The Opiate Eaters

A friend recently sent me a poppy seed strudel, an old-world sweet. I was thrilled. Who doesn't appreciate getting cake in the mail?

I wasn't so sure it really was a strudel. My friend, Eric Levin, called it a strudel. The package called it a strudel. I wasn't so sure, and since I think of myself as an old-world guy, my opinion counts. To me, strudels are defined by multiple sheets of thin dough. This strudel was more like a sweet, eggy, brioche-like cake. The poppy seeds were never in question. There seemed to be millions of them.

It wasn't until I'd started eating and noticed the mess I was making that I asked myself why anybody values poppy seeds. They're hard black specks that look like coffee grounds and stick in your teeth, roll around your kitchen counter, drop into cracks. I don't know any other food item where such a large percentage of an ingredient falls off and remains uneaten.

In America, poppy seeds are commonly found on bagels and muffins, less so in pastries or desserts, although I recently discovered poppy seeds in my sponge cake at the fancy Montage Hotel in Laguna Beach, California. (Orange County just doesn't feel like poppy seed territory.) There they were sparingly sprinkled in the cake, more for effect than flavor.

I called my friend to thank him for the strudel and to ask him if he was as irrationally attached to poppy seeds as I am. He said he was. He is a restaurant reviewer for the New Jersey Monthly, so I trust his judgment. He said he liked the crunch and the absence of sweetness.

To me, they have no taste whatsoever, an absence of everything, although I've heard it said that poppy seeds possess "nuttiness." That's one of those all-purpose culinary words. When nobody can describe a flavor, it's frequently nutty.

To me, poppy seeds aren't nutty. They're nothing. But I love them. Levin said it had to do with the part of the world our families were from—Eastern Europe, not far from Turkey, one of the locales where the Papaver somniferum grow. They're also found in Romania, where one of my grandfathers was born. The Papaver somniferum is the plant that provides us not just with poppy seeds but also with heroin. Eating poppy seeds has been known to cause false positives on drug tests.

Levin said, "We eat the seeds in fattening cakes, other people make dangerous drugs from them. We blow out our bodies with cholesterol. They blow out their brains with heroin."

It's always nice to have a deeper understanding of oneself. I cut myself another slice of strudel. This time I buttered it.