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Apfel Strudel
(German Apple Cake.) This is a very fine cake, but not often made properly, as it takes time. Mix 1 tablespoonful of butter with 1 large cup of flour, add 1 egg and sufficient milk to make a stiff paste. Knead for 1/2 hour, lay aside and cover, near the fire. Mix 1 dozen peeled and sliced apples with 2 cupfuls of fried bread-crumbs, 1/4 pound of chopped almonds, 3/4 cup of currants or raisins cut up, and 1 tablespoonful of cinnamon. Mix all well, and rolling the dough very thin, spread this evenly over it. Now fold it and pull until as thin as paper, but not broken. Roll up like jelly cake, curve in shape of an 8, and bake 1 1/4 hours, basting often with 1/2 cup of butter. Serve either hot or cold, in slices.
The recipe is sound but compressed, and it leaves out the two things a modern cook most needs: an oven temperature and any hint of how large the finished roll will be. A few notes before you start.
- The hinge: rest, then stretchThe long kneading and the warm rest are what make the gluten extensible enough to pull paper-thin. Skip or shorten the rest and the dough tears no matter how carefully you work it. Half an hour of kneading by hand is not an exaggeration for the period; five to eight minutes in a stand mixer with the dough hook gets you to the same place. The recipe gives no length for the rest — half an hour or so, covered and warm, is a reasonable reading of "lay aside and cover, near the fire."
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Strudel wants a moderate to moderately hot oven, 375F, dropping to 350F if the pastry colours too fast.
- Baking timeAn hour and a quarter is long by modern standards and points to a slower oven than we would use; the recipe does not say what kind. In a modern oven a strudel of this size should be done in 45 to 55 minutes, when the pastry is deep gold and crisp and the apple juices bubble at the ends. Basting "often" with the half cup of butter, as the recipe directs, does the same work as brushing filo.
- Fried bread-crumbsThis means dry crumbs fried in butter until golden, not raw crumbs. They are the layer that absorbs apple juice and keeps the bottom from going to paste, so brown them properly and let them cool before mixing with the apples.
- ProportionsOne cup of flour with a tablespoon of butter and one egg makes a modest amount of dough, and a dozen apples is a great deal of filling for it. Use tart, firm apples, keep them thinly sliced, and expect to make two rolls, or scale the filling to about six apples for one.
- "1 large cup" and stiff pasteTreat it as a generous cup, roughly 5 oz of flour, and add milk by the spoonful. The dough should be stiff enough to hold a shape but not dry; a dry dough will not stretch.
- ShapingRoll up from the long side like a jelly roll, seam down, then curve it into a figure eight on a buttered sheet so a long roll fits the pan. Tuck and pinch the ends closed or the filling runs out.
- Yield and servingOne full roll at these proportions should serve something like eight to ten in slices. Good warm with cream; the recipe says it may be served either hot or cold, in slices.
Strudel dough belongs to the family of thin stretched pastries that spread through the Habsburg lands from the Ottoman east, and the Viennese apple strudel is the best-known survivor of that line; the pulled, translucent sheet is generally traced to the same tradition that produced filo and baklava rather than to any northern European pastry. The name simply means "whirlpool" or "eddy" in German, said by tradition to refer to the spiral of the cut slice. The subtitle here, "German Apple Cake," is telling: it treats the Austro-Hungarian and German kitchens as one, and glosses an unfamiliar dish with a familiar word like "cake" to reassure the reader. The book's frank warning that it is "not often made properly, as it takes time" is the honest note of a period when a cook could still be assumed to have half an hour of kneading to spare.