia notes that the earliest mention of fluden appeared in the writings of Rabbi Yehuda of Mainz around the year 1000 C.E. In his writings, he analyzes a dispute between two great Rabbis who were arguing whether it was permissible “to eat bread with meat if it (the bread) was baked in an oven with a cheese dish called fluden” (Encyclopedia of Jewish Food).
Picture of fluden by: http://www.jwi.org/view.image?Id=3029.
The World of Jewish Cooking mentions that fluden is related to another Ashkenazic dish, pashtida: a double-crusted meat-filled Sabbath pie (339). The thick upper and lower layers serve as a method of keeping the filling moist as well as a base to eat the filling. The layers symbolize the double portion of manna that the Jews collected for the Sabbath and as the upper and lower layers of dew protecting the manna, while they traveled through the Sinai desert.
The World of Jewish Cooking provides a timeline of how the meat filled pashtida morphed into the cheese filled fluden and eventually into the current fruit filled pastry (339). The hard, thick pastry dough of the pashtida was later replaced with thin layers of soft dough. The Franco-German Jews then began filling the layers with a sweet cheese filling. The Encyclopedia of Jewish Food adds, “Cooks eventually developed several other fillings besides cheese, as it was not always available or affordable.” Cooks began using variations of fillings corresponding the different fillings according to occasion.
Unlike other Jewish dishes that migrated with the large mass of Eastern European Jews to America, the once famous fluden was lost in transit, “perhaps because it was replaced with the similar but easier apple pie” (Encyclopedia of Jewish Food). In 2005 an article on Passover appeared was written in the New York Times. The article included a recipe for “Cashew Nut Strudel with Guava and Lime (Fluden de Pesach)” (Encyclopedia of Jewish Food). Although the title does not explicitly state that strudel and fluden are the same dish, it hints that their origins might be the same or that they are variations of one another.
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| My family's strudel |
I was told that strudel takes a while to prepare, but I never realized how long and tedious the job really is. A few years ago, before my brother’s Bar Mitzvah, I asked my grandmother if I could help bake the strudel and she gladly accepted. She told me to set aside the whole day for the preparation. At the time I was a bit skeptical and wondered how long can strudel making really take, as they are simply little pastry squares. However, this is where I was mistaken. I arrived at my grandmother’s early in the morning and we got to work immediately. Even with the homemade fig preserves prepared the previous night, there was still a long road ahead of us. While the recipe itself is not so difficult, the steps require time and precision.
During my interview with my grandmother, she shared with me the story of the birth of our family’s strudel recipe; “when she came here from Europe, when they got their first house, which was that two story house in Galveston, she liked to grow things. She planted two fig trees along with vegetables in her yard. When the fig trees grew, they gave off a lot of figs. She didn’t know what to do with them when they were ripe, so she decided that she might as well preserve them. So, she preserved them and thought, ‘now what can I do with all these preserved figs’ and then she decided to make this recipe of making strudel with the fig preserves serving as the base of the recipe.” I asked if it took her a while to perfect the recipe to which my grandmother responded, “oh no! She was an excellent cook and the first time she made it, it was the same and it was great.”
Not only has strudel become an important part of my family; the tradition of planting two fig trees started. When my great-grandmother moved to a smaller house in Galveston, she again planted two more fig trees. My grandmother continued telling me, “oh, and when I got married she told me you MUST plant two fig trees in your back yard, which I did. And then when we moved to Lemac (her street name) I planted two more fig trees. She wouldn’t let me go without planting fig trees, two of them.” I am not sure of the significance of planting two fig trees, but I was once told that my great -grandmother was convinced that the only way a fig tree could grow was if it was growing along side another fig tree.
Although I never met my great-grandmother, I have been told repeatedly of her phenomenal cooking and baking skills. She created multiple recipes and cooked and baked based on feeling and instinct rather than following recipes. I can believe my family when they rave of her cooking skills since the recipes of hers that we still make not only involve multiple steps and unique techniques but also taste delicious. My grandmother told me that her mother was “very famous for her strudel amongst her friends. They had different meetings: Hadassah meetings, synagogue meetings, and whatever. She would bring strudel and they would raffle it off and that is how they made money.”
My grandmother came across an article from the Galveston Jewish community’s newspaper written about my great-grandmother. The article opens with “If she knows you are coming, there will be some kind of baked delight awaiting you. In that one sentence, we have told you quite a bit about the personality and character of Libby Plantowsky.” The article continues, “Great Grandma Plantowsky likes to bake. She bakes for teas, Bar Mitzvahs (Bas Mitzvahs, too), parties, weddings, —. She bakes from recipes handed down from grandmothers to mothers and she is absolutely famous for her mandel bread, strudel, challah, etc… We have told you that Libby bakes like a dream, makes a five cent cucumber taste like it was worth its weight in gold.” With the stories I have heard, the article, and having tasted many of her recipes, I am thoroughly convinced that my great-grandmother was a phenomenal baker.
Both my grandparents laughed when reminiscing the day that my grandmother learned how to bake strudel. She proceeded to share with me the entertaining, yet exhausting, process of acquiring the recipe from her mother. “She was coming in to stay with us when we lived on Lemac and I had told her that I would like to bake strudel, would she make it up and teach me how to make it. She said, ‘sure’. She said, ‘okay, I need a sifty of flour’ and I said, ‘mom, a sifty of flour, how much is that? I need to know the amount’ and she said, ‘vell I don’t know, a sifty.’ So, a sifty to her was a sifter. So I got her a sifty, put it in a pan, and I started pouring the flour gradually, gradually. I said, ‘is that enough?’ ‘No a little a bit more,’ ‘is that enough?’ ‘No a little bit more’ and we kept going on till she decided it was right amount in the sifty, and then we stopped. I took the sifty over and I measured the flour that she had me pour in there and I had five cups. So that is how I came to where I use five cups of flour. Then we went to the sugar. The sugar, she said a cup of sugar. Thank god that was all!”
My great-grandmother baked by adding ingredients solely on instinct and “every time she’d pour a sifty of flour, the sifty wasn’t necessarily the same as the last time she made it.” My grandmother’s style varies greatly from her mother’s, as she measures each ingredient out in an extremely precise manner, making sure that each time it is exactly the same as the last. Her need for perfection served extremely useful when recording my great-grandmothers strudel recipe. Without her preciseness, there would be no written records of the strudel recipe. Through the detailed, step-by-step, recipe card that she compiled, my great-grandmother’s legacy will live on for many generations to come.
The recipe serves as great importance since my grandmother is the only one of her six siblings who learned how to bake strudel. She said the reason was “that they were all too busy, it’s a big job, it’s like a two day job and nobody was interested.” Since baking strudel is such a big job and requires a lot of time my grandmother “just makes it for special occasions and I make a lot of it and freeze it. Like for everybody’s Bat Mitzvah and everybody’s Bar Mitzvah.”
Strudel’s long process begins with the mixing of the fig preserves days in advance so that the flavors have time to absorb. For the filling the recipe calls for a variety of other preserves, tiny pieces of maraschino cherries, raisins, a grated lemon, and breadcrumbs. The dough calls for flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, eggs, Crisco, and warm water. The dough is a crucial part of the recipe and must be cared for and kneaded thoroughly. The dough is rolled out very thin and cut to fit the pan’s rectangular shape. It is then placed at the bottom of the pan and the layering begins.
The preserve mixture is spread over the dough, the chopped pecans over the preserves, and then lots of cinnamon and sugar on top. The process repeats and on the top sheet of dough extra cinnamon and sugar is added. Before the strudel is baked, the pan of strudel is cut into small squares and more cinnamon and sugar is sprinkled on top so no dough is visible, and then oil is poured over the entire pan. The work does not end there; the strudel must be watched closely while in the oven and the ends must be flipped midway to prevent them from burning. The process as a whole, including the preparation of the fig preserves takes about 5-6 hours.
During a recent interview with my Grandmother, she revealed a bit of information that helps explain why all strudel pastries that I have seen look so different from the strudel she bakes. She said that she “hasn’t seen really any recipes in any cookbooks, but I think maybe in one cookbook. It usually is called fluden, F-L-U-D-E-N, and it’s more like two layers. It is similar to my strudel but I have never seen a recipe where it’s called strudel.” This new revelation initiated my research of the histories of both strudel and fluden to discover the true identify of the dish that my family has been calling strudel.
My research revealed that my family’s pastry closely resembles fluden, more than it does strudel. Despite its resemblance to fluden, our strudel does not fully meet the description of the dessert. All three pastries call for similar ingredients and preparation however, key differences between the three are: strudel is rolled; fluden consists of two layers; my great-grandmother’s recipe consists of three layers. I suspect that strudel and fluden most likely originated from the same European dish. Due to different preferences in variations of rolling styles, baking techniques, and fillings, the original dish evolved into two separate dishes. From this, I assume that my great-grandmother must have used her knowledge of both dishes to create her own pastry, which she called strudel.
*At the request of my grandmother, I did not post my family's strudel recipe.
*At the request of my grandmother, I did not post my family's strudel recipe.
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| An article written about my great-grandmother |
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| My great-grandmother Libby Plantowsky |
Clips from an interview with my grandmother:
Works Cited
Marks, Gil. Encyclopedia of Jewish Food. Hoboken, N.J: John Wiley & Sons, 2010. Print.
Marks, Gil. The World of Jewish Cooking. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. Print.
Mucasey, Shirley. Personal interview. 24 Nov. 2011.
Second edition, 1989; online version September 2011. <http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/191908>; accessed 02 December 2011. First published in A Supplement to the OED IV, 1986.
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