Finding Maria – Finding Maria

‘First I Went To The Cakeland, Then To Éclair. Agh!’

The memory is clear. And it must have happened dozens of times. Soon after my grandmother arrives on a visit to us in Maryland and is settled in the basement guest room, she appears in the kitchen with a bag.

“Well,” says my father with mock surprise as he rubs his hands together, “what have we here?!”

She pulls out a gray cardboard box tied up with red-and-white-striped baker’s string and sets it on the table.

“I cannot even tell you,” says, looking weary. “First I went to the Cakeland, then to Éclair. Agh!” She pursed her lips in frustration, then relaxed. “Kuglof,” she announced, patting the package.

There was often poppy seed cake and cookies, too, but Kuglof was the prize. We devoured it after dinner, while, invariably, my grandmother and my father absent mindedly pulled apart their pieces, examined the texture of the cake, lingered over the chocolate, deconstructed its quality.

Do Not Ever Call It Babka

Every family, every culture, has it’s own quirks and traditions, its own memories. Here’s how I recall Kuglof (“KOOG-loff”). It was a rectangular loaf cake. All the edges were fairly square. All the sides flat. The outside was browned, but not crusty. The loaf itself was rolled, and inside was a swirl of dark chocolate that, as I recall, had a slight crunch to it in parts. Was that extra sugar in the chocolate? The cake itself was a bit airy and flaky, and somewhat moist, though not overly so.

I will say this once: Kuglof was NOT babka. Please, do not ever call it babka. With its puffy top, lumpy shape, and excessive filling, a babka always exhibits a sense of having been thrown together. It’s like a messy room that’s been hastily neatened by an inherent slob. Babka is a kind of bread, with ample chocolate or cinnamon in it to satisfy, but also to distract from the fact that, at the end of the day, it is ordinary. Kuglof was not ordinary. It was pastry. The crust, the cake, the chocolate had a deeply thoughtful balance which produced a sophistication that did not stimulate cheaply, like buttery-sugary-chocolaty babka. It uplifted and delighted.

It used to, anyway. Kuglof, for me, is but a memory. It exists no more. Not how I knew it. Even when I did know it, its days were numbered as this refined culinary immigrant from Central Europe was assimilated into America and American capitalism.

Arguing Over Strudel And Schlag-Topped Coffee

While she tried to get her footing after arriving in America in 1950, my Hungarian grandmother worked for a time at Cakeland bakery on 108th Street in Forest Hills, Queens. Cakeland was run by the brother and brother-in-law of her second husband. They were fabulous bakers.

“The Kuglof at Cakeland, it was so flaky and delicate, like the air,” my grandmother said once “And the poppy seed cake was sweet and stuffed so generously,” she added, lingering on the last word. “We always used a little more poppy seed than the recipe.” She laughed, but then her face turned dark. “Agh! The new owners, they cheapened the ingredients, thinned all the fillings!” She pressed her thumb and index finger together and frowned, bitter at these crimes against proper pastry making.

But for a time these great Hungarian bakeries replicated aspects of home. Some would say the most important aspect: food. Many fondly recall A.M. Seliger’s Éclair Bakery on West 72nd Street, which opened in 1939 and lasted fifty years. Alongside throngs of displaced central Europeans arguing over strudel and schlag-topped coffee, one might have seen Isaac Bashevis Singer, Toscanini, or Stephen Wise. And during a few years in the early 1950s, one might have been served at the counter by my grandmother.

She Took A Room At The Paris Hotel

In 1949, she remarried a childhood friend who’d left for America before the war (my grandfather died of a brain hemorrhage in 1943). Her purpose in doing so was to escape Communism, but first she had to escape Hungary, arranging for herself and her children to be smuggled to Vienna.

When she got here, she learned that her second husband had no job, and soon experienced his physical abuse. At one point she walked out. She took a room at the Paris Hotel on 97th Street and West End and thought things over. Nearly a half-century later, I took my first apartment in the city right across the street on 97th. Also facing a kind of cross-roads, I often found myself on a bench along Riverside Drive looking out over the gray Hudson River. I imagined her there on those same benches (had they even had benches there in the 50s?) working out what to do.

She’d been in the baker’s union at Cakeland, and through the union she found out about a job at Éclair. Later, she would take a job with the city hospitals department, where she would spend two decades. But before that, there were four years at Éclair. Not long after she started there, Emery showed up. And some combination of his requests, my father’s pleas, and lavish gifts from Emery’s relatives persuaded her to return to Queens. She was extraordinarily resourceful and resilient, and I fantasize that after a time there was no violence, if perhaps also no peace.

And there she would be at the kitchen table, not long after settling into the guest room, patting another of those gray boxes, tugging loose the knot of baker’s string, pulling out a Kuglof, regaling us with her search all over the city, which ended, inevitably, at Éclair.

We would have it for dessert, and then maybe the next afternoon with coffee (or for me, tea or milk – I know, it was a terrible sin). Perhaps a month or so later, if there was any to have been saved, we’d take a few slices from the freezer and soon they would emerge from the oven hot, slightly toasted, and filing the room with an exquisite aroma.

The shape, the textures, the flavors, they’re all gone now. The people, too. A.M. Selinger, my grandmother, my father. And maybe that is what has made Kuglof even more treasured. It is true that the splendor of memory has many advantages over the imperfections of the present. I don’t mind. I don’t expect to find a proper Kuglof again. Still, I will keep my eyes open for it. Rectangular. Brown. Flaky. Rich chocolate. And definitely not babka!

Buy the book, Finding Maria (Bloomingdale Press – 2nd edition November 25, 2019), on Amazon

Mr. Dobos’s Invention

One of my most favorite desserts growing up was the seven-layer cake we bought at Giant, the local grocery store. Yellow cake. Chocolate icing. Heaven. Along with Hostess cupcakes and Suzy Qs, was this not another of the crimes committed against the potential sophistication of the palettes of kids growing up in America the 60s and 70s? Real seven-layer cake was invented in Hungary by József Dobos in the 1880s. For those of you who, like me, don’t speak Hungarian, Dobos Torte does not translate to “seven layers”. It’s the name of the guy, and then “cake”. In any case, the fact is that in most cases it has, admittedly, five layers (where 1 layer of cake + 1 layer of icing = 1 layer). So just call it Dobos (that’s “DOH-bohsh”).

Genius In Plain Sight

In contrast to Palacsinta, the genius of Dobos is completely unhidden. Everything is in plain sight. Chocolate layer cake is what it looks like. The extra genius of Dobos may be found in four places. To start with, while the cake layers are recognizably cake, they are distinctly thin, maybe a third of an inch. What this does is facilitate a mixture of chocolate and cake in the mouth that is more unified and interesting (and chocolaty) than just a typical two-layer cake.

The second location of genius is in the icing. It is a chocolate buttercream. Many American buttercreams stray into butteryness. Not Dobos. Its buttercream (which Mr. Dobos is also reported to have invented) is light, bordering on fluffy, but unyielding in its commitment to chocolate.

The third genius is there on the sides, and you may not even notice it at first. The sides are covered with a dusting of ground nuts, maybe walnut or almond, chestnut or hazelnut. The flavor and texture of the nut makes a late entrance. If you are eating your slice of Dobos from the narrow end to the fat end, the ground nuts suddenly rejuvenate the flavor, take it to a new level of pleasure. The final genius, a particularly Hungarian genius, is the wafer-stiffened caramel top, that sits atop the top layer. (More on this later.)

I thought I recalled having Dobos once with my grandmother out at a local bakery in Queens. But the slice was square, not a wedge, and I don’t remember a proper Dobos top, so that may well have been just plain old seven-layer cake.

Layers And Mixtures

The Dobos I’ve delighted in more recently is here at the Hungarian Pastry Shop in Manhattan (where I am writing this). It is a round cake cut into wedges. Capping each wedge is that special top, a triangle that crunches a bit like a wafer, but that’s really mostly caramel. What to do with this top? I have tried just treating it without prejudice, taking my fork to the cake top and all. But this usually leaves the cake mashed and the caramel top still whole. I have tried removing the top and setting it aside. But this sort of segregation does not satisfy. I either end up not getting to it, or taking a bite or two, being overwhelmed by the sugary caramel, and putting my fork down in surrender. Sometimes I remove it and cut it up with my fork, then take some with each forkful of cake. That’s probably the most enjoyable.

I read somewhere that the cake was shipped widely across Europe, and that Dobos’s caramel-wafer top functioned to seal in moisture and help keep the cake fresh through these journeys. But I wonder if this brilliant, utilitarian, caramel stroke, an extra layer atop the layers, yet a layer with its own striking identity, maybe also had something to do with the extraordinary ethnic diversity of Hungary in the later 19th and early 20th centuries. A number of other Hungarian desserts also work with layers and with mixtures (Flódni comes to mind). Consciously or not, it seems to me that the layering, and the mixtures of diverse and sometimes unexpected-yet-delicious additions, reflect and celebrate the may peoples of Hungary at the time.

I wonder what Dobos would have to say about that.

Buy the book, Finding Maria (Chickadee Prince Books, 2017), now on Amazon

Photo by author. Cake by Hungarian Pastry Shop, 1030 Amsterdam Avenue, New York.

Buy the book, Finding Maria (Bloomingdale Press – 2nd edition November 25, 2019), on Amazon

It’s What’s Inside That Counts

[The second half of my digression into Hungarian food will feature three desserts. Here’s the first!]

My father empties a small ladle-full of batter into a cast iron pan in quick circles. He adjusts the heat, picks up a long, thin spatula, and waits. He checks his watch, and then he slips the spatula under the thin pancake and flips it. In a minute or two, in one fluid motion, he scrapes the pancake out of the pan and flops it onto a growing stack of Palacsinta.

No Identity?

If there are two words I associate with Palacsinta (“pah-la CHIN-tah”), one of them is “patience.” Waiting for the pancake to cook, removing it to the stack, making the next one, beginning again, slowly building a pile. Perhaps there was no greater illustration of my father’s deep patience than his Palacsinta making.

The other word I associate with Palacsinta is, well, “limp.” On the face of it, Palacsinta is maddening. What is this thing? Spongier than a crêpe, and rolled, not folded like its French cousin, yet firmer and thinner than a blintz, Palacsinta appears to have no identity, no striking character. It could slide easily into obscurity, and often does, deservedly). I’m reminded of how the lunch special at Moca, a long-gone Hungarian restaurant on the Upper East Side, would conclude with a Palacsinta, dropped quickly on the table by the waiter, who seemed to want no responsibility for it. It was too small (they really should be six or seven inches in length) and the filling lacked personality.

While main dishes are a deserved source of pride (and calories!), in my opinion, the crown jewels of Hungarian cuisine may be found in its desserts. In some Hungarian desserts, the genius is plain and up-front, in others, it is quite literally wrapped inside. So it is with Palacsinta. The Palacsinta pancake is like an overcoat, a neutral cover that protects, and hides, the “filling,” the snazzy suit or gorgeous dress underneath. Its frumpy filling – bland, indifferent – is what made Moca’s Palacsinta so frustrating.

Chocolate And Vanilla We Get

My father made three types of Palacsinta filling: poppy seed (from his recipe: “Mak Toltelek”), walnut (“Dio Toltelek”), and cottage cheese (“Turos Toltelek”). The poppy seed was a salt-and-pepper mix of tiny black seeds and sugar. It was the oddest to me and I never ate poppy seed Palacsinta back then. I preferred the sugary, lemony, chopped walnuts. I went back and forth on the sweetened cottage cheese, unsure quite what to make of it, but eventually loving it.

A central aspect of the genius of Hungarian dessert fillings is their unusual palette. Unusual to an American, that is. When it comes to dessert, what most Americans do not understand is subtlety. Chocolate and vanilla we get, so long as they are delivered in familiar forms such as ice cream or cake. The lemony tang, crunch, and slight sweetness of chopped walnut filling, the lumpy-soft sweetness of cottage cheese filling, or flavors used in other Hungarian desserts, including chestnut or almond paste, take time for an American to come to appreciate. But once one does so, there is no turning back. These flavors open new territories of enjoyment, new levels and complexities.

For me the final frontier was poppy seed, perhaps second only to paprika as the national flavor of Hungary. How I hated poppy seed when I was growing up. And how my father loved it. Alone, it had the dark aftertaste of licorice or cigarettes. I turned up my nose even when it was sufficiently sugared. “So uncouth!” my father would shout, as I sat savoring my Hostess cupcake (remove the top, roll it into a ball and save it for later) or Suzy Q (once around the cream filling with the tongue before the first bite). My father’s admonition was partly pleasure in seeing his son enjoy a sinful treat. But he also must have felt a kind of sadness at how little could be translated to his children, from Hungarian to American. Its strange flavors contributed to a sense of distance I felt about Hungary, and to some extent about my father, when I was growing up.

Pulled From The Freezer And Warmed In The Oven

During the time that I was writing about him, and coming to understand and relate to him more subtly as I myself entered middle age, I grew a taste for poppy seed and I began to eat poppy seed desserts. The strudel was too much for me, with a ratio of poppy seed to dough of easily 10 to 1. My preference was for the poppy seed Hamentashen (not particularly Hungarian, I know), where I could cut and balance the strong, complex filling with the neutral cookie.

I had settled in New York by then, and later moved uptown near the Hungarian Pastry Shop with my young family. As we would prepare to drive down to visit my parents in Maryland, my father would ask me (and remind me multiple times) to bring along several slices of poppy seed strudel, one of which he would consume almost immediately upon our arrival.

I picture him at the kitchen table some weeks later, unwrapping the foil around the poppy seed strudel he has just pulled from the freezer and warmed in the oven. And as I see the flashes of ecstasy on his face as he savors it, I appreciate the full power of Hungarian dessert filling, and my own limitations. Even as I have come to appreciate their flavors and textures to a degree I never would have expected, there is a wide gap between the depth and breadth of pleasure an American convert to Hungarian dessert feels when he eats it, and that which a native Hungarian does.

Buy the book, Finding Maria (Bloomingdale Press – 2nd edition November 25, 2019), on Amazon

(Photo credit: https://greathungarianplain.wordpress.com/2012/01/22/sunday-brunch-makos-palacsinta/)

My Hungarian Royalty

[My series on Hungarian food continues with a final main course…]

If there was a royal dish in our home it was Chicken Paprika. It was the most elevated, the most beloved dish. It possessed its own distinct pageantry. It was rich. We over-indulged in it.

The royalty of Chicken Paprika has a special earthiness to it. Plates were sometimes licked. Leftovers were retrieved from the refrigerator at all hours, for days. I think this earthiness has to do with its Central European origins, a place where high and low culture sometimes mix with an ease not found to the same degree in Western Europe. My father used to say that chicken was rare in Budapest, considered a kind of luxury. This might be one aspect of the highness of the dish. And yet the simplicity of Chicken Paprika gives it a kind populist accessibility. Anyone can make it, and at our house, everyone did.

Nokedli – Among The Most Beautiful of Foods

My mother’s specialties were the chicken and the gravy. After lightly browning the onions, my mother would add chicken to the pot – thighs, legs, breasts – and sear it on both sides. She would shake paprika all across the large, deep, oval pot, add a splash of water, and cover it. Later, if she were visiting at the time, my grandmother would be called in to gauge progress, sticking her face almost into the pot, inhaling the tomatoey peppery aroma deeply several times. “Ah, ya,” she might conclude with a nod, a serious expression on her face (this was serious business), and her approval would energize the foot-soldiers for the rest of the preparations.

But of course chicken paprika is not Chicken Paprika without Nokedli. This was my father’s province. I picture him in old khakis and a white undershirt (occasionally there would be a nice button-down, as in the picture below), holding a metal bowl tight against his belly while beating the dough vigorously with a wooden spoon, grunting occasionally from the effort. When the dough was ready, my father would spoon a large clump onto a cutting board. Now came the tricky part, the part that required both artfulness and technical skill. My father would take a large, sharp knife and restructure the clump of dough into a log. Then with the knife, he would separate a long slice from the log, maybe a half inch or so thick. And finally, holding the end of the cutting board over a big pot of boiling water, he would, in one motion, cut an inch or so from the slice, slide it gracefully into the pot, and dip the knife in the hot water (so the dough wouldn’t stick when he cut the next piece). He would repeat the motion quickly until the slice was gone, then begin the routine again.

In a few minutes, the dumplings would rise to the surface as if calling to be removed (though they still required 5 to 7 minutes more cooking). One of the happiest sights of my youth (and still to this day) was a casserole dish filling with Nokedli as they were removed from the pot.

Nokedli are one of the most beautiful foods. When they are properly made, that is. A beautiful Nokedli has an irregular silhouette and topography. Each one is similar, yet different – the result of the length cut from the log, the degree to which some may have rubbed off as the knife slid across the cutting board, the position it was in when it hit the scalding water. Too often, Nokedli are thin, small, and scraggly. Maybe these are traditional in someone’s eyes. But a proper Nokedli, in my view, has a certain heft to it, a kind of meatiness in your mouth. It is oblong, not missile shaped. It is from the dumpling family, not the rice or pasta family, so a Nokedli that has the diameter on its narrow dimension of spaghetti is not Nokedli. The diameter of a pencil? No. Should be a half-inch, even three-quarters. And at least an inch long. Now, not too big. We’re not talking pierogi-sized here. Two or three in your mouth at a time. Not a dozen. Not just one.

They Become One

Near the end of the cooking process, when the Nokedli were finished and the chicken was done, my mother would make the gravy. Though she was not Magyar (she was from Brooklyn), she was a genius with the gravy. She knew just how much sour cream to add, just how long to simmer it, and she always managed to produce the exquisite taste, which is as much in its texture as its flavor – small squares of onion, odd bits of chicken, tiny globules of sour cream. The gravy unifies the dish. You spoon it generously over the chicken and Nokedli, and they become one.

One last thing is essential to the royalty of Chicken Paprika: Uborka Saláta, Hungarian cucumber salad. Its name is like a primal chant – “OOOborkahSALAta” – so different from the refined notes it adds to the meal. Simplicity is part of its genius – cucumber sliced paper thin, a touch of sour cream, a little vinegar, some paprika. It is a side dish, not a centerpiece, served best quite literally to the side in a small bowl. Uborka Saláta is the light and fresh complement to the rich and exuberant Chicken Paprika. Alternating them every now and then substantially increases the flavors and pleasure of a Chicken Paprika meal.

A Slap Of The Table Top

When the words “home” and “special occasion” are mentioned together, an image comes to mind. In the center is a plate, one half is filled with chicken breast meat and maybe a whole thigh, the other half with a crowded herd of Nokedli. Everything is coated with the orange-brown gravy. At the top of the plate, which could just as easily be everyday china as Limoges china, to the left, is Uborka Saláta in a small glass bowl. To the right, a cup of water, or, when I was older, a glass of wine. Perhaps it is Hungarian wine. And perhaps at the end of his usual toast my father might have chosen to conclude, on this night, “Egészségedre!” Adding, in a stage whisper to us, “That means ‘to your health.’ But be careful not to pronounce it as ‘A seggedhez’!” punctuating the laugh that followed with a slap of the table top.

You can buy the book, Finding Maria (Chickadee Prince Books, 2017), now on Amazon