Duff Goldman Recalls His Great-Grandmother’s Baking Recipes

Tucked into Esther Steinberg safety deposit box in Wichita, Kansas was her prized recipe for strudel. She kept it a secret, sharing it with only a few people like her granddaughter Jacqueline Winch. Learning to make the strudel, “was like a right of passage…. Really, it was like a bat mitzvah of cooking,” Jacqueline, who is the mother of famed baker Duff Goldman, explains. 

“It was a two day ordeal, I had to spend the night and the apartment was as big as a normal person’s living room and the kitchen was as big as a closet,” Jacqueline recalls. Mamo, as Esther was known in the family, showed Jacqueline how to stretch the dough across her dining room table, how to bend her wrist just so to prevent the dough from tearing. The result was a translucent dough that was stuffed with an apple marmalade. The secret ingredient? Canned pineapple, mixed into the apple filling. Jacqueline says she was sworn to secrecy. 

It’s one of many recipes Esther left behind in her unique style of writing. “She wrote English phonetically,” Duff explains. “She spelled everything with a Russian accent, which is really funny. So, everything is misspelled, but when you read it, it sounds like you have a Russian accent.” Many of the recipes, which now live in Duff’s Southern California home, are written on stationary from the Hollywood Hat Shop, the store Esther owned in Wichita.

And, “most of her recipes were from the old country,” Jacqueline adds. Esther lived in Halych, a town in western Ukraine until she was a teen, when she immigrated to the United States, settling in Wichita. Inspired by her new home, some of her recipes took on American twists. As for the strudel, no one is quite certain about the recipe’s origin.

Esther was a gifted baker. “She could make any kind of dough. She never took out a book, she just knew what to put in: how many eggs for this kind of dough and how much oil for that kind of dough,” Jacqueline adds. 

“She could make any kind of dough. She never took out a book, she just knew what to put in: how many eggs for this kind of dough and how much oil for that kind of dough”

Among her baking recipes is one for babka, that was forgotten and later revived when Duff was asked to contribute a babka recipe to the Food Network Magazine. He called his mother Jacqueline who shared it with him. It’s not a recipe she makes, but it’s one she loves. A couple of years ago, Duff invited Jacqueline for Seder to meet his then girlfriend Johnna. Knowing his mom’s love of babka, and not living in a traditionally observant home, he baked her a loaf. “Even though it’s very not kosher for Passover,” he acknowledges.

It was shared between Johnna and Jacqueline. “My mom and her were eating it after the Seder and they kind of bonded and it was nice to watch them eat babka and drink coffee,” Duff recalls. After cleaning up, Jacqueline pulled Duff to the side and said quietly: “‘I like her.’ And that was when I really knew, ok, I can marry this girl.”

Today, both recipes are treasured, but neither lives under lock and key. Duff and Jacqueline have decided to share their family recipes — thankfully, with us.