Beginning my own desire to make the recipes I grew up eating, the recipes fill me with comfort and a sense of self, recipes that comprise how I connect with my Bubby, with whom we share a language barrier. Food is our language. These recipes have become my way to connect with my family history and heritage that is often fraught, vulnerable to loss through generations, through assimilation in Canada, from the former Soviet Union, a place from which my mother and Bubby sought religious and personal freedom. Sharing present and historical oral narratives is a way of preserving that which makes us most connected to ourselves and others. The literal translation of the German word strudel is "whirlpool". It derives from the Indo-European root "to flow". My Bubby told me that strudel means to be wrapped up with the world.
Ending with the performance, an exploration of strudel making techniques of Viennese strudel dough where, with the help, we stretched the dough to the thinness of being able to see the pattern of the fabric. Getting the ball rolling, this created a space to which the conversation of inter-generational transmission and relational experience opened. A space of warmth and comfortability that was supported by every person in the room, contributing their presence, their own experiences and memories of strudel, their fears about doing a new thing "the wrong way", questions about the process, and sentiments that could be expressed freely.
Ending with the performance, an exploration of strudel making techniques of Viennese strudel dough where, with the help, we stretched the dough to the thinness of being able to see the pattern of the fabric. Getting the ball rolling, this created a space to which the conversation of inter-generational transmission and relational experience opened. A space of warmth and comfortability that was supported by every person in the room, contributing their presence, their own experiences and memories of strudel, their fears about doing a new thing "the wrong way", questions about the process, and sentiments that could be expressed freely.