“She could light up a room like nobody’s business,” chef Marissa Lippert says of her grandmother Beatrice, whom everyone called Bebe. She passed along her resilience, independence, and talent for baking to Marissa, who is a chef and nutritionist in Brooklyn.
Marissa would sleep over at Grandma Bebe’s house when she was little and the duo would stay up to watch “Golden Girls” and bake in Bebe’s 1980s yellow and green kitchen. They made brownies, coconut macaroons, and the apple kuchen Bebe was known for. Somewhere between a cake and a tart, Bebe’s rendition of the sweet was baked in a square or rectangular baking dish, creating crispy corners Marissa always requested.
No one in the family knows precisely where the recipe originated, but Marissa suspects it might have come with Bebe’s parents who emigrated from Austria-Hungary to the United States. Bebe’s father worked in the wholesale butter and egg business “and there’s a lot of butter in the kuchen,” Marissa joked when she first told us about Bebe for a Schmaltzy event in 2017.
When Marissa opened her cafe and catering company Nourish Kitchen + Table in the West Village in 2013, she knew Bebe’s kuchen would be a fan favorite, and she was right. She’s updated Bebe’s recipe over the years, creating versions fit for the season like this summertime blueberry and peach kuchen with lavender pastry cream as well as a strawberry-rhubarb rendition with rose pastry cream, and mixed berries with currants and lemon or lime pastry cream.
Marissa knows Bebe would be happy that she’s made the recipe her own. As we watched her prepare the recipe in her apartment in Brooklyn this summer, she told us: “You can really use the kuchen base as a blank palette. Make it your own. Bebe would be proud!”
Cooking notes: To customize the pastry cream, swap the lavender for 1 tablespoon of another edible floral or citrus element like dried rose petals, lemon or lime zest. The pastry cream can be made up to a day ahead and stored in the refrigerator until ready to use.