les temps perdu......

ok, so this from the nytimes......i've never had this dish, but now want a taste very, very badly......

The Lost Strudel

By NORA EPHRON
Published: December 28, 2005

FOOD vanishes.

I don't mean food as habit, food as memory, food as biography, food as metaphor, food as regret, food as love, or food as in those famous madeleines people like me are constantly referring to as if they've read Proust, which in most cases they haven't. I mean food as food. Food vanishes.

I'm talking about cabbage strudel, which vanished from Manhattan in about 1982 and which I've been searching for these last 23 years.

Cabbage strudel is on a long list of things I loved to eat that used to be here and then weren't, starting with frozen custard; this delectable treat vanished when I was 5 years old, when my family moved to California, and my life has been a series of little heartbreaks ever since.

The cabbage strudel I'm writing about was sold at an extremely modest Hungarian bakery on Third Avenue called Mrs. Herbst's. I initially tasted it in 1968, and I don't want to be sentimental about it, except to say that it's almost the only thing I remember about my first marriage. Cabbage strudel looks like apple strudel, but it's not a dessert; it's more like a pirozhok, the meat-stuffed turnover that was a specialty of the Russian Tea Room, which also vanished.

It's served with soup, or with a main course like pot roast or roast pheasant (not that I've ever made roast pheasant, but no question cabbage strudel would be delicious with it). It has a buttery, flaky, crispy strudel crust made of phyllo (the art of which I plan to master in my next life, when I will also read Proust past the first chapter), with a moist filling of sautéed cabbage that's simultaneously sweet, savory and completely unexpected, like all good things.

Once upon a time I ate quite a lot of cabbage strudel, and then I sort of forgot about it for a while. I think of that period as my own personal temps perdu, and I feel bad about it for many reasons, not the least of which is that it never crossed my mind that my beloved cabbage strudel would not be waiting for me when I was ready to remember it again.

This is New York, of course. The city throws curves. Rents go up. People get old, and their children no longer want to run the store. So you find yourself walking uptown looking for Mrs. Herbst's Hungarian bakery, which was there, has always been there, is a landmark for God's sake, a fixture of the neighborhood, practically a defining moment of New York life, and it's vanished and no one even bothered to tell you. It's sad. Not as sad as things that are truly sad, I'll grant you that, but sad nonetheless.

On the other hand, the full blow is mitigated somewhat by the possibility that somewhere, somehow you'll find the lost strudel, or be able to replicate it. And so, at first, you hope. And then, you hope against hope. And then finally, you lose hope. And there you have it: the three stages of grief when it comes to lost food.

The strudel was not to be found. I spent hours on the Internet looking for a recipe, but nothing seemed like the exact cabbage strudel I'd lost. At a cocktail party, I lunged pathetically at a man named Peter Herbst, a magazine editor who my husband had led me to believe was a relative of the Herbst strudel dynasty, but he turned out not to be.

I also spoke to George Lang, the famous Hungarian restaurateur, who was kind enough to send me a recipe for cabbage strudel, but I tried making it and it just wasn't the same. (The truth is, most of the genuinely tragic episodes of lost food are things that are somewhat outside the reach of the home cook, even a home cook like me who has been known to overreach from time to time.)

About two years ago, when I had landed in what I thought was the slough of despond where cabbage strudel was concerned and could not possibly sink lower, my heart was broken once again: the food writer Ed Levine told me that the strudel I was looking for was available, by special order only, at Andre's, a Hungarian bakery in Rego Park, Queens. Ed hadn't actually sampled it himself, but he assured me that all I had to do was call Andre and he'd whip some up for me.

I couldn't believe it. I immediately called Andre. I dropped Ed Levine's name so hard you could hear it in New Jersey. I said that Ed had told me Andre would make cabbage strudel if I ordered it, so I was calling to order it. I was prepared to order a gross of cabbage strudels if necessary. Guess what? Andre didn't care about Ed Levine or me. He refused to make it. He said he was way too busy making other kinds of strudel. So that was that.

But it wasn't.

This week, I heard from Ed Levine again. He sent an e-mail to say Andre had opened a branch on the Upper East Side. It was selling cabbage strudel over the counter. You didn't even have to order it, it was sitting right there in the bakery case. Ed Levine had eaten a piece of it. "Now I understand why you've been raving about cabbage strudel all this time," he wrote.

The next day my husband and I walked over to Andre's. It was a beautiful winter day in New York - or my idea of a beautiful winter day, in that you barely needed a coat. We found the bakery, which is also a cafe, went inside and ordered the cabbage strudel, heated up. It arrived. I lifted a forkful to my lips and tasted it.

Now I'm not going to tell you that (like Proust tasting the madeleine) I shuddered; nor am I going to report that "the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory." That would take way more than cabbage strudel. But Andre's cabbage strudel was divine - crisp but moist, savory but sweet, buttery beyond imagining. It wasn't completely identical to Mrs. Herbst's, but it was absolutely as delicious, if not more so.

Tasting it again was like being able to turn back the clock, like having the consequences of a mistake erased; it was better than getting a blouse back that the dry cleaners had lost, or a cellphone returned that had been left in a taxi; it was a validation of never giving up and of hope springing eternal; it was many things, it was all things, it was nothing at all; but mostly, it was cabbage strudel.

Nora Ephron is a writer and director.