Make a pie-dough. Roll out and spread with melted butter, raisins, currants, chopped apples, nuts and shredded citron. Cover well with brown sugar and sprinkle with cinnamon and the grated peel of a lemon. Roll up the dough. Lay in a buttered baking-pan. Rub the top well with melted butter and let bake until brown. Serve with wine sauce.
A strudel-style roll built on pie pastry rather than stretched dough, with quantities left entirely to the cook. The instructions assume you know how much filling a sheet of pastry will hold.
- The hinge: seal and ventA filling of apples, sugar and dried fruit throws off a lot of syrup, which will run out of the ends and weld the roll to the pan. Pinch the ends closed, tuck them under, and cut two or three steam slits along the top before it goes in the oven.
- QuantitiesNothing is measured. A double-crust quantity of pie dough (about 2 1/2 cups flour) rolled to roughly 10 by 14 inches takes about 2 cups chopped apple, 1/2 cup mixed raisins and currants, 1/3 cup nuts, 2 tablespoons citron, 3/4 cup brown sugar, a teaspoon of cinnamon and the peel of one lemon. Serves 6 to 8.
- "Until brown"No temperature is given. A moderately hot oven, 375F, for 40 to 50 minutes browns the pastry and softens the apple; the roll is done when syrup bubbles thickly at the slits.
- Shredded citronCandied citron peel, sold in tubs at holiday time and by weight from bulk suppliers. It is firmer and more resinous than candied orange peel, which is the usual substitute. Rinse off excess syrup and chop fine, since large pieces stay stubbornly chewy.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, a small raisin grape, not fresh red or black currants. If you can only find raisins, use them and cut them once.
- Keep the apples dryFirm tart apples such as Granny Smith or Northern Spy hold their shape. Toss the chopped apple with a spoonful of the brown sugar and a little flour before spreading, so the pastry base does not go to paste.
- Wine sauceThe book assumes you have one. Period wine sauces took more than one form: butter and sugar creamed and thinned over hot water with a sweet wine such as sherry or Madeira, or a sugar-and-water sauce thickened with a little cornstarch and flavoured with wine. Either suits the roll, as does a warm egg-based sabayon.
- Rolling and baking panRoll the pastry up from the long side, jelly-roll fashion, and lay it seam down. A rimmed sheet pan or shallow baking dish contains the leaked syrup better than a flat sheet.
Hungarian and Austrian kitchens share a family of rolled sweet pastries, of which the best known is rétes, the paper-thin stretched dough known in English by its German name, strudel. Stretching that dough over a floured cloth until it is translucent takes practice and a large table, and American cookbooks of the early twentieth century are often said to have sidestepped it by substituting pie crust or a rich yeast dough. That is exactly the shortcut taken here. The filling itself is the traditional one: apples, dried fruit, nuts, cinnamon, lemon peel and candied citron, sweetened with brown sugar. Books of this type, arranged as one dish a day from a different nation, formed something of a genre of their own, offering city cooks a tour of immigrant kitchens with the technical difficulties quietly filed off. The wine sauce, poured hot over the sliced roll, belongs more to the Anglo-American pudding tradition than to Budapest, where such a pastry would more likely arrive dusted with powdered sugar.