- Put the lukewarm milk, melted butter, eggs and egg yolks, yeast and the sugar in the mixing bowl.
- Add 1 cup of flour and give it a stir.
- Let it sit until doubled.
- Begin to add from the remaining flour gradually kneading on medium speed with a dough hook. The dough should be pliable.
- Knead it really well to develop the gluten. If you don’t have a standing beater, knead by hand and beat the dough against the counter with force about 50 times or more.
- Place the dough in a buttered bowl, turn it over and cover.
- Let the dough double.
- Punch down and roll the dough on a lightly floured surface 1 cm thick.
- Brush lightly with melted butter and scatter a quarter of the sliced almonds and chopped dried fruit on the top.
- Roll the dough up in jelly roll fashion and let the dough rest for 20 minutes.
- Roll the dough out again in the opposite direction, brush with melted butter and top with the almonds and the apricots.
- Repeat the resting, rolling and topping with almonds and apricots twice more. [4 times altogether]
- The last time you roll it up, place on a parchment lined baking tray.
- Brush the strudel with the melted butter and let it rise until doubled.
- Heat the oven to 350F.
- Brush the top with beaten egg and place in the preheated oven for 90-100 minutes or until the top is nicely browned.
- Rest the strudel on a wire rack.
We shopped for food every day. Few people had ice boxes; nobody had a fridge,
not even the milk store. The milk was ladled into metal cans. The can had a lid
and a handy carrying handle. Bread was a 2 kg loaf or cut in front of you
into a half a loaf or a quarter of a loaf. They gave you a 3 inch piece of
tissue paper for handling it. The only thing that was prepackaged was the
sugar, flour, salt and the grits. Everyone carried homemade grocery bags.
You had to stand in line when you wanted to buy something. There was no self
serve. State run sales people were snarly. Kids were ignored. They would serve
the adult next in line and ignore the kid. There were frequent shortages.
Sometimes you couldn’t find sour cream or batteries. You got most of your
vegetables at the open air market. Drug stores only sold drugs. Meat stores
sold only meat. Household stores sold the cleaning stuff. Beauty products were
sold in the beauty product store. You made your pasta at home. There was
no tropical fruit until 1957. Cocoa and green coffee beans appeared after the
revolution. You had to roast the coffee beans and grind them to make espresso.
Vegetables were available in season or canned in jars. There were no green
vegetables during the winter. The first green thing that appeared in the spring
was green onions. They were expensive. Nobody had central heating. We burned
coal and wood. Everyone was poor in September. That is when the winter fuel was
delivered. We kept it in the basement. Each apartment had a stall in the
basement. If you lived on the third floor and your house had no lift, you had
to haul it upstairs in metal bins. You woke in a cold room. About 10:00 AM we
opened up the windows for fresh air, mom went down to the basement and brought
up the daily wood and coal and started the fire. That was a happy
time. Only communists had cars. We traveled on foot or by streetcar. There
was a short line of metro and later buses. Most deliveries were conducted by
horse drawn buggies. We had a 6 day workweek. People worked for 48 hours.
We went to school on Saturday. We had one day off, Sunday. All the museums
and galleries had free admission on Sunday. Movie theaters were cheap. The
busiest was the 2:00 PM showing. Before the movie there was a News Report. It
had interesting things in it but mostly just propaganda. Sometimes in the
intermission there was a magician or a couple of acrobats. I always felt sorry
for them. Our tickets were numbered. Grandma and I liked the 2nd row in the
middle. We only ever saw Hungarian or synchronized Russian films. The first
American film I saw was the Red Shoe. There were lots of indexed books.
Opera and live theater was state subsidized and cheap. You could be poor and
cultured at the same time. I had one dress but I had season tickets to the
opera, live theater and to Philharmonic events. Only communists were eligible
for post secondary institutions. You had to pay to pee. All public bathrooms
had an attendant. We carried tissue paper with us because all they ever gave
you was a small piece of toilet paper. We used cut up newspapers at home.
Magazines were shiny and not very absorbent. Newspaper worked better. Not
everyone had a bathroom. We had an indoor toilet and an iron wall sink in the
kitchen, but no bathtub or shower. We bathed in the kitchen. Mom would heat up
some water and poured it into a very large basin placed on a stool. You washed
your hair and the upper body first. Next we would put the basin on the floor
and step into it to wash the rest. The bathwater was poured down the toilet.
Kids shared the bathwater. It was a treat to visit a relative with a bathtub.
You got married twice if you were religious. No church could marry without a
civil ceremony first. That still applies. If you practiced a religion it meant
you were enemy of the state. From grade five on you had to learn Russian. We
hated everything Russian, especially the Russian soldiers. We had to sing the
Russian anthem after the Hungarian anthem. People tended to be opportunistic.
Once I got a pair of sheepskin gloves for Christmas. It was a big deal. Two
days later I dropped one on the street and before I bent down to pick it up
someone snatched it away from me. There were several people around but I
couldn't tell who took it. I was ten years old and just stood there crying.
What would half a pair of glove do for somebody? We used handkerchiefs to blow
our noses. Laundering them was really gross. So were the cloth diapers. I
didn’t know anyone with a washing machine. On washing day all my mother did was
wash. For drying we had a large ceiling rack in the kitchen. It worked
with a pulley. It would be lowered for hanging the clothes and then pulled up.
We had them drying overhead for days. All the heat we had in the kitchen was
from the stove. Only one room was heated. In the afternoon my grandmother's
door would be opened to let in some warmth. The toilet and the front entrance were
always cold. The only source of running water was an iron wall sink in the
kitchen. That is where we got our drinking water, washed our hands, brushed our
teeth and filled the pots for cooking and bathing. Dishes were washed on the
kitchen table in a large basin. Everything had to be dried with a kitchen
towel. I remember the day when a second basin was put next to the dish basin
for rinsing off the soapy dishes. My family had two rooms. Grandma had the
small room and we had a slightly larger one. That is where we lived, ate and
slept. For meals the table was pulled out and a table cloth laid on it. There
were no napkins. My dad wiped his mouth into the corner of the table cloth. We
used spoons and forks but I don't remember using knives. We were not allowed to
speak during the meal. According to my father Hungarians do not speak
while eating. There was no drink on the table. We drank water after we finished
eating. Getting ready for bed was complicated. One by one the day-night bed and
the day-night armchairs were opened up and bedding laid on them. The room
turned into a wall to wall bed. We had to crawl over each other's bed to get to
our own. Before I left home nine people slept in the room, my parents with
seven children. The youngest slept on top of a large office desk in a cardboard
box for two months. After that the state gave my parents a 4 room rental unit
overlooking the Eastern Railroad Station. A month later I left for
