Sally Stang

By: centraljersey.com
My twin niece and nephew were turning 24 and my sister-in-law called to invite me to their birthday party. As she was telling me about the "really really fun" idea she had, I struggled to keep my eyeballs from rolling up and out of their sockets, crawling over the top of my head and bouncing onto the floor behind me. Then I heard some idiot who sounded a lot like me saying, "Sure, sounds like a really really fun idea."
The last "young adult" party I had been to had been a torturous, raucous affair involving endless hours of beer pong, deafening rap music and salty, fatty, sugary snacks.
Us old fogies sat on folding chairs around the periphery, in observation mode, swatting at mosquitoes and occasionally fielding a ping-pong ball. I left early, claiming that I thought my bathtub was on fire.
So, when my sister-in-law declared "Strudel party!" and I was told that the fruit of her loins (four children total) all fist-pumped and gave a big "Woohoo!" I must admit I was befuddled and full of misgivings.
Strudel? Really? Maybe this "strudel" was a slang word for some vile fad that kids were doing nowadays. Did I want to be a witness to this strudeling and was it legal?
Warily, I arrived at the house (searching the sky for a meteorite to fall and save me) and followed the voices of yammering youth into the kitchen. To my surprise and delight, I caught seven young folk in mid-strudel, their hands pounding a small wad of dough.
I watched with wonder as they pinched and slapped and stretched that dough until it was almost the full size of the 3-foot-square card table beneath it.
"We need to stretch it even a bit more," Piroska Toth, co-owner of Moonlight Bakers ordered her charges with enthusiasm. "It has to go all the way over the edge of the table before we can roll it up!"
"Patch up that hole there and try not put your fingers through it." encouraged Marilyn Besner, the other half of the baking duo.
The yackety young friends kept on stretching the dough over their knuckles, gently cajoling it until it was so impossibly transparent, you could see the printed flowers on the tablecloth underneath it. The team tugged just a bit more, then a bit more, daring it to tear apart completely. It reminded me of a college stunt to set some sort of world record.
All around the kitchen, a dozen more people (young and old, male and female) were preparing strudel fillings. At the counter, leeks and mushrooms were being chopped and cold beets were being shredded for savory strudels. Stayman apples and sour cherries were being cut up for the dessert strudel.
Piroska dotted the paper-thin dough with tiny dabs of goat cheese. Marilyn and a couple of volunteers sprinkled fillings all over the surface. When it was all covered with filling, the four edges of the dough were flapped over.
Then, like firemen holding the edges of a safety net, Piroska and Marilyn grasped two sides of the tablecloth, held it aloft and performed "the move." With a flick of the cloth, they encouraged the opposite edges of the dough to tumble downhill towards the middle. It happened so fast, like a magic trick! The two rolls met in the center, landing side by side like twin jelly rolls, forming that recognizable strudel shape.
"That’s so cool!" Everyone clamored to try the tricky move. "Let me try it!" So, as the first strudel baked for 20 minutes, we all joined together to make the next one.
When our bellies were full of four kinds of strudel (two savory and two sweet), I wanted to find out more about strudel-making and about the women behind the dough. I licked my fingers and Piroska and Marilyn explained about how it all began.
The two women became acquainted when their children were in grade school at Princeton’s John Witherspooon School. They soon became friends when they discovered they had a love of baking and fine crafting (both are accomplished crafters).
"Marilyn would talk about baking strudel all the time," says Piroska, "and I couldn’t understand why. In Hungary, where I grew up, we had strudel all the time. It was no big deal. In Hungarian, we call it ‘retes’ ("layers")."