When my daughter Daniela returned from a work trip to Eastern Europe last summer, she raved about the kasha varnishkes at Kafe Jerusalem, a tiny Ashkenazic Jewish restaurant in Lviv, Ukraine. According to her, it was even better than mine.
I pride myself on my recipe, having learned it from my mother-in-law Paula, a kasha varnishkes maven who grew up not far from Lviv, so I found this news perturbing, to say the least.
Recipe: Kasha Varnishkes (Buckwheat Groats, Noodles and Caramelized Onions)
Paula’s version was a simple yet ethereal mixture of caramelized onions; kasha, the hulled groats of buckwheat berries; and varnishkes, one of several Yiddish words for noodles. But often, the dish is bland, lacking in onions with buckwheat that’s too finely ground.
Curious to know what made Kafe Jerusalem’s kasha varnishkes so special, I contacted Marianna Dushar, a food anthropologist in Lviv who focuses on the food of Galicia, which covers parts of western Ukraine and southern Poland.
“First and foremost, it’s all about the kasha,” Ms. Dushar wrote in an email, translating for the restaurant’s chef-owner, Lola Landa.
Around 1880, long before my in-laws came to the United States in 1950, a large wave of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe brought kasha varnishkes to the Lower East Side. Most bought their stone-ground buckwheat from Wolff’s, long the go-to for the grain. Since the 1930s, Birkett Mills has milled Wolff’s buckwheat in its an 18th-century grist mill in Penn Yan, N.Y., where it thrived in the region’s Eastern Europe-like climate. (Today, the company still sells its buckwheat widely, but because the gluten-free, protein-rich, climate-resilient grain has become increasingly popular, there are many brands, including a number of smaller producers, putting their versions on the shelves.)
Ms. Landa uses more darkly roasted European whole groats, now easily found in Slavic or Eastern European grocery stores in the United States. She also plays with the noodles, which have always been bow-tie in my experience. She sometimes makes them from scratch — the day Daniela was there, they were similar to gemelli — and cooked in schmaltz (chicken fat) with griebens (cracklings).
Early in the history of kasha varnishkes, cooks would roll dough, cutting it into squares, which are then painstakingly pinched into tiny rectangles to resemble bow ties. But that changed in 1883, when the A. Goodman company, founded in 1865 by Augustus Gutkind, a Polish baker for the Union Army who Americanized his last name to Goodman, became mechanized, adding first square matzos, then bow-tie and other noodles to its product line. For immigrant housewives, boxed noodles not only made life easier, but they were also one of the first American products to be certified kosher, becoming central to what the dish is now.
For a final flourish, Ms. Landa, whose restaurant has stayed open since the full-scale Russian invasion even when used as a bomb shelter, simmers the groats at a gentle boil, then cooks them with more schmaltz or griebens. Oil is traditional for Hanukkah, nodding to the miracle of the oil that underpins the holiday. But, with new inspiration from Kafe Jerusalem, I’ll make a slightly altered version of the kasha varnishkes, served as a main dish with salad, or accompanied by roast chicken or brisket.
I only hope that Daniela approves.
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