Chocolate Almond Crumb Bars

It is four-fifteen on a Thursday afternoon in November, and I just got home from school. Thirty-seven years of coming through that door at four-fifteen and dropping my bag on the chair by the stairs, and the chair still has the same indentation. My husband Marvin says I should get a new chair. I say the chair knows me by now, which is more than I can say for most people.

I changed out of my teaching clothes — I still wear teaching clothes, which means I dress like a person with standards, unlike certain colleagues who appear to have retired from the concept of a blazer before they retired from education — and I came into the kitchen. The rugelach dough has been resting in the refrigerator since last night, wrapped in three disks of plastic, cold and waiting. Tonight I roll them out. Tonight they bake. The kitchen will smell like my mother, and I will stand at the counter feeling fifty-nine and fifteen at the same time, which is, I have come to understand, just how it goes when you make your dead mother’s food.

My name is Ruth Feldman. I grew up in the Bronx, on the Grand Concourse, in a two-bedroom apartment that smelled like chicken soup from October through April and like brisket on every holiday and like something good always, always something good. My father, Irving, pressed coats on Seventh Avenue for thirty years. He was a union man, an FDR Democrat, a man who read the Times in the morning and the Post in the evening and said what he meant and meant what he said and kissed my mother every evening when he walked through the door. He did this for forty-one years. I did not understand it was extraordinary until I went looking for a man who would do the same thing, which took considerably more effort than Irving made it look.

My mother was Sylvia Rosen, and Sylvia cooked the way other people breathe: without effort, without anxiety, with the absolute confidence of a woman who had learned from her mother who had learned from her mother in a shtetl in Russia that no longer exists. She made the Ashkenazi standards — brisket braised for six hours, matzo ball soup with fluffy balls because she held the dense-ball position with religious conviction, challah every Friday, kugel, latkes, chicken with everything. But her rugelach were famous. I use that word deliberately. Our neighbor Mrs. Kowalczyk — Polish, Catholic, not exactly the target market — once knocked on our door specifically to ask if there were any left over. Sylvia gave her half a dozen and came back inside and said, with the satisfaction of a woman whose theory of the universe had been confirmed, “She knows.” This was Sylvia’s highest compliment: acknowledgment that a person had correctly perceived the quality of a thing.

I watched Sylvia make rugelach approximately four hundred times and absorbed almost none of the actual technique, because when you are a child watching your mother do something magnificent, you are not watching — you are simply breathing the same air, cataloguing sensory details, building a memory you don’t yet know you’re building. I remember the smell of the cream cheese dough. I remember the sound of the rolling pin on the floured board — a soft, rhythmic pressure, not the aggressive assault of a woman who distrusts her dough. I remember her hands spreading apricot jam in a thin, even layer that went to within a quarter inch of the edge, no further. I remember the walnuts, roughly chopped, and the raisins, and the cinnamon sugar she mixed in a small bowl by feel, and how she scattered everything over the jam with a casual confidence that looked like improvisation and was, I now know, the opposite of improvisation. It was thirty years of repetition wearing the costume of spontaneity.

I did not learn to cook as a child. Not really. I learned to eat. The cooking came later, when I was fifteen, and my father had his first heart attack.

Irving was forty-seven. He survived, but the man who came back from the hospital was a quieter version of the man who had gone in — slower, grayer, the ease gone from his walk. He went back to the factory too soon because the bills didn’t pause for cardiac events, and he worked for another ten years, each year a little less of him, the machine taking what the heart attack had started taking. I watched this happen the way you watch weather: gradually, and then all at once. And at fifteen I decided I would learn Sylvia’s food. Not because I planned to need it yet. Because if I lost my father — and I could see, even then, that losing him was not a question of whether but of when — the food was how I’d keep him. The food was how I’d keep both of them.

Irving died in 1985, at fifty-seven, of a second heart attack. I was twenty-eight, a teacher, a new wife. I cooked brisket at the shiva and fed sixty people. Sylvia ate a plate and said, “It’s almost as good as mine,” which was the highest praise Sylvia Rosen had ever given anyone, including God. I held onto that sentence for eighteen years, until she was gone and I had nothing left to hold but the recipes.

The honest version of this story is that Sylvia never gave me the rugelach recipe. Not because she was withholding it — Sylvia was a teacher in her own right — but because she didn’t have one. Not written down. The rugelach existed in her hands, in her judgment, in the accumulated knowledge of a woman who had been making them since her own mother showed her, and her mother had learned in a world that no longer exists. When Sylvia died in 2003 — pancreatic cancer, two months from diagnosis to death, the speed of it still feels like an assault — I served her brisket and her matzo ball soup at the shiva and I didn’t cry because crying would have interfered with the cooking and the cooking was the mourning. And then I came home to Oceanside and spent the next year trying to reconstruct the rugelach from memory. From sense memory. From the ghost of watching her hands.

The first batch was wrong. Too dense; I’d overworked the dough and it hadn’t been cold enough. The second was better but the jam was too thick, a wall of sweet that overpowered everything. The third I burned at the edges. The fourth batch my husband Marvin — an accountant from Queens with a sense of humor so dry it is practically a geological formation — ate without comment, which is his way of telling me something is almost right but not quite. He is a very precise man in his silences. I finally got it sometime around 2006, three years after she died. The dough tender and flaky, the filling exactly the right ratio of sweet to nutty, the crescents baked to a deep, honest gold. I called my sister Miriam in Tel Aviv and told her, and she was quiet for a moment, and then she said, “Ma would have said they were almost as good as hers.”

We both knew that was right. We both laughed. We still talk about her every Friday before Shabbat. We always talk about her.

The rugelach I make now are Sylvia’s, more or less. More, I think, than less. The dough is cream cheese pastry — butter and cream cheese in equal parts, cold, worked together quickly with your fingertips, chilled for at least two hours before you touch it again. This is non-negotiable. Warm dough is why people fail at rugelach. Warm dough is the enemy of flakiness, and flakiness is the entire point. The filling is apricot jam, because that is what Sylvia used and I am not here to innovate on Sylvia. Walnuts. Raisins. Cinnamon sugar, mixed by feel in a small bowl, which I now understand is not improvisation but memory. Each circle of dough gets cut into sixteen triangles, each triangle rolled from the wide end toward the point, tucked point-side-down on the baking sheet so it doesn’t unroll in the oven. Egg wash. Cinnamon sugar on top. Twenty-five minutes at three-fifty, until they are the color of the Grand Concourse in October.

I make them in November because the holidays are coming and the grandchildren will visit and the table will be full again in the way a table should be full. David’s children eat rugelach the way all children eat rugelach: in one bite, reaching for another before they have finished chewing the first. I let them. You do not teach restraint through pastry. You put the plate in the center of the table and you watch them eat and you think about a kitchen in the Bronx and a woman with quick brown hands and apricot jam spread to within a quarter inch of the edge, and you think: this. This is what doesn’t break.

Marvin just walked into the kitchen. He looked at the rugelach cooling on the rack, took one without asking — the correct move — ate it standing at the counter, and said, “Ruthie. These are perfect.”

I told him that was not what my mother would have said.

He said, “Your mother was a harder audience than me.”

I said, “Everyone is a harder audience than you.”

He kissed my cheek and took another one and went back to the living room. Thirty-four years of this. Not bad at all.

Here is the recipe.

The rugelach will always be my mother’s recipe, and I will never stop making it. But sometimes the kitchen asks you for something different — something with weight, with layers, something you can cut into squares and stack on a plate and watch disappear before anyone has said a word. These Chocolate Almond Crumb Bars are that kind of recipe. They are rich enough to silence a room and simple enough that Sylvia herself would have approved of the method, even if she’d have raised an eyebrow at the cream cheese. I made them last Thursday for no reason at all, and Marvin ate three standing at the counter, which is how I know they belong here.

Prep Time: 20 min | Cook Time: 35 min | Total Time: 55 min | Servings: 24

Ingredients

3 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/2 cups granulated sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, slightly softened
2 eggs
1 teaspoon almond extract
12 ounces (2 cups) chocolate chips (we used dark chocolate, semi-sweet is another good option)
8 ounces cream cheese, softened
2/3 cup milk
1 cup slivered almonds

Instructions

Preheat and prep. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Grease the bottom of a 9×13” baking pan or dish. Set aside.
Make the crumb mixture. In the bowl of a mixer, combine flour, sugar and baking powder. Cut butter into small pieces and scatter into the bowl, along with eggs and almond extract. On low speed, combine together until a very crumbly mixture forms. Do not over mix.
Press the bottom layer. Pour 2/3rds of the crumb mixture into the bottom of the prepared pan and spread evenly. Very lightly press down with your fingers, but don’t pack the mixture down. Set aside.
Melt the chocolate filling. In a large microwave-safe bowl, add chocolate chips, softened cream cheese, and milk. Microwave on high for 30 seconds, stir, then microwave for an additional 30 seconds. Stir to combine into a smooth chocolate mixture. If the chocolate isn’t fully melted, microwave again in 20-second intervals, stirring after each, until the mixture is smooth and fully mixed.
Add the almonds. Once the chocolate and cream cheese mixture is melted, add almonds and stir to combine.
Spread the filling. Pour chocolate almond mixture over bottom crust in the prepared pan. Use an offset spatula or spoon to spread to the edges.
Add the crumb topping. Sprinkle remaining 1/3rd of the crumb mixture evenly on top of the chocolate filling.
Bake. Bake for 35–40 minutes, until the edges of the bars and top are lightly golden brown.
Cool and cut. Remove from the oven and cool completely before cutting into squares. (We did 4 rows x 6 rows for 24 pieces, but since these Chocolate Almond Crumb Bars are very rich, smaller squares would also work.)

Nutrition (per serving)

Chocolate Almond Crumb Bars — Because Some Things Deserve to Be Kept on Paper