Nalysnyky vs Blintzes: Two Filled Crepes, Two Kitchens

Part of our Heritage Kitchen Glossary – short guides to the ingredients and techniques behind Eastern European cooking.

Put nalysnyky and blintzes side by side and they look like the same dish twice: a thin crepe wrapped around white cheese, cooked once as a pancake and again after it is filled. The resemblance is not a coincidence. Ukrainian and Ashkenazi Jewish families spent centuries in the same towns, buying flour at the same markets. What separates the two dishes is a handful of small decisions, and every one of them changes how the finished plate eats.

The same thin pancake

The Ukrainian crepe is mlyntsi, a word built on the same root as mlyn, the old term for a mill. Fill one, roll it, and it becomes nalysnyky. The Yiddish blintse comes from the Slavic blinets, “little blin,” or little pancake. Both names describe the same object: a thin round of batter cooked in a hot pan. Ashkenazi cooks took the pancake from their Slavic neighbors and kept the neighbors’ word for it, which is how a good deal of Ashkenazi cooking came about. Cooking a dish twice is a Ukrainian habit more than a Jewish one, and the blintz inherited that along with the word.

The second cooking is where they part

The split comes after the filling goes in. Nalysnyky are rolled into a snug tube, laid in a buttered dish, splashed with cream, and baked for 25 to 30 minutes. Blintzes are folded into a small rectangular parcel and fried in butter until the outside is golden and slightly crisp. Oven against pan, and the difference is not subtle: baked nalysnyky come out soft, almost custardy where the cream soaked in, while a blintz has a browned, crackly skin. On paper, the same dish. On the fork, two different things.

What goes inside

Both start from the same cheese: dry, pressed farmer’s cheese, sold as tvorog or quark, firmer and drier than the cottage cheese in most American supermarkets. Wet cheese leaks, and a leaking filling is what ruins either dish.

After that they part company. The everyday Ukrainian filling is savory – cottage cheese with an egg yolk, a spoonful of cream, salt, pepper, and more dill than most people expect. Sweet versions exist too, with vanilla sugar, honey, or poppy seeds, and so do meat, braised cabbage, and mushroom fillings that turn nalysnyky into dinner. Blintzes keep a narrower range: sweetened farmer’s cheese, sometimes with raisins or lemon zest, served with sour cream and preserves. Anyone raised on sweet blintzes tends to be startled the first time a crepe arrives full of dill.

Two different calendars

Nalysnyky belong to Masliana, the week before Great Lent, when mlyntsi and nalysnyky get made daily. They left the holiday behind long ago, though. Sunday breakfast, a dish for visitors, something a household makes on no occasion at all.

Blintzes kept their holiday. Shavuot is the one major Jewish holiday built around a dairy meal instead of a meat one, and in Ashkenazi homes blintzes are the dish most associated with it. There is a second one as well: blintzes turn up at Hanukkah, part of a cheese custom traced back to Judith, who in the medieval retelling fed an enemy general salty cheese before killing him. In the older form of the custom the cheese went straight into the pancake: the first latkes were cheese, not potato, and the potato version only arrived in the nineteenth century.

Which one should you cook?

For something soft and baked that eats like dinner, nalysnyky with the dill and cheese filling; there is a lighter version of it here. For something sweeter with crisp edges, blintzes, and a lighter version of those too. And if the cheese is the part you want, syrnyky skip the pancake entirely and fry the curd straight into small cakes.

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Further Reading & Sources

This entry draws on the sources below and on the recipes it links to elsewhere on this site. They are listed for readers who want to go further.

1. “What Are Blintzes and Why Are They Jewish?” Aish. aish.com — the Yiddish and Slavic roots of the name, and the double cooking that separates a blintz from a crepe.
2. “Why Dairy on Shavuot?” My Jewish Learning. myjewishlearning.com — why cheese, and blintzes in particular, define the Shavuot table.
3. “A Hidden Hanukkah Tale of a Woman, an Army and Some Killer Cheese.” NPR. npr.org — the Judith story behind eating cheese at Hanukkah.
4. “Traditional foods.” Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine. encyclopediaofukraine.com — the place of cottage cheese as a filling in Ukrainian flour cooking.