food
Showing posts with label food. Show all posts

Jewish Food: Kishka


Sometimes, when I am bored, I will find old delicatessen menus online and flip through them.

I'm not really the target audience for delicatessens, although I remain a longtime patron. The Jewish deli is a uniquely Jewish American creation, originally a German invention that Ashkenazi Jews seized on and made Ashkenazi.

And they sort of went crazy with meat. As I understand it it, red meat wasn't a common part of the Eastern European Jews's diet, where it was often rare, expensive, and difficult to obtain thanks to kosher slaughtering rules. There was meat, certainly, but the dietary staple of many Eastern European Jews were fish and foul.

But in America there was a superabundance of inexpensive meat. And, since Jews must separate their milk products from their meat products, two traditions evolved: The milkhidiker restaurant, which served dairy, or the deli, which served meat. (For those unfamiliar with Jewish dietary laws, fish and foul are, for these purposes, neutral, and could be served at both establishments.)

 And boy did delis serve meat. They still do: massive towers of sandwiches piled high with brisket, pastrami, chopped liver, tongue. 

 Now here is where I should point out that I am a vegetarian, and have been since I was 16. When I go to delis, I mostly eat sides and snack on pickles. But my Jewish food is the food of the milkhidiker restaurant: blintzes, borscht, latkes and the like.

 But still ... when I flip through the old deli menus, I can't help but wonder. Before I turned 16, I had most of the staples, the triple-decker turkey sandwiches, the pastrami on rye. I know the taste of those foods, even if I don't eat them anymore.

 But these older menus have foods on them that I couldn't get in Minnesota. Some you can't really find anywhere anymore, like miltz, a cow's spleen stuffed with garlic and onions, or lungen stew, a cow's lung with garlic and onions; apparently almost any offal can be cooked with garlic and onions and it becomes food.

 But there are a few items that still linger on New York deli menus. Despite my vegetarianism, I will make exceptions when it seems like exceptions must be made, and, in this case, my curiosity about these old Jewish foods got the better of me.

 So when I was in New York recently, I stopped by the Second Avenue Deli, a New York classic dating back to 1954, and ordered two items I have long wondered about. The first was kishka, the second gribenes, and I will write about the first now and the second later.

 I have discussed the word kishkes previously. The word means intestines, and that's, in part, what it is: fat and flour or matzah meal stuffed into an intestinal casing. As I mentioned in my earlier piece, it sometimes goes by the name stuffed derma, which is supposed to be better but sounds frankly disguising to me.

 Kishke used to be a staple of Jewish events, but has since sort of fallen off the map; I would guess that this is because the recipe has changed significantly. It used to be made like cholent, the traditional sabbath meal: slow-cooked, sometimes in the cholent, acquiring the flavor. Now it is usually boiled and served rather quickly, often in an inedible artificial casing, which sort of defeats the point.

 The kishka I had was a pasty, sweet potato-colored mound with no visible casing and a brown gravy on the side. It had an extremely strong umami flavor, but indistinct -- kishka is frequently made with onion and sometimes carrot or celery. None of those flavors could be distinguished. The Joy of Jewish cooking from 1974 has a recipe in which the kishka is covered with apple cider, but this was not done here. 

I suspect this is a food that could easily be revived by foodies. There are vegetarian versions as well, stuffed with potato or simply using oil to replace the fat in the original recipe. Once expects that, slow-cooked and balancing the ingredients, either the original or the vegetarian version cold be tremendous. The deli version wasn't, and I would not eat it again.

 However, there is another meal, almost identical, but the ingredients are stuffed into a chicken neck instead of intestines. This meal is called helzel, and is often made with garlic and black pepper, and I might have to break my vegetarianism to try this if I ever get the chance.

Cooking the East European Way: Ukrainian Deviled Eggs


I've eaten a lot of deviled eggs in my day. I sometimes go party crazy, where I just want to live like there is always a 1970's-style party going on. I even imagine multiple variations of the theme: Fondu parties, where everybody is dressed in leisure suits and discusses art movies; Studio 54 parties, where everyone is spray painted gold and shares amyl nitrate; key parties, where everybody is dressed in leisure suits and discusses art movies.

During these party deliriums, I eat a lot of hors d'oeuvres, because that seems appropriate. And so deviled eggs have wound up being an entire section of my party nutrition pyramid, which also includes such categories as "cocktails," "canapes," and "flambes." But my experience with deviled eggs has been limited to the Midwestern version, which is, for those of you who haven't had it, a half a hard-boiled egg with its yolk removed, combined with mayonnaise and mustard, and then returned to the middle of the egg, sometimes garnished with paprika.

I had not realized there were international versions of the deviled egg until I tried this Ukrainian iteration, called "Nachynani Yayechka" or "stuffed eggs." It is very much like the Midwestern version, but with the addition of finely chopped sweet pickles and scallions to the yolk and, of course, dill as seasoning. I don't know that this is what John Steinbeck ate when he visited Ukraine in 1947, but he described eating some "strange-tasting stuffed eggs." It's possible he got another version of the recipe I located that had smoked ham in it. Maybe he got the one with chicken liver. Or mushrooms. Anyway, he's right that these don't taste like Midwestern version.

The pickle, of course, makes all the difference, and viva la difference. Obviously I already like deviled eggs, as the mustard in the filling gives the hors d'oeuvre an almost delicatessen flavor, and this quality is greatly increased with the addition of pickle -- my girlfriend makes an egg salad sandwich that contains pickle, and this is like a deconstructed version of that.

(I want to take a moment to note that my girlfriend always seems to have made her own version of whatever Slavic food I am taste testing, despite coming from a lumber family in Northern Minnesota. We were at a loss to explain it until a genetic test determined that she is part Croatian. It may also explain why her mother once tasted Slivovitz, a plum brandy that most people compare to a junkyard fire, and declared it "smooth.")

I am curious to try some of the other recipes. As I investigate these appetizers, it's become increasingly obvious to me that Ukrainians think that just about anything can be added to egg yolk, mustard, and mayo and stuffed into an egg white.

That sounds like a party to me.

Cooking the East European Way: Lazy Cabbage Rolls


This is a Ukrainian/Russian dish called "lenyvi golubtsi," which I am told translates as "lazy cabbage rolls," presumably because the meal is usually the sort of thing you'd put into a roll, but you couldn't be bothered. This may be the best-named food yet -- how many other cultures have recipes that insult your work ethic?

I have located a recipe that finely chops the ingredients, adds rice, gets squeezed into little balls, and then deep fried, but I was feeling especially lazy, so I went with the simplest recipe. This is a mix of shredded cabbage, diced carrots, tomato paste, onion, and ground beef (as I am a vegetarian, I used a vegetarian substitution). The whole of it is fried on a stovetop and left on a low heat for a while, and then just plopped onto a plate and seasoned with salt, pepper, and, this being an Eastern European dish, dill.

 The results are pure comfort food, and, as a Minnesotan, a comfort food that was unexpectedly familiar. We have a rather famous local meal called hotdish, which is a savory casserole, and there are two types -- those made with a tomato base, and those made with cream of mushroom soup, which we call "Lutheran Béchamel." This tastes like the sort of thing a Minnesotan with tomato sauce might whip up, although, in Minnesota, you never know what they might throw in -- cocktail weenies, wild rice, chow mein noodles, even marshmallows, god help us. 

 I decided to try an experiment and mix the leftovers with a traditional Minnesotan hotdish ingredient, egg noodles, which also seemed appropriately Jewish, because if I dumped some cinnamon on the resulting dish I could pretend it was a kugel that went terribly wrong somehow. 

 And in answer to my own unstated question: Yes. Lazy cabbage rolls on top of egg noodles is a hotdish. In fact, there is an almost identical Minnesota recipe called Cabbage Hamburger Hotdish. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised by this, or by the fact that almost everything I have made so far tastes oddly familiar. Despite Minnesota's insistence that it is the unrecognized seventh Scandinavian country, we also boast a sizable Eastern European population, especially in the the Twin Cities, Duluth, and the Iron Range. 

 I suppose it had never occurred to me that Eastern Europeans were secretly inserting their ingredients into Minnesota hot dish recipes. But now I know. The intention of this project was to explore the recipes of Eastern Europe, but I've come to the realization that I've already explored a lot of these recipes. They were just loaded into casserole dishes and served in church basements.

Cooking the East European Way: Fried Egg with Onion


Various sites list this as a Russian/Ukrainian recipe, but I had a hard time tracking down whether or not this is true. Finally I located a recipe called "oğanlı yumurta," which seems to mean "bulbous eggs," which is about as delightful a name as imaginable.

 The recipe I made was quite simple: Chop up some onions, brown them in a pan, and then fry an egg on top of them. If I can trust Google translate, the original version also includes spices, sometimes red pepper, sometime paprika, and in some the onion are chopped into rings instead of being diced. Nonetheless, the recipe is essentially the same.

 It is, as you can guess, a recipe with a strong onion flavor to it. We tend to use a light hand with onions in America, sprinkling a little raw chopped onion onto hamburgers and sandwiches as flavor, or breading and deep frying rings of the stuff. I don't know if I have ever met somebody who has just cooked an entire onion and then eaten it, even though this is a popular recipe throughout the world. I suspect the reason for this is our fear of having bad breath, but you're just going to have to set this fear aside to enjoy this meal, or other Eastern European meals that make extensive use of mounds of onion or garlic. And I haven't even started making food our of cabbage.

 I like a cooked or browned onion. The vegetable develops a pleasing sweetness when cooked, and pairs well with egg without overpowering the flavor of the egg. It's a simple dish, but because it thrusts the flavor of the onion so much into the forefront, it feels like nothing an American would ever make. You see, in American, we have egg with maybe a little bit of onion.

 In Russia, we have onion with maybe a little bit of egg.

Cooking the East European Way: Cucumber and Tomato Salad


It's been hot and muggy in Omaha, which is the sort of thing that makes the idea of turning on an oven and burners in the kitchen profoundly unappealing. Instead, I decided to make a Ukrainian salad, and a little research led me to something called "salat s ogurtsami i pomidorami," which literally means "salad with cucumbers and tomato."

 There's more to it, of course. There's also pressed garlic, onion, and a dressing made of sour cream and mayonnaise. Oh, and the salad can be herbed as well, and a lot of recipes suggest dill, which is starting to seem like to go-to herb of choice for recipes from the former Soviet Union.

 I feel a bit odd writing about this salad. I expected this project to be a voyage through the strangeness of a foreign palate, and, instead, this salad is extraordinarily familiar. I grew up eating something very like this, as did my girlfriend -- it's her go-to salad, and her diet is thoroughly Minnesotan. 

 That being said, it's often not the main ingredients that make the meal, but the preparation and flavoring. We Minnesotans tend to just splash ranch dressing onto this sort of salad -- considering that ranch dressing contains garlic and dill, as well as a mayonnaise base, it's like we were trying for the Ukrainian recipe and just missed it.

And here's the difference: ranch is made with buttermilk, which has a tart sweetness. The Ukrainian dressing prefers sour cream, with its straightforward sourness, which is definitely one of the defining tastes in the Eastern European flavor profile. 

It is, I will allow, a subtle difference, but the Ukrainian dressing benefits from subtlety. I find that ranch dressing tends to overpower whatever it's put on, whereas the Ukrainian dressing allows the flavor of the cucumber and tomato to come to the fore.

Still, it's a bit like I sat down to make a Ukrainian breakfast and the results looked and tasted almost exactly like Cheerios. It's like I traveled to Kiev and the first thing I saw was a Paul Bunyan statue. It's like I signed up for an adventure packet and they sent me to my own apartment and told me to write a blog entry about Yiddish.

Cooking the East European Way: Potaptsi


There are times in my life when I think I will just give up on real food and be happy with appetizers. At really meaty restaurants, the appetizer menu is often the only refuge for a vegetarian, and a couple of appetizers are usually enough to take care of my appetite.

There is a Yiddish phrase I learned, "“A lek un a shmeck," which means "a taste and a smell" and isn't generally used in a complimentary way -- the phrase either surfaces when somebody's portions are too small, or when somebody has done an especially shoddy job on something. "He was supposed to rebuild the engine, but listen to this banging!" someone will cry. "I asked for a complete job and he gives me a lek un a shmeck?"

 But I'm not sure that I don't prefer a lek un a shmeck, especially when what I am tasting and smelling is delicious. The potaptsi, as an example, which Discover Ukraine insists in a popular Ukrainian appetizer. It's easy enough to describe: It's essentially an open-faced grilled cheese sandwich with garlic and tomatoes.

 But, boy, a simple description does not do it justice. Listen, I am a patron of the American grilled cheese sandwich. A partisan, even. I like it on white bread with American cheese, even though I am pretty sure I am just consuming cheese-colored petroleum on bread-shaped sawdust. I judge greasy spoons on the quality of their grilled cheese, mostly because I usually can't eat anything else, but, then, if you can't make a descent grilled cheese how can you be trusted with anything else?

 This being said, I'm not sure I can go back to grilled cheese. The potaptsi is superior to it in every way. To begin with, your typical grilled cheese sandwich is only fried on the outside, leaving the bread slightly spongy, while the potaptsi bread is grilled on both sides to a lovely golden brown. This makes the bread more toastlike, and firmer, which is not only helps it support its ingredients, but also means the sandwich gets more butter or oil fried into it.

 There is a reason we so often pair grilled cheese with tomato soup -- the tomato's umami flavor balances the sweeter dairy of the sandwich cheese well. But it's hard to add tomato directly to a grilled cheese sandwich -- in my experience, the results tend to be a wet, sloppy sandwich. I suspect the grilling process liquefies the tomato somewhat, and it's the sort of thing a talented chef can correct for, but the potaptsi solves the problem in a simpler way. 

 Once the bread is fried, you add the tomato and grated cheese, along with fresh minced garlic, and put it in the oven at a relatively low heat for 5-7 minutes. This melts the cheese and lightly bakes the tomato, but maintains the structural integrity of the sandwich.

 Finally, the recipe I worked with called for adding "verdure," which, from context, seems to simply mean "herbs." One expects any of the herbs popular in Eastern Europe would be a nice addition: dill, bay leaf, maybe horseradish. Grilled cheese in the US is not typically served with garlic and herbs, and, for Pete's sake, why not? 

 There was apparently a time when we were actually afraid of garlic. Anti-Italian sentiments in America blamed the supposed hot temper of the Italians on their "spicy" food, and the spice in question was garlic. Maybe that's why the American grilled cheese sandwich is so very plain. 

 Well, I can't go back. I don't care if the garlic angries up my blood. I don't care if, as the Chicago Tribune complained in 1875, garlic is the unpleasant flavor of the workman's tenement. I don't care if eating it makes me somehow more Italian.

 Besides, you cut the crust off a potaptsi, so it's a very small sandwich. Barely enough to make someone too ethnic.

 Just a lek really. Maybe just enough for a schmeck too.

Film: Deli Man (2015)


I listen to a lot of food podcasts. I started a few years ago, when there was a period in my life when I lived in a food desert, trapped in a part of Omaha with no nearby grocery store, trying to put together a decent meal from whatever I could buy from a gas station/bodega I passed on my way walking home from work.

I felt a bit like one of the subjects of the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, in which a group of conscientious objectors allowed themselves to be malnourished during World War II. Several of the men became obsessed with cookbooks, and afterwards became chefs. I had long had an interest in good food -- I am a former resident of New Orleans, after all -- but now this interest turned obsessive.

So on my way to and from work, passing that little gas station/bodega, I listened to food podcasts and dreamed of a day when I would live close enough to a good grocery store to be able to make proper meals. Last year, a particular movie came out, and the filmmakers or the subjects of the film made the rounds of these podcasts.

The film was "Deli Man," in which filmmaker Erik Greenberg Anjou documents the decline of the Jewish deli, as well as focusing on Ziggy Gruber, a bearlike fellow who owns and runs the acclaimed Kenny and Ziggy’s in Houston. Gruber is a fascinating character, a relatively young man who has the bearing and mannerisms of a 90-year-old Jewish man. He was trained in fine dining, but came from two generations of New York deli men, and has an obsessive love of the subject.

It is, the film acknowledges, a bad time for delis. In New York, the number of delicatessens has dwindled from 1,550 in 1931 to just 21 today. The deli owners in the film complain of a myriad of business problems, chief among them the fact that their clientele has largely either died or moved to Florida, coupled with the fact that they primarily serve meat, which has become prohibitively expensive. To Gruber, delis are an essential link with the past, with the history of Jewish immigration to the United States, which the film documents. But increasingly it seems like delis may also be a remnant of the past, struggling to survive with a diminishing base of very old, very particular Jews who insist on still eating the same food they enjoyed in the mid-20th century.

I am sympathetic to Gruber's passion. Delicatessens are not just an aspect of Jewish-American life, they are one of the defining aspects. I grew up near a deli in Minneapolis, the Lincoln Del, and New York delicatessens were an essential part of my regular trips to New York to visit family. I was a patron of Los Angeles delis for the years I lived in Los Angeles, and even here in Omaha, where there isn't a proper Jewish deli, I regularly make myself delicatessen-style food. As I've written elsewhere, I think that the deli served the same place for the American Jew as the Irish pub served for the Irish-American, and I don't know what fulfills that function now that the deli is in decline.

At the same time, it's hard not to struggle with the fact that delis are so stubbornly conservative, as though some idealized, perfect deli occurred in 1937 and that's how it should always be done. The film points out that deli food isn't actually the food of Eastern European immigrants. It is, instead, a hybrid, having started as a German innovation, absorbing a surprisingly large Romanian influence, and allowing itself to be Americanized. The heart attack-inducing, meat-based meals of early delis were a product of a specific American time, one in which meat was cheap and plentiful and had grown to dominate the American diet.

This certainly doesn't represent the diet of European Jews, which, thanks to poverty and dietary restrictions, including a lot of dishes in which veggies or milk dominated. In fact, there was a parallel development to the American deli called the milkhik restaurant that elusively focused on milk dishes. One of New York's most famous Jewish restaurants, Ratner's, was milkhik, and their menus demonstrate the extraordinary variety of meatless dishes possible in Jewish dining, including blintzes, potato pancakes, borsht, and kreplackh. (It should be noted that these restaurants also served a lot of fish, which is not considered meat in Jewish law.)

 So it is possible to re-conceive deli cooking without so much emphasis on the budget-busing meats. This is the deli food I have known most of my life, as I have been a vegetarian since I was 16, and I have never lacked for dining options when eating at Jewish venues. 

 That being said, it is hard not to watch "Deli Man" without thinking, you know, when I go into a deli, maybe I should suspend the vegetarianism thing for a little while. There is a genius to a properly cut and built pastrami on rye, and that genius is both in short supply and may not be financially viable for much longer. Do I really plan to go my entire life without ever eating lox again? And delis have already, for the most part, removed lungen stew from their menus, the meal largely made from cow's lung. If I get the chance to try it, as unappetizing as it sounds, can I really pass it up? Will my life be richer or poorer for the lack of classic, meaty deli food?

 Poorer, obviously. I don't know that the deli can survive as it is now, but, by God, deli food must always have a place in the Jewish-American diet. Is there a podcast on this topic? I feel like I need to start listening to a deli podcast.

Cooking the East European Way: Homemade Kvass


Sooner or later, I was going to experience the real foreignness of foreign food. We Americans like to think we have an international palate, because we grow up eating food that calls itself Mexican, and food that calls itself Chinese, and food that calls itself Indian. It's all delicious, and it's rarely a challenge. Your average Mexican restaurant in the US, as an example, doesn't serve food made with corn smut, a corn-destroying fungus that is seen as a delicacy in Mexico. You're probably not going to get snake soup in Chinese restaurants or bullfrog in an Indian restaurant. Heck, it's pretty hard to get black pudding in Irish pubs in America, and that's a mainstream British treat.

Foreign foods can run pretty far afield of the American palate, and, unless a restaurant caters to an immigrant clientele, their menu will be Americanized. I've been to many Eastern European restaurants in my life, including having been a regular at the legendary (and recently closed) Nye's Polonaise Room in Minneapolis, and so I reckoned I'd had a lot of what Eastern Europe has to offer, and I was wrong.

It's only my second blog entry in this series, and I have already strayed far from mainstream American tastes. Because I made my own kvass.

For those of you who don't know, kvass is an enormously popular beverage in Slavic and Baltic countries, where it is vended in the streets. It is slightly sour and fizzy and mildly alcoholic. It tastes like rye or black bread, which is what it is made of. It's not widely available in the US, because we drink sweet drinks, and we don't drink bread.

I drank it once previously. I peeked into a Russian grocery store once, curious, and bought some candies and some cookies. I also saw a massive bottle of what looked like a brown soda pop, so I bought it, and it tasted like a tart beer. I shrugged it off then -- who would drink a beer soda pop? -- and threw the rest away. I was younger and stupid, because millions of people drink the stuff, and it is the basis for several popular recipes.

I am older and not quite so stupid, and so I made my own kvass. There are a number of recipes online, and they are all pretty similar: Soak bread in boiling water for a while, add in sugar and yeast and let sit, cool and drink. Sometimes you add something else -- I added raisins, which is a popular choice. You can use any hearty bread, and you cook it or scorch it before adding it in, to make the drink extra bitter. It's not hard to make, although it is a little time consuming -- all told, it was about three days from toast to kvass.

There are other types of kvass as well, including a beetroot variation that I have not made yet. The kvass I made seems fairly straightforward, and I am not yet acclimated to the taste. I used rye bread, and I am a fanatic about the taste of rye, but it is taking a while for me to appreciate it as a soft drink. Also, because I fermented the stuff on my own stove, I was terrified it might kill me, but I have had several glasses now and managed to survive.

I also tried mixing it with other beverages, which I don't believe is typically done in Eastern Europe, but American bartenders have started to experiment with the drink as a mixer. I added lemonade and touch of lemon seltzer to give it more fizz, which seemed logical -- kvass has a beer-like flavor, and people have been mixing beer and lemonade together forever and calling it a shandy. The kvass shandy was pleasant enough, although the combination seemed to highlight the fact that kvass is not beer. It tasted somehow off, which is the risk you run when you try to just substitute one ingredient for another, less familiar ingredient in a drink you are already familiar with.

I suppose the next step is for me to try other recipes and, over time, I will be familiar enough with the flavor of kvass to know what to expect, and what I like. It's happened to me with other drinks. I have developed a real taste for an herbal liqueur called fernet, which is about as bitter as you can imagine -- as bitter as a married couple discussing the terms of a divorce.

In the meanwhile, I will start looking for cooking recipes that use kvass. I barely understand how to drink the stuff, so why not cook with it?

Said nobody ever.

Cooking the East European Way: Green Borscht


There are books on Jewish cooking, of course. I have a few. Most are pretty general about where foods that are typically seen as Jewish come from. Oh, sure, they'll mention that Ashkenazi Jews adapted local recipes to fulfill their dietary requirements, but often that's as far as it goes. We don't generally learn that the bagel is Polish in origin and dates back to the 16th century, and was as popular among Slavs as it is now popular among Jews. Our beloved blintz is also Slavic, and apparently pagan, as the pre-Christian Slavs reportedly saw them as symbols of the sun. And so it goes, with cholent perhaps coming from the French, knishes deriving from either Ukranian or Russian antecedents, and kugels borrowing from the Germans.

So I've decided to just go ahead and claim East Europe's food as my own. Why not? It's where my family came from, and they claimed their share. I'll follow their lead and modify it to serve my own needs, as I am a vegetarian, but the basic recipes will be those from my ancestor's countries: Russian, Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, and Moldova, as well as broader influences -- my Moldovan connection gives me license to explore Romanian food, while Poland leads me to Lithuania, and Ukraine gives me Mongolian and Turkish food. I know this is all just an exercise in making excuses to eat food I want to eat, but if you invaded or were invaded by one of my family's ancestral homes, I'm going to go ahead and eat your food.

I started with a Ukranian dish. Ukraine is a global breadbasket as a result of huge reserves of farmland (it's one of the reasons people keep invading), and so Ukraine is a country with an extensive and varied cuisine -- they have something like 30 varieties of borscht, which is a commitment to borscht you just don't see all that often.

So borscht was to be my first meal. Borscht is still something I am learning to love, and I blame my American upbringing. Americans have a notorious sweet tooth, and so a soup that could fairly be described as "sour" isn't going to be the first thing we turn to. Borscht is generally made with beetroot, which is also not something common in American cuisine, and it's often made with pickled ingredients and served cold, and this is about as far from a candy bar as it is possible for a food to get.

I started with green borscht, which does not have beetroot, but is typically made with sorrel instead. It's not that easy to get sorrel in Omaha, so I used a common substitution: spinach. One website suggested adding a splash of citrus to duplicate sorrel's acidity -- although spinach is alkaline, apparently it doesn't have that sour punch that is so distinctive of sorrel.

The other ingredients for the soup include diced potatoes, a smattering of rice, sour cream, and dill and green onions for flavoring, as well as a hard-boiled egg that has been chopped up. There are other recipes out there, but this is a good combination -- the resulting soup is a bit like cream of potato, but the spinach, dill, and green onions give it a sharp, earthy flavor. I'm not usually in the habit of chucking an egg into my soup, but I made my own ramen last week and that also called for a hard-boiled egg, so I am starting to think everybody else puts egg in their soup and I've just never noticed.

This is a soup that Jews absconded with a long time ago, re-dubbing it schav or shtshav in Yiddish, although that's barely a new name, as it is called szczaw in Polish, so our Yiddish name is a bit like we claimed the hot dog, insisted it was a Jewish food, and it's Yiddish name was the khat dag.

Green borscht can be served hot or cold. I've only had it hot so far, and, let me tell you, it's a great partner for a grilled cheese sandwich on a rainy night. Or perhaps I should refer to the sandwich by its Yiddish name: grill kez.
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)