MY GREAT-GRANDMOTHER'S RECIPE

I remember peeling the apples to help my great-grandmother make her famous apple strudel. There was excitement in the air on the rare days that she got out the card table she used for spreading the dough. Everyone loved her apple strudel. You'd be a fool not to. The dough melted in your mouth like it was made by an angel, which it was.

Our great grandmother had raised six children without much money. She married at age 16. Her husband died in the coal mines when she was barely 20. She received a letter from his brother in America explaining that he too was a widower with children, and could they get married. She took her three kids on a voyage to America from their home in Vienna, Austria. She married and had three more kids, but it turned out that her new husband wasn't much inclined to work for a living. She took in laundry and ironing. She made her apple strudel for the neighbors, and they convinced her she should sell it in stores. That's how she supported her family for years. No one could make apple strudel like she could.

She would patiently teach us children how to make the dough and how to keep it light. Then she would begin rolling it as big as the table it was on. It seemed too thin to stay in place without tearing but somehow it did. The tricky part was transferring it to pans. Then the apples and glaze were added and after that, finally, the streusel topping. It was a time-consuming operation done with a heart full of love.

We weren't invited to do more than peel the apples and grease the pans. The work seemed too delicate for my clumsy hands and I didn't object.

Everyone, including all the men, would be hovering around the stove when it was time to take the strudel out of the oven. Great Grandma would smack the hand of anyone caught trying to steal a hot piece before anyone else could have a proper cut and cooled piece.

She never lost the taste for her apple strudel even after a lifetime of making it. She would sit down with everyone else and enjoy her strudel with some coffee. Sometimes I saw her eating more than one piece. I was glad for her that she still loved it after having had it for all those years.

She continued to show us how to make the strudel when we were teenagers. Of course, our heads were too full of clothes, makeup and boys to really pay her the attention we should have. If we had, maybe then she would have let us helped her.

She wasn't literate and never did get the recipe written down. That was something one of us should have been doing for her. But we just took it for granted that she would always be there making her apple strudel.

After she was dead a few years and I had my own family, I realized I had swindled myself out of my family heritage by being bored and uninterested in something that was important to my ethnic upbringing and family history. There was no going back to a single afternoon of apple strudel making to get it right this time and take notes and ask questions. I had had my chances and ignored them. I had turned my back on my rich heritage and deprived my family of their birthright.

I never could eat bakery apple strudel. It all tastes like cardboard after you've had the real thing.