The Curious Tale of Grandma Bess’s Schnecken

Growing up in a family of Jewish matriarchal bakers, I could always count on finding homemade desserts appearing at the end of a meal: pies, cakes, cookies of every kind, and my Grandma Bess Lenox’s ubiquitous – Schnecken. These delectable little pastries were my grandmother’s signature dessert, and the tradition passed along to my mother, Marilyn Lenox Zirl, who picked up the baking baton and ran with it.

For other traditional Jewish families, rugelach was the go-to favorite for holidays, or Oneg Shabbats, or bar mitzvah kiddushes.  In our family, Schnecken reigned supreme. These were not your nonna’s “Schnecken” by definition; they were something else entirely – exclusively made by my grandmother and my Great-Grandmother Rae Weiss before her.

If you’ve never seen either pastry, a rugelach is a bite-sized, rolled up confection made with a cream cheese pastry dough and filled with cinnamon, nuts, and fruit jams or chocolate. These tasty morsels have become as familiar and assimilated as bagels. The “rug” in rugelach means “spiral” or “crescent-shaped” in Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish, and the baking process involves rolling up a triangle of dough much like the shape of a French croissant. In more western regions of Europe, family bakers were making a buttery German version of a sticky bun, filled with raisins and cinnamon, rolled up in a sour cream-based dough, formed into a log, and sliced into rounds. These spiral pastries took their name from the Yiddish word for snail, and they called them “Schnecken.” 

Rugelach

Schnecken

Somewhere in the course of the pastry’s evolution (before their westward migration to America), my baking ancestors re-invented Schnecken into a whole new dessert genre – the unlikely genetic offspring from the shidduch between a rugelach and a croissant – until it became singularly our own. The only similarity is the name.

My grandma Bess’s parents, Rae and Louis Weiss, and my grandfather, Jacob’s parents, Anna and Benjamin Lenovitz, were from the same town, Kovna, Lithuania. The families were friends and they immigrated to the United States together at the time of the Russian pogroms (1903-1906). Both families arrived by boat at the Port of Baltimore. The Weiss clan moved to northern New Jersey, and the Lenovitz’s had a stay in Baltimore, but then moved north to Rockville, Md.

Great Grandma Rae Weiss was a wonderful baker, and probably gets the credit for teaching my Grandma Bess to make Schnecken, though tracing her lineage, the Russian proximity would have yielded rugelach expertise. My grandmother’s sister Goldie also was a prolific baker (if she couldn’t sleep, she’d get up, head to the kitchen, and bake something.) I have to believe that another generation back before Rae, her mother (my great-great grandmother) also must have been a baker, and that generation originated closer to Germany.

So my Grandma Bess brought all that collective cultural knowledge into her American kitchen. She taught my mother, and my mother taught me. All the Weiss women shared baking tips, had conversations about ingredients, and occasionally shared recipes (sometimes these were just oral notes, and not exactly written recipes, which I would discover when I went in search of actual recipes with measured ingredients).

Grandma Bess was always baking something in her spacious kitchen in her home on Nymph Road in West Orange. I loved spending time with her as she moved around the room, gathering ingredients, pulling out utensils, running her mixer on the counter. As my grandparents were building the house, my grandmother led the kitchen design effort to ensure there was a place for everything, and she could float from counter to counter and tend to multiple food creations at once. Today, I imagine that kitchen has a center island, contemporary appliances, and the latest gadgets nestled in their dedicated nooks on the countertops.

In the utility room adjacent to the kitchen (aka laundry room), there was a second stove top and oven, a sewing area, and a large pantry. The aroma of baking, and fragrant scent of spices was omnipresent as you walked in the house. We knew we'd find the green-topped glass cookie jar filled with fresh tollhouse chocolate chip cookies, and the black flowered tin full of sugar-crusted molasses crinkles.

Grandma would bake traditional challah and a sweeter type of bread with a streusel crust I dubbed "Pretty Bread." She'd bake gorgeous, frosted layer cakes, fruit pies and tortes – all delicious. Some were from favorite recipes she'd tested out many times, others were from recipes shared by friends or passed along from relatives.

But Grandma Bess's diminutive dessert gem was an original, and we've never found a recipe that comes close to what our family knew as Schnecken. The Weiss women put their own spin on pastry and the result was like no other.

I found an online discussion on a dessert and baking blog, where posters were intensely debating the rivalry between rugelach and Schnecken, with a focus on the dough, for one thing. Some contend that what makes a rugelach is the cream cheese in the dough, while a Schnecken has sour cream as a mix in. The bakers shared their family recipes and traditions, but none matched what my family had created. Grandma's family adopted the name Schnecken for their creation because of the shape and resemblance to a rolled up snail. But they are nothing like the spiral sticky buns called Schnecken in German or Yiddish.

That's where the dessert fork in the road diverges into a different path.

The Schnecken recipe is labor intensive. I stood in as baking sous chef numerous times, taking a front row seat, trying to absorb as much as I could to learn the process. Grandma Bess's Schnecken start with a flaky yeast dough. It rises several times, gets refrigerated, then rolled out and layered with butter, and folded over in several stages, much like you would do with a pie crust (my grandma’s and my mother’s pie crusts were legendary) but without butter in a block like you would use to make laminated yeast dough for croissants. Once the butter is folded into the dough and it rises again, the dough is shaped with a rolling pin into a large rectangle. That surface is spread with soft peaks of meringue, covered in chopped pecans or walnuts, and sprinkled with cinnamon, and then raisins. The adorned dough is cut carefully into long triangles. There’s one more secret ingredient, which I’ll omit here – ‘cause it’s a secret – and you’ll never guess. (And I gotta keep the family legacy intact in case I want to patent the recipe.) The triangles are rolled up into the snail shape and placed on a parchment lined baking sheet. The prepared Schnecken are covered with a cloth, and they rise one more time before baking in a moderate oven, with some temperature adjustments along the way. About 25 minutes later, what results is a delicate, impossibly flaky, melt-in-your-mouth confection with toasted meringue peeking out the sides. Just before serving them warm, Grandma and Mom would sprinkle powdered sugar over the tops. The little Schnecken were beautiful and their presentation on a platter was always dramatic. One taste and dinner guests would never forget them.

Preparing the dough

Letting yeast rise

Time to rise

Baked pastries

Grandma Bess's Schnecken

Grandma and Mom would whip up a batch of Schnecken when they’d run low, and both bakers always kept a plastic Tupperware tub or two of them in their respective freezers in case guests came to visit. Not your ordinary freezer either. Like mother, like daughter, both households had separate, stand-alone freezers, so you know they were serious bakers.

At my grandmother’s house, she had a large chest-style freezer at the foot of the stairs in the basement, which was down a flight of stairs, with access from the kitchen. It was consistently filled with her creations.

In our basement at the house in Livingston, we had a huge vintage upright GE freezer, which we got from our across-the-street-neighbor, Charlie Daber, when I was a little girl. In the 1950s, the department store, Bamberger’s (the precursor to Macy’s) would pitch in a free freezer to customers who bought a subscription to frozen meat. Dad and Charlie dragged that freezer across the street on a dolly, rolling it down our long driveway, through the garage, and into the basement. It stood in the same spot for another 45 years or so. We had that GE freezer forever, and it worked better than any other appliance. It was a classic. 1950s appliances were styled to look like automobiles of the era. The workhorse freezer was a heavy metal white Chevy with chrome highlights and grillwork, a sleek aerodynamic door handle, and a turquoise solid plastic interior. Mom filled our freezer with her baked goods just like my grandma did. You could also find plastic containers with frozen homemade chicken soup, leftover kugel, and cookies and brownies galore.

There must have been Schnecken at every meal these two women served – whether it was a small gathering like an intimate dinner party or a holiday-sized event – no meal was complete without a platter of Schnecken.

When Grandma had gotten older and was ailing with dementia and cancer – before she went to the nursing home – we had caregivers in the house. One very kind personal aide, Sheila, was a charming, gregarious, and empathetic East Indian woman who was also a fabulous cook. Sheila was able to make a connection with my grandmother over their love of cooking and baking. Sheila would take out a couple of Schnecken from the freezer and give them to my grandmother for dessert after helping her eat. Grandma loved them. “Ooh,” she’d say as she ate them, “these are so good.” But she did not remember that she made them.

We sold my grandmother’s house after she died in 1989, and there were still containers of Schnecken in the freezer. We took them to our house – and put the Schnecken in our giant freezer. The tradition continued, and the legacy passed on to my mother.

When Mom was bored, or stressed, (or had insomnia like her Aunt Goldie), or happy, or planning a dinner or holiday gathering, she would be sure to set aside time to make Schnecken. I would watch her in the kitchen, help out as best I could, and marvel at how carefully and precisely she created these desserts, even though it looked effortless.

Over the years, I’d simply pay attention, and act as her pastry assistant.  I didn’t want to interrupt the master at work. But as she got older, and smart phones put cameras in our pockets, it occurred to me that I should be documenting the Schnecken-making process. I photographed my mother at work in the kitchen, reviewed every step of the recipe with her, and filmed the whole procedure. Sometimes, I’d take over some of the steps as we made them together, shadowing her so I could learn how thick and wide to roll out the yeast dough, how fluffy to make the meringue, how to sprinkle the cinnamon and nuts over the surface, how to cut the correct size triangles, and where to place a small dab of the secret ingredient, before rolling up the pastries into their eponymous shape.

They always came out of the oven as fragrant and beautiful little snails of puffy, flaky yeast dough with baked meringue peeking out of the sides, all in rows on a cooling rack awaiting their dusting of powdered sugar before serving them warm to guests.

All my life, there were Schnecken in the freezer.

We were preparing to sell the Livingston house after my mother retired. I wanted to find a new home for the vintage (now probably antique) GE Upright Food Freezer with its Chevy-like chrome fixtures. I wasn’t able to sell it, and sadly, it stayed with the house. I knew the builder who bought our house wouldn’t know what it was, how it still worked perfectly after 59 years, and what a lovely antique it was. I knew it would just be unceremoniously scrapped and hauled away to some landfill and it broke my heart to leave it there. We could not take it to the townhouse, and it would just add to our moving expense to transport it and store it. 

We emptied out the freezer and took the contents with us to our new rental townhouse in West Orange, where we had a big LG kitchen refrigerator with a pullout freezer drawer, and another older refrigerator (kept in the garage) with a small upper freezer section.

Mom made Schnecken in the townhouse kitchen – a much larger space than we had in the Livingston house, but not as enormous as Grandma’s kitchen. We only had a few dinner guests in that townhouse during that last year and a half of her life. But she must have made Schnecken 3 or 4 more times because the freezers were full of them.

Once we were settled in the townhouse, Mom reconnected with her life-long high school friend, Pearl Bass, who lived with her husband Marvin in Livingston. They invited us to dinner at their home. Of course, Mom brought a plate of Schnecken wrapped in foil. As we walked in the house, Pearl took one look at the mystery foil package and said, “Oh my god, your mother’s Schnecken!” She knew immediately. Pearl was a huge fan of my grandmother’s cooking, and she was so happy to have them. Mom’s high school friends Pearl, Marcia, and Phyllis had been to numerous meals at Grandma’s house and had tasted her desserts many times.

Mom died that April of 2018, after a two-month hospital stay. I was devastated and all alone. I had made the decision to leave New Jersey and move to California. I had exactly 60 days before I would leave.

Now I was spending all my time clearing out rooms, packing, deciding what to sell or give away, and what to keep for my journey across the country.  I opened up the freezer and saw Mom’s last batch of Schnecken lovingly nestled in foil layers in their plastic freezer-safe bins.

A few weeks before the move, I stopped purchasing most groceries, especially frozen items, since I knew I’d have to clean out the fridge and freezer and could not take anything with me on a plane to California. I gave a neighbor much of the freezer contents, but I kept the Schnecken for myself.

I spent every second of every day cleaning and packing, and I barely slept or ate anything at all. I lost so much weight that I was down to just 112 pounds when I finally left New Jersey. But as each awful day ended, physically and emotionally drained from packing up my life, I pulled out one or two of Mom’s Schnecken, heated them up for a few minutes, sprinkled on powdered sugar, and had a warm embrace with my mother’s baking, reminding me of her and my grandmother and the love they put into in each sweet bite. I inhaled the warm yeast dough, the aromas of cinnamon and toasted meringue, and sat with the memories of Mom telling me about Grandma and her family. I missed my mother terribly. But I savored those moments until the last two Schnecken were the only ones left. They were perfectly delicious and I cried as I ate them, knowing I’d never taste them again.

Even if I could make them myself, they will never taste as good as Grandma’s or Mom’s Schnecken.