Cherry wisniak days

My great-grandmother lived with my grandparents in her old age. It was the first time since childhood she'd had a garden and she insisted on planting plum and cherry trees. Every spring and summer the whole family harvested the fruit and my great-grandmother set to work making fluden and assorted fruit pies, cherry and plum tzimmes and wisniak, with everyone else assigned jobs ranging from pitting the fruit to clean up duty.

She died before my time but my grandmother continued the tradition. I remember summers with my grandmother listening to the stories while we harvested the fruit and made my great-grandmother's recipes.

All except the fluden. That was more fiddly work, so she generally did that alone and I never did quite learn how my grandmother made it. Classic fluden recipes, are with apple, but in my grandmother's family they were always with plums and cherries.

For years after my grandmother passed I have tried to recreate her cherry and plum fluden, but never quite figured it out. The only one I ever found that came close was this cake made by a bakery at Jerusalem's Mahane Yehuda market. Whenever I would walk past I'd think of my grandmother, buy a few pieces from this stall and try to work once again on reconstructing.

The version from the market was known locally as "Smadar cake", famous for being sold at the old Smadar cinema as a snack.

Last time I walked by was just before covid shut everything down I was sad to see that the elderly man who usually worked there was gone and so were the pies that reminded me of my grandmother's fluden. The young man behind the counter didn't recall the cakes I was talking about, pointing out instead a whole bunch of other fruit pastries the bakery still made.

I do however make tzimmes every year starting with strawberries in late winter, then spring cherries and apricots, summer plums, peaches and nectarines, just like my grandmother used to. Some flavoured with vanilla, some just with a stick of cinnamon.

I always put some away in the freezer to enjoy during the autumn festive season just like my grandmother did, bringing back the fond memories of coming home Rosh Hashana afternoon after a long morning of services at the synagogue to big cold glass beer mugs full of chilled tzimmes topped with a little cream. My grandmother had horrific arthritis in her later decades and could barely walk as far as her garden gate let alone get to shul even for the High Holy Days so she prayed at home. 

I wish now that I would have taken the huge clay jars used to make wisniak that were originally my great-grandmother's. I'm not sure where I'd have space for them but maybe they'd inspire me to try to reconstruct that recipe too. At the very least they'd be special reminders of those distant childhood summers.