Schrödinger's Strudels

‘A strudel once closed should never be opened.’

In the last week I’ve discovered that this is a maxim unlikely to gain traction, although the pastry has. Googling apple strudel’s popularity, I found the Apple Strudel Consumption Trends, Analysis and Statistics Report 2023  which relAIbly informed me that ‘Social conversations about apple strudel have increased by 41.88%.’

“Increased since when?” I hear you ask.

Unclear.

The source of this invaluable knowledge was an AI generated platform for the food and beverage industry. GPT’s sticky toffee mitts were all over it—'the dominating diet for Seafood is Vegan.’ A message popped up: ‘Feeling overwhelmed? We get it, you just want easy-to-understand seafood insights.’ Yes. My heart’s desire, once wavering, is now certain.

As with all things AI, it’s easy to find yourself laughing while you read, ‘The fastest rising consumer need for Friends is Snack’, until your mind leaps to Soylent Green is People! visions of humankind’s doom and that scene in Terminator 2when a machine crushes a skull underfoot.

But this piece is not about the end of the world, or the sacrificing of creativity on the altar of consumerism. It’s about Austrian delicacies and things best left undisturbed.

The strudels that opened this can of thought worms were made from a recipe in the back of Meriel Schindler’s The Lost Café Schindler. Meriel was giving a talk about her book—a fascinating delve into her family history prompted by finding coffee cups from the Innsbruck café established by her Jewish grandfather in 1922, and later seized by the Nazis. Nodding to the café theme the event was set up with round tables on which the strudels were to take pride of place. I assembled and froze them ready for baking on the day, only to wake in the early hours realizing I’d been stingy with the filling. I prised the icy strudels open and crammed in spoonfuls of the apple-raisin mixture. The filo mushed and the pastries became unrecognisable. Only a heavy dusting of icing sugar pulled them back from being inedibly ugly.

It set me to wondering whether there are some parts of our lives which should remain sealed. I toyed with the idea that I’d found my calling as the progenitor of Strudelism, a philosophy whose proponent(s) (I won’t be cocky about its attractiveness) consider(s) that some life lids should never be lifted.

Despite being told by my physics teacher when I was fourteen that the scientific world would laugh at me, I do retain some respect for the scientific method. Incidentally, the experience also made me appreciate the phrase l’esprit de l’escalier. On reflection, my “of course they’d laugh at me, I’m fourteen!” wouldn’t have packed a punch, not least because astrophysicists, like grandmasters, tennis players, and stars of anything requiring physical and mental dexterity, begin young.

Committed to testing my theory, I’ve spent the last week strudelizing. These are the responses I’ve received to the question: “Are there things that once closed should never be opened?”

1. Love affairs: This is an understandably common reply. Most people have at one time or another (and another—depending on their recidivist leanings) dipped back into a relationship on which they’d had closure. It can be thrilling. A fingers up to rationality, headily scented with fate. An opportunity to palimpsest over pain, a control alt delete of a programme that’s been subtly disruptive in the background. It’s like unrolling a cut and canned film, inserting scenes in it, and perhaps, oh rapturous sigh, changing the ending. Romantic comedies tell us it’s possible. They say your eyes will meet those of an ex-lover across a crowded room, preferably whilst you’re in boho chic at the launch of your massively successful first novel. But we all know the chances are if you do bump into said ex, you’ll be greasy-haired, wearing unflattering trousers, and carrying a bag from the chemist which, if you’re spectacularly unlucky, breaks and deposits something embarrassing at their feet like a temple offering. If you get past the douche/thrush cream/immodium moment, the pattern will be not dissimilar to the scientific method: first date—excitement; second—testing; third—realization. The thing is, because there are examples of when it does work out, I can’t accept this as proof of concept.

2. Wounds: Often a synonym for No. 1. Taking it literally, I have to challenge it—don’t open old wounds they tell us, except of course if you need to retrieve swabs left behind in negligent operations or bits of overlooked shrapnel.

3. Surströmming: Baltic sea herring, fermented in brine for at least six months and salted to stop the rot—those who’ve sampled it may dispute whether the salt works. All the words used to describe it involve death/excrement/putrefaction. Apparently the smelliest fish in the world, it’s eaten by Swedes with flatbreads, potatoes, sour cream, red onion, chives and dill—aka not a dish you’d want to eat before your some enchanted evening with an ex. It features at Malmö’s Disgusting Food Museum. I don’t know what else is on display there, but for the record I’d like to add fried Tarantula’s body (the legs are manageable, a bit like twiglets, but the abdomen is unspeakable) and a soup I had in Northern China bobbing with lumps of meat shaped like, and with the consistency of, ears. Instagram, Tiktok, and whatever other web ways people advertise their herring-do are riddled with videos of Surströmming can opening, usually out in the open, sometimes under water. A BBC report included a gas-masked cameraman and a Beebster retching on a bench in what I’m fairly sure was Hyde Park. When I first watched clips of people dedicating their 15 minutes of fame to heaving over limp fish strips, I thought nothing would ever induce me to try it. But having written the above, I’m wavering. Curiosity has caught this cat. And what harm could it do? It would at the very least make for an anecdote at a dinner where conversation has devolved to the guests’ favourite A roads. This is reason alone for not consigning Surströmming to permanent closure. And the power of the anecdote, the twist in the otherwise mundane tale, is often an argument for opening up things, isn’t it? In passing, the name does sound a bit Teatime of the Gods. Makes sense—I’ve heard the Gods really dig stinky fish.

4. Nuclear waste silos: This one stands to reason. Or does it? At some point don’t we need to check things are decaying to plan? Can you imagine the conversation in 24,000 years? “Alright Bob, pop down there, eyeball it and report back on whether the Plutonium-239 is now Plutonium-0.” My friend who volunteered this example only to back-track said, “It would be a robot—a RoBob.” I didn’t have the heart to tell him we’d all be RoBobs by then. I do know a fusion physicist from CERN and an engineer who worked at Sellafield, so I could ask them what the form is. Wild speculation being the sometime mother of invention, I’m going to leave silos on the “Possibly consistent with Strudelism” list.

5. Portals to dimensions which contain something rather nasty: A few people suggested this one. It’s been a year since the final season of Stranger Things wrapped and people stopped singing ‘Running up that Hill’, wondering what song would pull them back from hell, and where they’d stashed their yellow Walkman. You can never be sure if what’s on the other side of a portal will be truly awful, a mixture of good and evil or a bit bland. Even if what emerges is the worst, there’s something to be said for banding together to fight the demons. A positive spin on Elpis (spirit of hope/expectation) being the remainder after Pandora opened her pithos is that she/they came out and pierced the darkness. I accept that expectation can be seen as an extension of suffering, and in any case hope is no earthly use if it’s left kicking around at the bottom of a jar.  But with Kate Bush still ringing in my ears, I’m going to keep faith in the redemptive power of being able to find each other’s music and slaying blood-curdling creatures badly in need of manicures.

6. Caskets: These even have the word ‘closed’ attached to them, and often for good reason. However, avid followers of true crime know that sometimes there’s only one way to solve that closed case—get digging.

7. Schrodinger’s Box: Back onto radioactive material—in this case a lump of it in a box with a quantum cat (which may or may not be called Bob), and a Geiger counter which on detecting single atom decay will shatter a flask of poison. While the box is closed you have no idea if the cat is dead or alive, its existence is a superposition of both states. This is a box you should simply observe but never open. You don’t want to destroy the blur of probability and burst a balloon of pop culture. Above all please don’t rob physics students of chat-up lines, because it’s only a step from quantum cats to quantum entanglement and all that swoonsome stuff about particle attraction.

8. Wetherspoons: This one from an American friend made me laugh. I’m going to leave it hanging in the air, like the smell in revamped pubs where the ghosts of spilt pints and disappointment waft up through newly laid lino.

Other contenders were Tutankhamun’s tomb, hoover bags,[1] and Boris Johnson’s political career.

Mention must be made of the discussion I had in a stairwell about whether or not we exist in a time when nothing is left alone, when we can’t accept closure. Do we really insist on cracking open seals, digging up our roots and looking at them more than in years gone by? Is a by-product of being bombarded by small parcels of information that we’re never satisfied with drawing a line? Is questioning everything endemic now? Thinking back to those avid strudlers of a century ago, Freud, Jung et al, I can’t believe that’s the case. We’ve always been Pandoras. And if the failed movement of Strudelism shows us anything, it’s that more often than not it’s best to prise, lever, unlock and open up.

The problem of course is in the ‘never.’ It’s always hard to justify a never. Although I think we can safely say there are two things that fall into this category: Schrödinger’s Box and strudels.

[1] Except when you have to hunt through dust and detritus for that tiny brass key to a locked box of unknown contents which you’ve just sucked up whilst enthusiastically cleaning out a drawer.