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,........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)