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Apple Strudel
Sift 2 cups flour with 1/2 teaspoonful salt and 1 teaspoon sugar. Add gradually 1 cup lukewarm water, and knead until dough does not stick to hands. Roll dough as thin as possible on floured board. Place clean tablecloth on table, put rolled out dough on it and pull carefully with fingers to get thin as possible. Mix 4 cups chopped apples with 1 cup sugar, 1 tablespoon cinnamon, 1 cup seeded raisins, and 1 cup currants. Spread over dough and spread little Crisco over apples. Take cloth in both hands, and roll strudel over and over like roly poly. Roll strudel into Criscoed baking pan and bake in hot oven until brown.
A workable strudel, but written for cooks who already knew the dough. Two things the text leaves out matter more than anything it says: the dough must rest before stretching, and the filling needs something to absorb the juice.
- Rest the doughKnead until smooth and elastic, then cover and leave it 30 to 45 minutes at room temperature. Unrested dough springs back and tears the moment you begin pulling it over the cloth; rested, it will stretch until you can read print through it.
- "Hot oven"Roughly 400 to 450F in period terms. For a filled strudel this size, 400F for 15 minutes and then 375F for another 25 to 30 is more reliable; the recipe itself gives no time, only "until brown".
- CriscoVegetable shortening, which this book exists to sell. Melted butter is the traditional fat and gives better colour and flavour; brush it on the stretched dough as well as over the apples, which the recipe does not mention but which keeps the layers separate.
- The missing crumbsA cup of sugar on four cups of apples releases a great deal of liquid. Scatter 1/2 to 3/4 cup of dry breadcrumbs, toasted in butter, over the dough before the fruit. This is standard in Austrian practice and prevents a soggy base.
- Seeded raisins and currants"Seeded" meant the seeds had been picked or machine-cut out; any modern seedless raisin does the job. Currants here are dried Zante grapes, not fresh redcurrants. Two cups of dried fruit is generous — a cup total is plenty for most tastes.
- ApplesFour cups chopped is roughly four medium apples, somewhere around 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb. Use a firm tart variety that holds its shape; softer eating apples collapse into sauce inside the roll.
- The clothA smooth cotton or linen cloth, well floured, on a table you can walk around. Lifting the near edge and letting the strudel roll itself is the whole trick, and it works better with two people than with one.
- CinnamonA full tablespoon is a heavy hand by current standards; 1 to 2 teaspoons suits most modern palates.
- YieldOne long roll, cut on the diagonal into 8 to 10 portions. Best warm, dusted with powdered sugar, the day it is baked.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to a genre of early twentieth-century American cookbook published to promote a single product — here Crisco, the hydrogenated vegetable shortening introduced by Procter & Gamble in 1911 — which is why the fat tends to be named as a brand rather than described as shortening or butter. That branding sits oddly on strudel, a Central European pastry generally traced to the Austro-Hungarian lands and usually made with butter or oil; the paper-thin stretched dough itself is often said to descend from Ottoman layered pastries by way of Hungary. Its appearance in an American product cookbook of this period reflects how thoroughly German and Austrian baking had entered the mainstream repertoire through immigrant households, and how eagerly the new industrial fats were offered as a substitute for the butter such baking assumed.