Hocus Pocus

A little boy, her son, opens his eyes wide. The rugelah is warm in his hands, and the chocolaty sweetness melts in his mouth.

I’m mesmerized by my husband’s wide-open eyes as he recounts his mother’s daily ritual when he’d come home from cheder as a little boy. It had taken him some time to figure out that the rugelah didn’t appear by magic. It popped out from under his mother’s elbow. It took him even more time to discover that the storefront downstairs where his mother checked eggs and sprinkled flour was her dough factory. The idea to develop, manufacture, and sell frozen dough had been Ma’s brainchild back in the 1960s, and aptly, she called her baby Fine Frozen Pastry.

Fifteen-some years ago, dementia crept up on Ma, leaving me in the middle of a relationship. I was in my thirties then, just starting to mature enough to appreciate her. I longed to hold on to her, this soft-spoken woman I’d hardly gotten to know. So I asked her for the recipe for her famous flaky dough that she’d used to make rugelach, or kifli, as she called them. Ma rattled off the kifli ingredients and measurements as I scribbled furiously on a paper plate.

Back home, I carefully copied the prized recipe into my blue-bound cookbook and whizzed on my Bosch. Flour made contact with margarine and eggs and sugar, yeast stirred things up, but for all my efforts to blend them together, the lot simply wouldn’t merge for a deep, meaningful relationship. Obviously, Ma, in her compromised state, had missed a thing or two in the recipe. The dough was greasy and dryish and wouldn’t hold together. I tossed it.