I Found My Strudel
As soon as I bit into the cabbage strudel, I knew I was going to have a problem. My friend had, after all, taken me to Andre’s for the sole purpose of pumping me with strudel and sending me on my way to write about it.
“Nora Ephron and Ruth Reichl have both written strudel pieces,” he’d said, spinning his laptop over to face me. I read Ephron’s and grew increasingly curious. She had described cabbage strudel as an unassuming, quiet favorite – and one that had escaped recognition, as well as, it seemed, production in recent years. When she discovered Andre’s on the Upper East Side of Manhattan was turning them out, she was eager to try – and just a bit skeptical. Would it compare to the strudels of her youth and current daydreams? Turns out she adored it. She described it as “crisp but moist” and “buttery beyond imagining.”
Sounded good to me, so off we went, desperately seeking strudel.
It was late, and pouring, so I’m not entirely sure my proclamation of the restaurant as being “so super adorable!” was based on a real reaction. I would’ve ducked into a slaughterhouse if it kept the pounding rain from sticking in my eyelashes and pooling at the nape of my neck. Besides, I had preconceived notions; just like my idols, I was going to love everything about the place.
We ordered wine – and I have no idea what I drank, because I couldn’t entirely understand the waitress and was too shy to ask her to repeat herself. It was listed on the menu as very dry, and when I asked her to describe it, she flicked her wrist and said it was a “bull’s blood wine.”
“Um, is that good?” I asked, not yet knowledgeable enough about Hungarian wine to know that Bull’s Blood wasn’t, you know, bull’s blood.
“Yes, yes, it’s very nice,” she answered, and she was smiling so sweetly that I just nodded and told her that’d be fine. Fine it was – red and easy.
We also ordered soup to start. My partner had a creamy cherry soup that was delicious, if not a bit too sweet for my tastes (but this is coming from a woman who ate caramel ice cream and Prosecco for dinner last night, so you don’t really have to take my word for it). I ordered a tomato soup that was teeming with soft, pillowy rice. The flavor of the soup was so, so something – rich? deep? comforting? – that I ate the entire bowl and wanted more. It was reminiscent of, forgive me, Spaghetti-O’s. I mean that only in the sense that it was so very thick and satisfying. It was perfect rainy day food, and I had, in some odd sort of way, been splashing in puddles.
The soup bowls left and I sipped my wine, liking it more and more. When the cabbage strudel arrived, I had to laugh, because it was entirely dwarfed by the plate of stuffed cabbage my friend had ordered. While his dinner-sized plate was piled high with leaves bursting with ground meat and rice and smothered in tomatoes, I received a small, dessert-sized plate on which sat a small, square pastry. So this was cabbage strudel.
I cut into it and took a bite. And, you know, it really was lovely – buttery, flaky pastry tucked loosely around meltingly soft ribbons of cabbage. It was good, yes. But I didn’t love it – and I still don’t know why. I ate the entire thing, searching for something extraordinary, something wild. With each bite, I held the strudel in my mouth a little bit longer, hoping to hear Reichl or Ephron in my head, pointing me toward understanding.
The more I ate, the more worried I became – what was I going to say about this piece of pastry that hadn’t been said before (and more eloquently!) by writers greater than I? Maybe I wouldn’t write about it at all.
I found my answer within dessert. Forgive me for being brash, but I’m now quite positive that Ruth Reichl and Nora Ephron have got it all wrong. It isn’t cabbage strudel that is so utterly transporting – it’s poppyseed!
It was the rich, impossibly thin pastry shell that I liked best about the first strudel, so to end my meal, I decided to order another, sweeter one. Apple and cherry and cheese all sounded fine, but poppyseed! Now there was something really special!
My dessert came packaged just as the cabbage strudel had – stuffed inside pastry, warm to the touch, on a small, plain plate. But as I sliced into it this time, a thick, black-as-night tumble of poppyseed compote came oozing out. I took a bit onto my fork and, very tentatively, brought it to my mouth.
It was sweet, yes, but not overwhelmingly so. In fact, if I wasn’t searching, I might not even have detected the sugar. The jam-like innards coated the pastry shell in a way the cabbage hadn’t – thorough, almost invasive. It was as if every inch of strudel existed just to hold the seeds. I ate it in large bites, bringing the fork to the very back of my mouth. There, I held the strudel on my tongue just long enough to let it dissolve and disappear easily, seamlessly. One needn’t even really chew the strudel, which is good, because if one did, one might find poppyseeds in one’s teeth for weeks after. Instead, I let the seeds roll around on my tongue, feeling their firm yet light texture through the syrupy coating.
I ate that entire pastry too, but not because I was searching. I had found my strudel, and though it wasn’t Ruth’s or Nora’s, it was every bit as good as I’d hoped.