Today we have a guest post from my friend Ilana Newman. She is a fantastic Canadian Jewish librarian in Toronto with a keen mind and a witty sense of humor! Though we often have different perspectives on things like authenticity, she is an incredible person to discuss food with, and has a keen eye for historical and current recipes that go beyond the box of what we think of when we think of Ashkenazi Jewish food.
Ilana wrote up a recipe for pyrizhky – pasties – stuffed with hearts. This recipe is part of a longer tradition of Jews eating treats stuffed with organ meat. Many Lithuanian Jews would stuff pierogi with lung, dumplings with liver, and of course, put a stuffed kishke (intestine) in the pot. Polish Jews often prized the gizzards and other organs of chickens, geese, and ducks. (You can learn more in Gil Marks’ and Claudia Roden’s works. I am personally a fan of these foods, and it pleases me very much to publish Ilana’s recipe.
I will let Ilana take it from here.
For the last couple of years, I’ve been on something of a mission to learn to cook the foods of my culture- so, Ashkenazi Jewish cuisine. Of course, I’ve been eating some of this food my whole life, so on one level it’s intimately familiar to me. But I also grew up as a middle class American child of culinarily-adventurous Ashkenazi Jews, one second generation and one third generation, making me something like Gen 3.5 – and as a result, I have ended up eating the foods of other peoples more than my own.
I don’t think this is a bad thing, by any means. I’m grateful to my parents’ “foodie” natures (and their financial stability), which meant I got to try saag paneer, sushi, ojingeo bokkeum, and other culinary delights, early and often. But my experience with Real Jewish Food* was limited to a few staples: gefilte fish (from the jar), my mom’s challah, matzoh brei, latkes, matzoh ball soup, bagels and lox, salami and eggs, and pickles. It wasn’t until I left home and met Jews other than the ones I grew up with that I tried cholent, kishke, holishkes, and more.
As a kid, I also instinctively understood that there was something embarrassing, if not even shameful, about Ashkenazi food. Just as I absorbed the notion that Ashkenazi pronunciation of Hebrew was embarrassing, in comparison to the Israeli pronunciation we were taught in Hebrew Sunday school and at synagogue, I learned what “acceptable” Ashkenazi foods were. These included challah, brisket, matzah ball soup, and bagels. They were sweetish, soft, cakey rich bread, roasted meat, bready dumplings, and, well, everyone knows what a bagel is.** Who wouldn’t like those things? Gefilte fish, on the other hand, is obviously “disgusting,” or “smelly.” Cholent? Tzimmes? Holishkes? Unpronounceable, unrecognizable, and frankly inedible, to the WASPs with whom I grew up surrounded in Maine in the 1990s. (Even today, articles like “7 foods I would never touch if I wasn’t Jewish” abound.)
All this is to say that I grew up somewhat divorced from my own culinary heritage. I was taught to have as adventurous a palate as I could, even eating some kinds of treyf, like a fiery Korean squid dish. I was not taught the same for the “deep cuts” of Ashkenazi food, like tongue, p’tcha, chopped liver, pickled herring, kishke, knishes, and more.
It is with this in mind that I have started to explore eastern European cooking in general, since Ashkenazi food is generally an adaptation of the same, with changes made here and there to allow for kashrut. And one recipe I tried recently is for heart-stuffed pyrizhky, Ukrainian stuffed buns. Pyrizhky are made with a yeasted dough wrapped around some kind of filling- it can be cabbage, beef, cheese, potato, or anything, really. They are often baked, but can also be pan-fried.
I used Olia Hercules’ recipe from her cookbook Mamushka, but made several adaptations to make it kosher . They came out really delicious, and while they were not unbelievably challenging to make, prompted some amount of awe in friends and family (my dad’s response was that I was “taking it old school! Hearts!”). Here’s the recipe, by Olia (with a few edits by me). Olia’s recipe provides other fillings, including egg and green onion, and potato filling. Her original heart filling calls for chicken livers instead of mushrooms, but I improvised as I didn’t have livers, and I ended up loving the result. But you might try using livers instead if you prefer.
Heart-Stuffed Pyrizhky
For the dough:
- ½ tbsp sunflower oil** (or substitute canola or olive)
- 1 cup room-temperature water
- 2 tsp active dry yeast
- ½ tbsp granulated sugar (I think I forgot this, but they came out fine without)
- ½ tsp salt
- 2.25 – 2.5 cups flour
For the filling:
- 2 tbsp sunflower oil (or substitute canola or olive)
- 125g shallots (or substitute onions), sliced
- 2 tbsp Madeira (I didn’t have any and used ordinary cooking wine)
- ½ lb chicken hearts, quartered
- ½ lb mushrooms (any kind), diced very fine
- Sea salt to taste
- Freshly ground black pepper (to taste; I used about 2 tsp)
For frying:
- About 6 tbsp sunflower oil (or substitute canola or olive), or as much or as little as necessary depending on preference
Method:
- Whisk oil, yeast, salt, sugar, and water in a large bowl. Sift in the flour gradually. Cover and leave to rise for 45 minutes or until the dough has doubled in size.
- Knead dough until soft and pliable but not sticky. Divide into 8-10 equal pieces and cover.
- Heat 1 tbsp oil in a frying pan over medium-low heat. Cook the shallots or onions until golden, then deglaze with your cooking alcohol and cook until the liquid evaporates. Remove the shallots from the pan and set aside.
- Add more oil if necessary and saute the mushrooms until their liquid has evaporated. Add the chicken hearts on medium-high heat. Saute until they are fully cooked and begin to get some colour on them. Add your salt and pepper, add the shallots back to the pan and stir until the mixture is even. Take it off the heat to cool slightly.
- Flour your work surface well and roll out each piece of dough into as perfect a circle as you can, ideally about 10 cm in diameter. Put some filling in the middle of each circle (about two tbsp of filling) and fold over the dough. Fork the perimeter of the dumpling so the edges stick together.
- Heat your pan again and add some oil if needed. You can either fry the pyrizhky very hot in the oil (in which case add the full 6 tbsp), or use a little oil and steam-fry the pyrizhky. If frying, cook three minutes on each side. If steam-frying, cook about 2 minutes on the first side, covering, then flip the pyrizhky over and cook another 2 minutes covered. (I don’t love heavily fried foods, so I prefer the second method, which Olia doesn’t mention. She’s team fry all the way I guess!)
- Turn each bun out onto a paper towel on a plate, and let drain if necessary. Serve immediately for best results, but honestly, they’re still delicious even days later. (Just make sure to refrigerate them once they’ve cooled completely.)
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*“Real Jewish Food” is obviously a really subjective measure, dependant on time and place. All the foods I mentioned are Ashkenazi (not the only kind of Jewish and certainly not any more “real” than any other kind), and several are a specifically American variety of it. Authenticity, as has been discussed on this blog before, is itself subjective, mutable, liable to change – in short, very much a cultural construct. But nevertheless, the heart understands that some things are indeed Very Real.
** Olia says that unrefined sunflower oil is one of the cornerstones of southern Ukrainian cooking. For me it hasn’t been easy to find (I’d have to go to a specialty store), and I found that olive oil works just fine for this recipe.
Many thanks to Ilana Newman for this guest post! She describes herself as such: “Ilana is a librarian currently based in Toronto. She is also a frequent baker of challah, a stewer of fruit preserves, and a pickle enthusiast (half-sours are the best; no questions). You can find her on Instagram at @ketzelekitchenpreserves.”
