Powidltascherln

In my grandmother Eva's kitchen in Deal, there was a jar of dark plum butter that Gretel had brought back from one of her trips to Vienna. It was almost black, thick as tar, and smelled like winter. That was my first taste of Powidl, spooned straight from the jar by a woman who remembered it from before the war. She told me it tasted like home, and even as a child I understood she didn't mean Kent.

Powidltascherln are what Austrian cooks do with that plum butter. You make a soft potato dough, roll it thin, cut circles, and fill each one with a spoonful of Powidl spiked with rum and cinnamon. Fold them into half-moons, seal them tight, and simmer them in barely trembling water until they float. Then you roll the whole lot through a pan of butter-toasted breadcrumbs mixed with cinnamon sugar and eat them so hot you have to blow on the first bite.

This is a dish that crosses borders. The Powidl itself came from Bohemia, carried into Viennese kitchens through the Habsburg empire along with a thousand other good ideas from Prague and Moravia. Austrians made it theirs the way they always do: with potato dough, with too much butter, with a dusting of powdered sugar, and with the conviction that a sweet dish is a proper meal, not a footnote. Gretel always said Mehlspeisen are the heart of Austrian cooking. Powidltascherln prove her right.