All Mixed Up: Kasha Varnishkes

The two main ingredients for the dish we're writing about today aren’t, strictly-speaking, from the Farmers Market.  Yet even in this pantry dish, the onions and eggs come from the market, and we used homemade chicken stock using Cache Creek Meat Co. chickens. And anyway, we’re using the recipe to think about how cooking messes with every idea of purity or precision, every story of origins.  

 

Pete Seeger has a song called “All Mixed-up” that in one verse says:

I like Polish sausage, I like Spanish rice,

Pizza pie is also nice

Corn and beans from the Indians here

Washed down with German beer

Marco Polo travelled by camel and pony

He brought to Italy the first macaroni

And you and I as well as we’re able

Put it all on the table.

There’s a certain delicious irony in the evident fact that the song’s own references have dated (does anyone today say “pizza pie”?), and that, in celebrating the joy of cultural impurity, its lyrics take sides in what has been a long-standing debate about whether pasta originated in the far east or in Italy.   

Miniature from Marco Polo's Il Milione

For what it's worth, as the recent Encyclopedia of Pasta explains, there are unmistakable documentary references to pasta in the Italian peninsula long before the journey of Marco Polo to China in the 13^th century.   

Still, might not so basic a thing as a paste of flour and water (and sometimes egg) have been “discovered” or “invented” at a whole variety of different times and places?

Nevertheless, it is obvious that cooking often has strong associations with claimed ethnic and regional “identities.”  We were writing in the last post about S.’s Irish great-great-grandmother whose name he does not even know — the one who ate a baked potato (or what she reportedly called “a tatty”) for lunch every day in her old age.  Thinking of her made S. decide to do some “Jewish” cooking, which may seem surprising.  How did S. get an Irish grandmother and yet grow up thinking of himself as “Jewish”?  Thereby hangs a tale at once genealogical and culinary. 

S.’s mother Helen was only half-Jewish: she was the great granddaughter of the Irish tatty-eater, and the daughter of Anna, a devout Catholic until her death.  (And, by the way, since Judaism traces identity through the maternal line, this means that S. is not a Jew at all according to halacha  or Jewish law, even though all three of his other grandparents were of Jewish ancestry.)  S. has always wondered how his father Albert, who was born in Russia and raised in observant or “Orthodox” Judaism, managed to get himself married by a rabbi.  He suspects his father just plain lied about (or shall we say failed to mention) the fact that his bride was only half Jewish, and the wrong half to boot. He thinks this was because Albert had decided, to adapt the words of George Bernard Shaw, that he and nobody else was going to marry Helen.

Anyway, S. grew up in sublime ignorance of (as Jean-Luc Nancy puts it), his infinite lack of infinite identity, and in fact he suffered through a full education in what is called “reformed” Judaism.  And although his parents didn’t observe kosher rules, there were a few instances of what might be called Jewish cooking among his childhood memories.  Supposedly these were recipes from his paternal grandmother who, so the story goes, one day sat down with Helen, her daughter-in-law, and taught her a thing or two about Jewish comfort food.  Among the recipes coming from this ancestral direction were “cabbage rolls” — balls of seasoned rice and ground meat wrapped in cabbage leaves and then braised in a light tomato sauce.  They were his father’s favorite dish and made frequent appearances at the dinner table — though S. himself, unfortunately, loathed them. 

S. is pretty sure another one might have been kasha varnishkes: a somewhat unexpected combination of toasted buck-wheat groats and bow-tie pasta.   Is there any food more deeply associated with what we like to call "gustatory Judaism"  (and in this case very much for better and for worse) than kasha?  In one famous episode of Seinfeld, George’s father moves in with him; in the final scene they are sharing a single bed, and his father holds out a steaming bowl and asks “Kasha?”  The most harrowing, and profoundly comic, of domestic nightmares. (And anyway, isn't the "Castanza" family Italian?  Why is George's dad eating kasha in the first place?  But we digress.)

S. himself confesses to having, with regard to kasha, what might be called that degree of familiarity that, as the saying goes, breeds contempt.  Yet today, throwing it together out of curiosity more than culinary eagerness, we find the dish quite surprisingly good. Toasted buckwheat groats have to be coated with beaten egg and then cooked briefly in some kind of fat before being steamed in liquid.  If you try to just steam them the way you might with wheat berries they turn into a sort of mush which isn’t very nice.  To make it vegan, you can leave out the egg  and just cook the grains in oil to seal them.  We used superb vat-cultured butter from Sierra Nevada cheese company, bought at the Co-op, which we think is one of the reasons it tasted so good.  (Let's take a moment here to lament that Spring Hill Cheese Company no longer brings their Jersey milk butter and cheeses to the farmers market!). A traditional Jewish version would have called for chicken fat or margarine, since the dish contains meat stock which a kosher cook would not mix with dairy.  Of course you can also substitute vegetable stock or plain water for the chicken stock; you can also leave out the pasta for a simpler version. And finally, we must confess we added a little Sriracha hot sauce at the end to juice up a dish that is otherwise a little on the bland side.  That just makes it all a little more satisfyingly mixed up.

This recipe is based on one published online at the “Epicurious” website and said to be from a 1925 Yiddish cookbook published in New Jersey, which collected prize-winning recipes from the local Yiddish press. 

Apparently the 1925 recipe for “varnishkes” was a pasta dumpling filled with cooked kasha and served in broth, something like what is otherwise called kreplach.  As such, the dish is also not far from what is called in Northern Italy tortelloni or tortellini: little pasta packages stuffed with meat or cheese that are cooked and served in a savory stock.  Aliza Green’s Making Artisan Pasta has a recipe for what she calls “Ukrainian Vareniki,” which look a bit like the "pork buns" served in Chinese dim sum, and which in this case is a little pasta package stuffed with candied sour cherries and served as a desert.   

By contrast, the dish as we know it must have come about, it seems to us, when it occurred to some busy restaurant chef (or home cook) that one might as well just toss kasha with cooked dried noodles, instead of going to the trouble of making fresh pasta and stuffing the same kasha inside — a tricky job, as we’re going to talk about shortly in another post. 

Kasha Varnishkes

Slice two onions thinly and cook in butter, margarine, chicken fat, or vegetable oil until soft.  Remove from pan.

Beat one egg.  Pour it over one cup of toasted buckwheat groats and stir to coat.

In the same pan, over high heat, stir the coated grains until they are beginning to brown and separate. 

Add two cups chicken stock or water and salt and pepper.  Add the onions, cover, and turn down the heat.  Steam for about ten minutes or more.  Uncover, stir, and check for doneness.

Meanwhile, cook ½ lb of dried butterfly noodles (called farfalle in Italian) according to package directions, usually about 10-12 minutes.  Drain them when they still have a little bite, as they will continue to cook in the other pan.

Add the cooked butterflies to the kasha mixture in the pan, adding a few tablespoons of pasta-cooking water if it looks dry, and a little more salt and pepper (or a shot of Sriracha sauce!). 

Stir gently until it's all mixed up.