Bernice's dried and candied fruit strudel
Strudels
My mother didn’t much follow recipes – I can’t ever recall her taking out a cookbook and going step by step. Whenever I would ever ask her how she made something, she would say ”Its a little of this and a handful of that” and then she would laugh and invite me into the kitchen to watch just how it was done. This is how I learned to cook. <br /> <br />One of my favorite things she made was a dessert mother called “strudel.” This was nothing like the typical apple or cherry kind you might buy at a bakery. In fact, I have never known anyone else to make anything even remotely close to my mother’s “strudel.” When she mixed up the filling, we loved turning the handle on the old-fashioned meat grinder she used to prepare the sticky mixture. As much as we loved the strudel, we would turn up our noses as she stuffed the strange ingredients into the hopper. Some of these ingredients were simply horrifying to us – nobody would eat that, we would insist! But all the while we knew that the end result was going to be this delicious, coveted, almost candy-like sweet. I say coveted because once it was made, mom would hide the tins filled with our beloved strudel, doling it out bit by bit. The strudel kept “forever,” because of the use of the whisky which was blotted on a paper towel and placed in the tins to keep the dessert moist. <br /> <br />When I grew up I reconstructed my mother’s strudel and updated the technique for mixing the filling using a food processor. If you have one of those old fashioned hand crank meat grinders you could use that. Mom will smile down on you! <br />
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