Emperor’s Crumbs or császármorzsa or smarni or Kaiserschmarrn was our first recipe on this blog. I felt like revisiting it for three reasons: first, it is our name and signature recipe, so we should try it with American ingredients. Second, we are delighted to mention that we’re featured on The Hungarian Girl’s website and I don’t want to risk any mistakes! Most importantly, my mother-in-law had a birthday recently, and a decadent breakfast reminiscent of fancy Austro-Hungarian weekends was a perfect way to celebrate it. So I remade the recipe to serve 5-6 instead of the original 2. I also made it more “California compliant” and used less eggs and almost no fat, while keeping its outstanding flavor. It still tastes rich and delicious. If you want to know the background of emperor’s crumbs then check back to our first post and the old recipe.

Print recipe

Emperors Crumbs

Original recipe tripled, reduced eggs. We have been able to find semolina without any trouble here, both packaged (Bob’s Red Mill is one brand) and in the bulk bins. We love the bulk bins these days!
Ingredients

Makes 5-6 portions

• 2¼ cup/300 g semolina
• 3 cups/750 ml milk
• 2 tsp vanilla extract
• 5 eggs, separated
• pinch salt
• 1½ cups/300 g sugar
• zest from 1 lemon
• 50 g butter for sauteing
• powdered sugar, compote or jam or all three as topping

Method

• Mix together the semolina, flour and milk. Let it sit for an hour or so to let the semolina absorb the milk.
• Mix the egg yolks together with sugar and stir it into the milk mixture.
• Whip the egg whites and a pinch of salt into firm peaks and fold it into the milk/egg mixture.
• Melt the butter and add the batter. Stir the batter with a spatula or wooden spoon until it starts to form little clumps – crumbs. Depending on the size of the pan this can take up to 30 minutes.
• Serve hot with powdered sugar or with jam, or with compote or drizzle with some syrup.

This is the kind of thing you throw together when your fruit trees are producing more than you can manage, or if you’ve gone a little crazy at the farmers’ market. [Read more →]

With our respective families 6000 miles apart, one thing Valerian and I have done together a lot is travel. And with two kids added to the mix now, we arm ourselves seriously when we head out to the airport: books, toys, changes of clothes, and of course, snacks. Lots and lots of snacks. When your kids start to get squirrely, sometimes a treat that would normally be off-limits is just what you need to get through the last hours of a 14-hour flight.

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Given the contents of this blog, it might surprise you to learn that in fact we try to eat sensibly during the week and reserve our most decadent dining for the weekends. This recipe definitely falls into the category of indulgence. When I was living in New York, I discovered chocolate babka at Zabar’s, which is pretty much the Platonic ideal of bread + chocolate. Or at least my ideal. While it most definitely originates in Central Europe, I haven’t seen babka in a bakery there (the fact that there aren’t many Jewish people left to bake it being the obvious reason). We have tried a variety of similar things with different names, all good but not quite babka.

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There is not a mistake in the title – yes, it is Valeria. Valeria was my grandmother, who I never met, but I was named after her. Everybody in the family remembers her as an amazing cook and queen of Hungarian recipes.  During the war (WWII), she ran a small workers’ kitchen, and her cooking is still remembered by those who outlived her. The problem with my grandmother’s recipes is that she wrote them for herself. She did not write a lot about how to prepare this cake,  at which temperature to cook it, how long to cook it, what kind of cake pan to use. I tried to check online and asked some friends but when I mentioned the ingredients, they said “no flour? you must be missing a page!”. So I looked into early twentieth and late nineteenth-century cookbooks, and there it was. Potato torte,  at least 4-5 versions. Mr. Kugler (a Hungarian pastry celebrity from the early twentieth century) explains a lot about the cake, but my questions were still unanswered.  It seems that since then this recipe has been forgotten. So we had to experiment and bring it back. The main difference between my grandmother’s and Mr. Kuglers recipe is that my grandmother wrote it during or right after war, so she used a limited range of ingredients.  Her version of the cake is great not only for people with gluten intolerance but for people watching their fat intake and for people who watch their wallets. A great cake for hard economical times.

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