ZUTCH ZUTCH ZUTCH ZUTCH
Occasionally on Saturday mornings my mom would serve us bowls of crumbly / crunchy / light / dense / filling / buttery / salty / sweet fried dough topped with cinnamon sugar. If you ask my siblings or me, we will all tell you it was our favorite growing up. I consider this dish to be a magical and important part of my childhood.
We called it Zutch.
The story of Zutch begins in 1941, during the middle of World War II, when everyone in the Unites States was issued ration books in order to purchase certain items at the grocery store. My grandmother, Dolores Terwoord, was working on her dissertation in Chemistry at Catholic University of America in Washington D.C. She lived in a boarding house and was surviving on peanut butter and crackers. Somehow she was invited to a meal group organized and run by Mrs. Von Wald, a woman who would cook large meals for students through her home across from the University. Mrs. Von Wald would collect and pool the ration cards from each of her guests. This allowed her to buy a variety of scacer ingredients including meat, butter, and sugar. This way she could make complex, flavorful, and healthy recipes. She served around 20 people each night in her home dining room, catering to students of all disciplines and areas of study. Hearing this, I would imagine a long wooden table filled with engineers, physicists, historians, mathematicians, lawyers, philosophers, and nurses chatting together, passing around bread, and slurping bowls of stew. I am sure it was something they each looked forward to after a long day of research. Their shared community was also probably an important way to find joy in the middle of wartime.
One day Mrs. Von Wald became sick and she passed on her cooking duties to her husband, Mr. Von Wald. He apparently had little cooking interest or experience was suddenly thrown into preparing a meal for twenty people and his own family. But he had a solution... He went into the kitchen and gathered the eggs, milk, flower, and oil, creating a thick batter. He then poured into the stove skillet and scrambled it with butter. His final touch was to sprinkle it with sugar and cinnamon. As he served it to his guests, who ate it all up, they asked what they were eating. As I understand it, he christened his invention “Zutch.� Dolores wrote down this new recipe and pocketed it for later.
I called my mom to confirm the details of this story and then decided to do a little background research of my own. I searched the internet for “Von Wald 1940s Washington D.C.”
My search led to this census report on a genealogy website. A couple named Water and Estelle Von Wald lived in Washington DC in 1940. They were 49 and 55 years old with four children, almost all in their early 20’s. They also listed a lodger who lived with them, probably a student at the University. I searched for their listed address, 925 Monroe Street, and discovered that The Catholic University is only around the corner.... I found the place where Zutch was born.
925 Monroe St appears to no longer exist. According to Google Street View, it is just an empty plot of land.
In 1942 Dolores was one of two women in the United States to receive a Ph.D in Chemistry. She then moved to Chicago to work at the University of Chicago under Nobel Prize Winner James Franck and Peter Pringsheim. They were important scientists who had fled from Europe just before the war. Everyone in the lab spoke German together. While working, Dolores met Robert Lad, a materials scientist in the lab next door. He had been omitted from the draft to work on the secret branch of the Manhattan Project at the university. They got married and moved to Cleveland in 1946, where Robert worked at NASA and Dolores eventually taught chemistry at St. John’s College. They had nine children together. I have never been a scientist and always preferred the humanities, but when I was in third grade I had to participate in a school science fair. I don’t remember my project that well, but I know I was struggling and so I recall my grandma sending me a letter with diagrams of molecules in different configurations. They were beautiful drawings.
Although cooking does involve processes of Chemistry, I think Dolores’s love of cooking probably aligns more with Walter than Estelle. With a family of eleven, she had to be creative with how to feed everyone each night. Cooking probably felt like a burdensome chore, but she was raised in the Depression and very resourceful. She never wasted anything. Every bowl was wiped clean, every last bone boiled into a broth to be used in the next meal, and she maintained a bursting vegetable garden in the backyard with leftovers canned for the winter. The meals that I associate with my grandmother usually connect to her Czech and German heritage. I hear stories of her cooking knedlicky (dumplings) and sauerkraut. At Christmas she made soft gingerbread cookies in the shape of little men. I have nostalgia for aggressively biting off their arms or heads and then having them dance around the dinner table. My younger brother loved her applesauce so much that we specifically visited my grandparents in Cleveland one fall so that they could make it together after the harvest. And then there is of course, famously, Zutch. It is still unclear how exactly Mr. Von Wald had come up the recipe. Was it an accident? Was it complete improvisation? Was it a failed attempt to make pancakes? It is most likely that Zutch actually is poor man’s version of Kaiserschmarrn, (translated as Emperor’s Nonsense), a fancy sweet dessert from Austria that spread throughout Germany, Slovenia, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Croatia.
Kaiserschmarrn is also made from a pancake like batter, but its consistently is more similar to dumplings than Zutch. It is also usually topped with fancy stewed cherries, stuffed with raisins, and coated in powdered sugar. It’s overly decadent.
You can find videos of Wolfgang Puck making Kaiserschmarrn on YouTube for the BBC. I watched about 2 minutes until I became irritated how much batter he wasted, barely scraping the bowl clean and leaving globs of it dripping of the side. Wasting food feels like sacrilege to me, a trait I probably inherited from my grandmother. A family friend was watching me cook at my parent’s house over the summer and said, “You definitely are a Lad.” I think this was because every ingredient I meant to include was fully used and the dishes barely needed to be washed.
Now that I am an adult with my own kitchen, I have made Zutch countless times. I remember devouring bowls of it one summer morning on my deck in Philadelphia with my friends Dianne and Austin as the sun shone down on our faces. I stowed a tupperware container in the basket of my bicycle and rode 3 miles to the museum where I worked as an art handler in Philadelphia and shared it with my co-workers at a potluck lunch. I made it for my guests in Columbus last weekend. (And every time I have proudly told the story of my grandmother and Mr. Von Wald.) I think I like telling this story because it is a chance for me to talk about my grandmother, a woman who accomplished incredible things when there were many unimaginable barriers before her. She passed away in 2011, but I wish I could have asked her to tell me the story about Zutch again in her own words. The story of Zutch is also a chance to reflect on how recipes are transformed as they are passed on from one friend to another or even one culture to another. It is a chance to share an experience from 80 years ago in the present moment. Here is the recipe.
Ingredients:
-
Cooking oil or spray
-
1 batch pancake batter (you can use bisquick, mix or from scratch; follow appropriate directions)
-
1 stick butter or margarine (using less is also ok)
-
Cinnamon sugar (sugar mixed with some cinnamon; my mom always uses Penzey’s Vietnamese Cinnamon)
1. Prepare pancake batter according to chosen recipe
2. Generously oil or spray a large pan
3. Heat the pan over medium-high heat.
4. Pour in entire batch of pancake batter
5. Turn heat down to medium or medium-low.
6. Cook batter until bottom is set (bubbles will form on top)
7. With a spatula, gently lift portions of the batter and turn over—
8. When that is cooked, continue to lift and turn as if making scrambled eggs
9. When almost cooked, pour melted butter on top
10. Then sprinkle the cinnamon sugar
11. And stir until it’s all coated
It is Zutch a good lunch!
Lydia Smith February 2020