Kuchen—A Love Story
When I was eleven years old, my mother took me for Kaffee und Kuchen | coffee and cake at the Café Landtmann in Vienna. We sat in an elegant room with high ceilings, under severely beautiful lamps. We were tourists, like several other customers, but there were a handful of old Austrian men, too, wearing little gold-rimmed glasses and dark scarves and frowning as they read the newspaper. We were served by a waiter with an immaculate handlebar moustache. My mother’s coffee, eine Wiener Melange, came with a glass of sparkling water on a silver tray. My Apfelstrudel—a rolled pastry with a filling made from thinly sliced apples, white breadcrumbs, sugar, and raisins—came freckled with icing sugar and mit Schlagobers | with whipped cream. I have never forgotten it.
On that trip, the only big family holiday of my childhood, I ate not only Apfelstrudel but also sour-cherry-stuffed Kirschstrudel; Topfenstrudel filled with quark, an ethereal dairy product somewhere between yoghurt and cream cheese; Mohnstrudel fudgy with poppy seed paste. There were other kinds of cake, too; a different one at each Konditorei. At Demel, there was Mamorguglhupf, a lofty marbled Bundt cake. At the Hotel Sacher, wedges of velvet chocolate Sachertorte, with their thin, essential layer of apricot jam. At Heiner, you could eat sponge-and-meringue Kardinalschnitte, its alternating yellow and white layers like the gown of the Pope. And at the Café Mozart, Mozartkuchen, a cake adaptation of the famous pistachio-nougat-marzipan chocolate found everywhere in Austria. I thought it was strange that Viennese cakes were not as well-known as French ones. Once, the Habsburg Empire was just as big as the French one, but oh, things change.
To be faced with the display cabinet of a Viennese Konditorei is to realise the weight of choice. Will you have a fondant pink Putschkrapfen (a boozy little petit four) or a slice of chocolate and almond Rehrücken (a rich and light sponge, cousin to frangipane)? Will you be tempted by the airy turrets of Malakofftorte (rum, sponge fingers, cream, almonds), or opt for a homelier but no less delicious wodge of Käsekuchen (lactic-bright cheesecake)? We had made the pilgrimage all the way from Aotearoa to Austria, a place where the locals are not famed for being friendly. But we had only friends there, no family; connections chosen, not inherited. Polish Piotr took us for chocolate and caramel Dobostorte, whose eight or nine thin layers my brother and I ate one by one; retired policeman Josef and his wife Gerda, who spoke no Englisch, took us for Pflaumenkuchen | plush butter cake deep-set with ruby plums. Austrian plums were in season and there was, Josef promised, keinen besseren Kuchen.
It thrilled my sober parents to go for Kaffee und Kuchen, an hour stolen from the day solely for sweetness. I had never before seen them so animated. Mum and Dad had their favourite cakes already, established during the year they lived in the city, two decades earlier: Mum favoured a Waldbeerenfleck, a buttery sponge topped with fresh berries, often set in a jelly; Dad almost always went for the Cremeschnitte, a softness of vanilla cream between two shattering pastry sheets.
My parents were not romantic people. At home, they bickered and snipped; life was hard for them in all the usual ways. But they had begun in romance. Their Vienna was not the birthplace of psychoanalysis or the scene of vicious Nazi pogroms, but a place of long summer evenings and Richard Strauss operas. They were lucky to be free of the city’s darker associations: it was only the blank score on which to write the music of their lives. I was taught to love Vienna before I had ever visited—the buildings in their lacy stucco gowns, the singsong variety of German spoken by the locals, the Apfelstrudel dreaming in its pool of crème anglaise. Sometimes it seems to me like the root of all my obsessions.
One afternoon, we took the U-Bahn out to the fifth district and located the apartment, above a supermarket, where they had lived. It looks smaller than I remember, said Dad, that old line—but here, still, was the underground station out of which they had once emerged to find the year’s first snow had fallen. Everything could be romanticised; everything was. On this street corner, said Mum, she had been hit by a car on her way to meet Dad for a Mahler concert: it wasn’t a serious accident, just a bruised leg and a stirring anecdote. Josef had swept in to save the day. She had been, she remembered, wearing her best dress.
Later, I thought often about the fifth district apartment, about how it was lived in by somebody else now. Another person dried their socks on the radiator and shivered when the seasons changed. My parents had returned to that other place, the thing we so mysteriously call real life, and Vienna remained in its 1983 bubble, an exquisite elsewhere. But my parents had decided to love it, and so promised you could make your own myths.
What is the power of a myth? It is a story we tell ourselves about what is worth treasuring. In Vienna, my parents became people who waltzed; people who laughed on the slightest provocation; people who ate astonishing quantities of cake. But some part of the myth could be held onto at home, too. It was the reason they listened to the opera together every Sunday throughout my childhood, three or four hours of music while Mum baked a cake, say, and Dad organised the bookcase. They each paused in their activities when Octavian presented Sophie with the silver rose in Der Rosenkavalier. Wie himmlische, nicht irdische… | How heavenly, unearthly… sings Sophie, in one endless blooming breath. My parents closed their eyes for her top note. It was an interest totally esoteric in their environment, and precious despite and because of this.
My brother and I complained about the opera—why did the singers sound like they were in pain so often?—and sat in our rooms with the doors shut while the soprano made all the windows in the house shiver. But love seeped in regardless. I would recognise Sophie and Octavian’s duet anywhere. And the cake Mum was baking? Pflaumenkuchen with New Zealand plums, eaten during Act III, with cream.
Maddie Ballard is a Chinese-Pākehā writer from Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters, where she won the 2023 Letteri Family Prize for Creative Nonfiction. Her debut essay collection, titled Bound: A Memoir of Making and Remaking, will be published by the Emma Press in 2024. You can read her work in outlets including Landfall, Turbine | Kapohau, and The Spinoff, or on her Substack.