Vienna’s “Fächertorte”—Jewish Budapest’s “Flódni” Layer Cake in Disguise. #RachelRaj #Demel (2024)

Vienna’sfächertorte recipe.

UPDATE:
Since I wrote this post, it gained a lot of traction, I guess also because it is the last possibility to get to an authentic gourmet Viennese fächertorte. Why? Well, first of all, Demel restructured its business since COVID and stopped being the torte museum it used to be: Though on my last visit, they did sell fächertorte again! Secondly, sadly, Rachel Raj closed her terrific flodni and torte business.

“FÄCHERTORTE,” says the white-aproned waitress at Vienna’s DemelKonditorei(German for pastry shop) from behind the magnificent display case of one of the world’s best Viennese cake and torte selections.

“Fächertorte, which translates as ‘fan-cake,’ is a house specialty,” she explains, while pointing at the little sign in front of one of the famous creations. She repeats the word fächertorte several times, in a purposefully exaggerated voice, for the benefit of giggling American tourists who are busy taking pictures.

“What is she saying? F*cker-tarte? Are you serious?”

Well, certainly the sound is close, but only close, and probably reveals more about the folks’ mindset—and mine—than anything about the delicious layer cake itself.

This old world Viennese specialty—not the same as sachertorte, another historic Demel house creation which is a chocolate cake with apricot jam—is comprised of four separately-made fillings piled on top of one another. The bottom layer is comprised of ground poppy seeds covered with a shimmery layer of walnut purée. Next comes a fruity layer of thin apple slices topped with a black dollop of powidl jam (thick plum stew). Finally, everything is wrapped in a thin crust of cookie dough and dusted with confectioner’s sugar.

Today, even though the recipe for fächertorte can be found in one of the most popular cookbooks about Viennese cuisine Die Gute Kücheby Ewald Plachutta and Christoph Wagner, the cake is very difficult to find in pastry shops. (In her book Koschere Köstlichkeiten,Salcia Landmann lists it too, though with a yeast dough.)

The cake has relatively expensive ingredients and needs quite a few steps in its preparation. Two facts which may likely explain its rarity in Vienna’s pastry shops…well, this and the fact that it’s so Jewish, and that the Viennese did murder or chase away all the Jewish customers.

But Demel comes to the rescue. The establishment continues to honor its unofficial title as Vienna’s cake “museum,” and regularly features the cake in its repertoire.

During world war two, when part of the management of the Demel, this former purveyor of the Imperial court, preferred to leave the country, the other part continued to serve high-ranking Nazi dignitaries. One of these dignitaries was Baldur von Schirach,the German Nazi Party’s national youth leader, head of the Hitler Youth, and later, Gauleiter and Reichsstatthalter of Vienna.

But reportedly, the Demel continued to serve their delicacies to quite a different sort of crowd, tucked away in a hidden hallway: former regulars. Why do we know this? Austrian historians like to quote Viennese journalist and diplomat Milan Dubrović from his book Misguided Story—The Viennese Salons and Literary Cafés:

“In a narrow, dimly-lit corridor between the kitchen and the loo, the concealed guests sat like stringed, chair next to chair: the U-boats [note: Hidden Jews], the persecuted, the political defamers, who ate Schirach’s leftovers, pies and creams out of his plate while discussing the daily news that they had listened to on an illegal broadcast.”

It may sound unbelievable that, in world war two Vienna, the head of the Germans would not have checked the places where leading Nazi figures ate.

But then, who knows—it’s that sort of thing that saved people, too.

Anyway, I’d like to spin on that story myself by imagining how those hidden Jews would have wanted to continue eating their beloved cakes, including the fächertorte, which was, before the extermination of Europe’s Jewry, a Yom Kippur treat in Vienna.

As Susanne Zahradnik, a Viennese Jew born in 1920, recollects in her 2003 Centropa interview:

“I remember that once on the Day of Atonement [note: Yom Kippur] we had to restrain ourselves in the garden to eat no nuts, because then we had to fast. After sunset, there was always a big dinner with goose and fächertorte, which was prepared with jam, Applesauce, nut and poppy seeds.”

In many families, fächertorte was a traditional treat for Yom Kippur. And because of the presence of poppy seeds—which is Mohn in German and mon in Yiddish, and a sound similar to Haman, the villain of the Purim story—it was also a Purim treat, just like its Hungarian counterpart, the flódni cake.

As a Jewish food maven probably would have noticedright from the beginning, there’s a striking similarity between fächertorte and what has become in the last decades the symbol of Jewish Budapest’s art of baking, theflódni.

Incidentally, in Andràs Koerner’s book A Taste of the Past- The Daily Life and Cooking of aNineteenth-Century Hungarian Jewish Homemaker,Riza Néni, who lived almost at equidistance between Budapest and Vienna, has a recipe that seems to be the precursor to both the flódni and the fächertorte.

Though the difference between the two pastries from the two neighboring metropolia of the former Habsburg empire is minor, it exists and is defining.

The individual layers of the flódni, contrary to those in the fächertorte, are separated by layers of dough. When baking the fächertorte, the juice of the apples seeps through the nuts slowly into the ground poppy seeds. But in the flódni, the different fillings need to already be close to the jam-like final product upon assembly, as they are separated by a layer of pastry dough, which prevents the different juices and flavors from mingling together and seeping downwards.

Flódni is a sort of sheet cake, which makes sense as it is sometimes also called fládni and seems to come from the German for “flat cake.” It is a little bit more rural, or informal than Fächertorte. The latter, is a torte, thus a bit more stately, elegant, or let’s say conservative, Viennese in other words. But also, it is very little known. Sadly, we know why. Again, the public for such Jewish cakes has been murder and chased.

Flódni in Hungary, on the contrary, became a star lately with the help of Budapest’s Rachel Raj. With her Café Noé next to her mother’s Judaica store in the vicinity of Budapest’s Tabak shul, the great NeologSynagogue, and her appearances on TV, she is almost as famous in Hungary as Rachel Ray is in the US. The comparison may sound a little over the top but has obviously already been made because of the similarity of their names—for instance, in a 2015 article in Tablet magazine “Budapest’s Top Pastry Chef Gives Christmas a Jewish Flavor,”where they also showRachel Raj’s flódni recipe. (Another detailed recipe I particularly like can be found in Rick Rodgers’ fabulous Kaffeehaus: Exquisite Desserts from the Classic Cafés of Vienna, Budapest and Prague.)

Rachel Raj, the sympathetic businesswoman, studied fashion before turning to cakes and becoming a celebrity pastry chef in Budapest. Though she now makes all things cake, especially decorations in her shop, Tortaszalon(meaning cake salon), she built her reputation on the flódni.

Imagine, she even served the late Anthony Bourdain a piece of her famous flódni during the shooting of aParts Unknown Budapest episode!

Budapest’s Jewish population once amounted to a quarter of the total population and basically shaped the city to what it is today: in my opinion, it’s the most Jewish city I know: It was, for the most part, built in its contemporary shape by its Jews. (Mary Glucks’ Invisible Jewish Budapest – Metropolitan Culture at the Fin de Siècle.)

Today, the city is home to around fifty thousand Jews (there are about seven thousand in Vienna), and we’re seeing a resurgence of, and interest in, local Jewish and Hungarian cuisine.

As for the relationship between flódni and fächertorte, my guess is that the specialty came from the Hungarian countryside and its surroundings to the city of Vienna with the immigrants of the formerHabsburg homelands. Thus, from the flódni, the flat-cake-shape, the delicacy became a torte, the fächertorte, served by a purveyor of the imperial court of Austria-Hungary. It’s very likely that this cake got its metropolitan roots through the city’s Jews.

But toknow with any certainty which came first, the torte or the flódni, is probably like thechickenor theeggcausality dilemma.

And in case you’re wondering, I have thought of making the fächertorte as popular in Austria as Rachel Raj made the flódni in Hungary. But when I see her— the young, good-looking, former fashion student— presenting the cake, and compare her to me—a middle-aged, bald, not-so-slim male— there’s nothing more to do but to try to make myself feel less guilty. Naturally, I then comfort myself with another bite of my favorite calorie bomb, the fächertorte.

And now, a few visual instructions followed by the recipe.

And here’s the recipe:

LET’S STAY IN TOUCH

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