Born in January 1883 in the small Bohemian village of Držkov, by 1912 the confectioner Josef Prousek was living in Vienna with his wife, Rosa Nerad, and running a pastry shop in the ninth district. It was from here that his culinary empire expanded rather rapidly. Prousek opened a larger production facility in the same district in 1921, named AIDA, giving a name to the chain of distinctively retro pink-and-white pastry shops that was to come. By 1939, he owned 11 branches of AIDA in Vienna and kept the chain alive after the Second World War by baking donuts and serving ice cream to American servicemen and introducing the first Italian espresso machine to Vienna. With it, Prousek begat the idea that the pastry shop could be a quick stop as part of a busy day -- that coffee and cake need not be lingered over. Indeed, the average customer today spends about fifteen minutes in AIDA. By the time Prousek died in 1974, having already handed his business over to his children, AIDA was an integral part of Vienna's sweet culinary scene. Indeed, AIDA's endearing steadfastness makes it seem almost eternal.
The dessert AIDA is best known for is its Cremeschnitte, a slice that would seem to owe something both to the French mille-feuille and the Slovenian kremšnita from Bled, as the above photograph shows (which, incidentally, is from Cafe Central and not AIDA). Though Prousek cannot claim to have originated the idea, for German-language cookbooks dating back to the nineteenth century contain recipes for this decadently creamy and flaky slice, AIDA's is certainly the best known and most-beloved in all Vienna. Notable is that, although AIDA has used the same recipe for Cremeschnitte since 1913, for decades they've been achieving the same result without Prousek's original, handwritten instructions. In 1943, he wrote down his Cremeschnitte recipe but it was thought to have been lost entirely until earlier this year, when it was discovered in the basement of the AIDA branch in Bognergasse, along with a bunch of other recipes, cake designs, and old shopping lists. What makes his Cremeschnitte so distinct is two-fold, according to his great-grandson, Dominik: lots of air beaten in the cream filling and a thick glaze on top.
