My friend’s mother, Halena, is a woman to be admired.  I posted a recipe of hers some time ago, specifically a gefilte fish recipe.  This time, if you’ve read my post about the eighth night of Hanukah dinner we attended, you may recall I marveled at the Viennese dessert Halena served called Biscotten Torte.

Well today was one of many lucky days I have experienced in this life, and Halena came over, with her little leather bound notebook of treasured recipes with an embossed date of 1957 on the cover, to show me how to make the Biscotten Torte.  Halena is not from Vienna but from Poland.  The recipe came from another old Jewish family from Vienna.  The mother and daughter of that family survived the Holocaust by hiding in France.  The daughter left Paris and found her way to India, where, she met and married her husband.  The couple immigrated to the United States after the war and relocated in Los Angeles.