Elm Creek Quilts [08] The Christmas Quilt by Jennifer Chiaverini Page A

from her mother, no one knew. Either way, everyone who tasted Gerda’s strudel affirmed that it was the most delicious they had ever tasted: the apples perfectly sliced and flavored with sugar and cinnamon, the pastry flaky and as light as air. Only a privileged few were ever treated to her strudel, and only at yuletide. All year she scrimped and saved her butter and egg money so that come December, she would have enough to purchase all the ingredients for the number of strudel she intended to make that year. She always made two for the family, which were devoured in a matter of minutes at breakfast Christmas morning. The others, sometimes as many as two dozen, she gave as gifts to her friends and to others whom she did not know as well, but who had earned her gratitude for a particular kindness they had shown her in the past year. Only one family other than her own received two strudels without fail every season: Dr. Jonathan Granger’s, most likely because his services were so necessary and his friendship so valuable in a town with only one doctor. “I give you simply the joy and hope of the season,” she would say as she offered a strudel to the lucky recipient, but neither the act nor the gift was as simple as she professed. Come Christmas Eve, when Gerda drove her brother’s horse and wagon from farm to farm and through the streets of their small town distributing her gifts, everyone knew exactly where they stood with her. Some were pleasantly surprised; others ruefully resolved to be friendlier toward the outspoken spinster in the year to come.
    As an unmarried woman living in her brother’s household, Gerda would have been determined not to become a burden. By all accounts she was a hard worker, cooking for the family and tending her brother’s children so her sister-in-law, a skilled seamstress, could earn extra money taking in sewing. Her strudel was already famous throughout the Elm Creek Valley by the time her nieces were old enough to learn her secrets. Later, when her nephews married, she taught their wives. Still, while every Bergstrom woman followed her instructions to the letter with results that would have been applauded in any other family, everyone agreed that Gerda’s strudel remained unmatched in every regard.
    After Gerda died, her cooking took on legendary attributes. More than one young bride marrying into the Berg-strom family fled to her room in tears after the strudel she had labored over for hours met with approving nods from her in-laws and fond reminiscences of the far superior crust or the more sublimely spiced apples Gerda had prepared long ago. Younger generations could only listen enviously as their elders recollected the Christmas feasts Gerda had created single-handedly in a kitchen that for most of her life boasted only a wood-burning stove and a root cellar. Once Sylvia was sent to her room for wondering aloud why Gerda could not have found any more productive use for her time than to haunt the kitchen peeling apples and stretching dough day and night, for that’s what she must have done in order to produce as many pastries as family legend would have it.
    But even though none could equal Gerda in the kitchen, every Bergstrom woman who learned her secret recipe had been armed with the power to win the admiration of young men, the respect of future mothers-in-law, and the envy of the other women whose family had been fortunate enough to receive a gift of the famous Bergstrom strudel.
    Then a time came when so many women of the family knew how to make it that the next generation could not be bothered to learn. Why should they, when another aunt or cousin could be relied upon to make one for the family’s Christmas breakfast and the several others necessary to fulfill Gerda’s tradition of giving them away to the dearest friends of the family? It went unnoticed that, with each aged aunt who passed on or each young wife who moved away with her new husband, a little of Gerda’s