With the arrival of Adar and Purim drawing near, kitchens across the Jewish world begin to fill with Hamantaschen. In this corner of Central Europe, though, the flavours of the season often look a little different: flódni on dining tables, with its dense, layered promise of poppy seed, walnut, apple, and plum jam — and something smaller and humbler to snack on at home, and to slip into the Purim basket almost unnoticed: kindli.

Kindli is another pastry that, like flódni, is considered typically Hungarian. It is a relatively new addition to Jewish Hungarian cuisine; it emerges only at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, the very period when flódni does. And if one looks deeper, it’s not a coincidence.

Its name derives from the German Kind, through the Yiddish kind, complete with the diminutive ‑ele suffix, affectionately meaning “little child,” a reference to its shape, which really does resemble a swaddled baby. But the name also makes sense when you think about how kindli came into being. They are, in a way, the offspring of flódni: not a smaller version of the same thing, but something born from what the larger pastry leaves behind. Scraps of dough, spoonfuls of poppy seed or walnut filling too much to discard and too little for another whole pastry, are gathered into this modest, rolled form. The etymology and the method mirror each other: a small, self‑contained continuation of something larger.

What makes kindli so suggestive, at least in my kitchen mythology, is that they are essentially a dessert of remains. They begin where flódni ends. Kindli emerge from that in‑between state; from the surplus that resists waste, from the fragments that insist on being used. They offer a quiet assertion that what is left can still be shaped into something coherent. Kindli step in as the quick, less demanding solution: roll out what one has, spread what is left, slice, bake, and suddenly the leftovers have an afterlife of their own. What was once a layered whole becomes portable fragments of reinvention.

That logic is not culinary so much as historical. Jewish continuity has often depended on this same calculus: what can be saved, what can be carried forward, what can be rebuilt from what is left. Central European Jewish history in particular is a record of partial survivals; languages held together by memory alone, rituals reconstructed from fragments, families reconstituted from whoever returned. The archive is never whole; it is always the remainder that demands interpretation.

Kindli, in their modest way, enact that ethic. They refuse the binary of abundance or nothing. They inhabit the middle ground; the space where one salvages meaning under constraint, where one works with what they have rather than mourn what they don’t. Their spiral is not decorative; it is a form of insistence, of resistance. A small, edible argument that the leftover is not the lesser, that the fragment can still carry sweetness, that the afterlife of the whole may be more resilient than the whole itself.

And so, to make kindli is to practice a minor form of responsibility: to save what can be saved, even when it seems insignificant. It is a gesture that belongs as much to history as to the kitchen; a refusal to let the remains disappear into oblivion.

In many Hungarian-Jewish homes, kindli naturally gravitate towards Purim, and especially towards mishloach manot, exchanged in keeping with the command to send portions of food amidst the feasting. Kindli is the kind of pastry that seems made for mishloach manot: compact, easy to share, sturdy enough to travel, their spiral hiding the same fillings you would expect in a slice of flódni, though never all at once. Where flódni layers its abundance in a single, declarative structure, kindli offers its sweetness one flavour at a time, a modest portion of poppy seed or walnut folded into its coil. They are not the star of the holiday table, not the showpiece cake, but the small, generous units that move from hand to hand in paper bags and boxes, the way stories and memories travel on Purim.

Purim marks the revelation of what stays masked: Esther’s concealed Jewish identity, God’s veiled presence in the Megillah, the precarious safety that flips into triumph only when costumes come off. Hidden miracles emerge from natural disguises. Flódni wears its abundance on display; served sliced, the poppy seed, walnut, apple, and plum jam layers speak plainly, but kindli, which look plain on the outside, spiral their sweetness shut, a walnut or poppy seed surprise revealed only on tasting. That uncertainty, that necessary trust before the bite, captures the holiday’s inversion: from threat to triumph, concealment to defiant joy, the remains of one form revealing sweetness in another.

Here, triumph is rarely grand. It is the quieter work of salvaging what has not yet been lost, of gathering the remnants and giving them form, of insisting on sweetness where little should remain, of staying present, still, in spite of everything. Kindli carry that logic quietly; a small, steady gesture towards survival in a world that has taken so much.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)