To Revive Jewish Dishes, Some Cooks Look to the Shtetl

GROWING up in Montreal, Noah Bernamoff had an issue with his mother’s kasha varnishkes.

“My mom’s had so much kasha with a noodle here and there,” he said. “I wanted to reverse the process to make it taste better.”

Two decades later, in his Brooklyn delicatessen, Mile End, he is reinventing this Eastern European comfort dish in what he thinks might be the tradition of his ancestors.

Clearly, his Lithuanian great-grandmother never purchased bow tie noodles at the supermarket, so in his commissary kitchen he pinches dough into butterfly shapes by hand. They will later be tossed with buckwheat groats, caramelized onions and mushrooms cooked in duck fat, with a confit of chicken gizzards gently stewed in duck fat.

For several decades now, many American Jews with a passion for food and a desire for broader horizons tended to explore Sephardic cooking, with its lush Mediterranean accents. Recently, though, cooks have been pouring their energy into old Ashkenazic dishes that had traveled so far they had lost much of their flavor.

Mr. Bernamoff is one such cook, who wants to preserve the past, but not necessarily the recent past. For some cooks, the search for authenticity begins with ingredients that taste as they might have in Eastern Europe.

A few months ago, near his sukkah in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, Naf Hanau grilled chicken wings and legs for lunch as the hens he raises for eggs roamed around in the backyard. He is the founder and owner of Grow and Behold, a small pasture-raised kosher meat company with farms in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. His chicken can be ordered online and shipped all over the country.

“We are producing an old-fashioned chicken for the modern world,” he said. “We are encouraging people to use all of the parts in the way our ancestors did. With every package of livers we sell we include instructions for koshering the liver and a recipe for traditional chopped liver.”

Grow and Behold sells chickens for $6 or $7 a pound, a bit above the prices of some of its competitors in the high-end kosher poultry niche like Red Heifer Farm and Wise Organic Pastures. Mr. Hanau says he has found an avid audience, even at the premium price.

Nearby, his wife, Anna, 28, served pickles made with wild fermentation that comes from a saltwater brine rather than the more rapid and stable vinegar cure usually found today.

She started making these pickles when the two were farmers at the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center in Falls Village, Conn. “It started with five gallons of cucumbers that we started pickling in the old-fashioned way for fun,” she said. Today these pickles, now branded as Adamah Pickles and produced by the Retreat Center, are sold in the New York area.

Jews are not the only ones taking part in the pickling revival of the past few years, but it often has a special resonance for them.

“When I was a little boy living in Siberia, there was not much fresh vegetables or fruit for vitamin C,” said Samuel Rachlin, 63, a journalist in Washington. “There was not much we could grow there but cabbage grew well,” he said. In Pokrovsk, a town on the Lena River in the northeastern part of Siberia, where Mr. Rachlin’s family lived after being deported from Lithuania during World War II, making sauerkraut was almost a festival, and everyone came out for the fun.

“We would make it in four-foot-tall wooden barrels,” he recalled. “When they cut out the core of the cabbage, we children would eat it. It was a special treat for us. We didn’t have much candy.”

Today, Mr. Rachlin recreates the ancient fermentation methods in his Washington kitchen so he will have sauerkraut on hand when he is not feeling well. “It is swarming with natural bacteria,” he explained. By trial and error, starting in the late 1970s, he has figured out the correct balance of salt and vegetables. Since cabbage is available year-round today, he makes sauerkraut in small amounts, shredding two or three heads whenever his last batch runs out.

“When my Jewish friends taste my sauerkraut, they get excited,” he said. “They remember stories their grandparents told them about making and eating sauerkraut in Russia.”

Like Mr. Bernamoff of Mile End, Maryanna Walls is on a quest to reclaim the food of her ancestors. In her case, though, what she particularly hungers for is a version of cholent, the overnight Sabbath stew, that can rival the legendary one her grandmother Goldie Levine used to make on the Lower East Side. Cholent is typically started on Friday afternoon and allowed to cook overnight to be eaten at noon on the Sabbath. “It was known that if you wanted really good cholent on Shabbos afternoon, you went to the Levine household,” Ms. Walls said.

But after leaving the Lower East Side, her family had gone secular. “My mother admitted to me years ago that the big metal pot she made spaghetti and meatballs in was really my grandmother Goldie’s cholent pot,” she said. After Ms. Walls decided to return to an observant life at 19, she began to seek out the Eastern European cooking traditions her family had dropped. In particular, she admits to being obsessed with cholent, and said that she is constantly on the hunt for a recipe as tasty and authentic as her grandmother’s.

Ms. Walls, 31, has settled on a cholent framework that varies from week to week depending on the ingredients brought home by her husband, whom she calls the spice man. For it and other recipes she gleans inspiration from cookbooks like Jamie Geller’s “Quick & Kosher: Recipes from the Bride Who Knew Nothing” (Feldheim, 2007).

Ms. Geller, who also writes recipes for kosher.com, became observant when she married. The new interest in artisanal Ashkenazic flavors “doesn’t mean that kosher cooks don’t want to try new recipes like coconut milk chicken broth for their matzo balls,” Ms. Geller said. “But they want traditional recipes that taste great as well.”

Ms. Walls has a Friday cooking rhythm that fills her kitchen in Potomac, Md., with the aroma of apple cake, challah, kugel and kishke, a blend of celery, onions, carrots, fat and flour or matzo meal that she steams on top of the cholent. Next week her husband, Gedalia, a rabbi and personal trainer, will help out, frying the requisite Hanukkah latkes before nightfall for them and their four children.

“Sabbath is the one time of the week when we have no interruptions,” Ms. Walls, development coordinator at the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington, said. “We don’t answer the phone, don’t check e-mail, we have no work. It is family day. We put away the outside world.”

Just like her grandmother Goldie.