Category: Glossary
Short term/comparison guides — not recipes, cross-cuisine content.
Uzvar is a Ukrainian dried-fruit drink, one of the two main dishes of the Christmas Eve Holy Supper, served beside kutia.
Skip to main content Part of our Heritage Kitchen Glossary – short guides to the ingredients and techniques behind Eastern European cooking. A biscuit named after its holiday Kūčiukai are small, hard biscuits made from a leavened wheat dough with poppy seeds. They’re baked for Kūčios, the Lithuanian Christmas Eve supper on December 24, and…
Kutia is cooked wheat with ground poppy seeds and honey, the ritual first dish of Sviata Vecheria. Where the name and the customs come from.
A sufganiyah is the fried, jam-filled Hanukkah doughnut. Where the name comes from, why it is fried, and how it reached Israel from Nuremberg and Poland.
Kugel is baked egg noodles or grated potato set with egg. Where the name comes from, why it began in the Shabbat stew, and why some families bake it sweet and others peppery.
Borscht is a family of Eastern European sour soups: hot or cold, red or white, and not always made with beets. A short guide to where the name comes from and how the versions differ.
Matzo meal is matzo ground to crumbs. What it does in matzo balls, latkes and gefilte fish, how meal, cake meal and farfel differ, and what to use instead.
Skip to main content 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 fresh white cheese. They are relatives. The blintz is thought to have started…
Skip to main content Part of our Heritage Kitchen Glossary – short guides to the ingredients and techniques behind Eastern European cooking. The short answer Farmer’s cheese is a pressed cottage cheese, with less moisture and a firmer texture than ordinary cottage cheese. In Ukrainian it is syr. It is the classic filling of blintzes…
Skip to main content Part of our Heritage Kitchen Glossary – short guides to the dishes, ingredients and techniques of Eastern European cooking. Put a plate of pierogi, a bowl of varenyky and a bowl of barszcz with uszka on the same table, and they can look like one dish served three ways. All three…
Skip to main content Part of our Heritage Kitchen Glossary – short guides to the ingredients and techniques behind Eastern European cooking. The short answer Kasha is cooked grain. In the Ukrainian village the grains eaten most often were buckwheat and millet, and millet kasha was cooked with about two and a half times as…
Skip to main content Part of our Heritage Kitchen Glossary – short guides to the ingredients and techniques behind Eastern European cooking. Put a plate of holubtsi next to a plate of gołąbki and they look like the same dish. Both are cabbage leaves softened in boiling water, wrapped around minced pork and rice and…
Skip to main content Part of our Heritage Kitchen Glossary – short guides to the ingredients and techniques behind Eastern European cooking. The short answer Salo is salted pork fat. It can be plain or have streaks of meat running through it, and some cooks also use smoked salo. Shkvarky are cracklings: small cubes of…
Skip to main content Part of our Heritage Kitchen Glossary – short guides to the dishes, ingredients and techniques of Eastern European cooking. Ukrainian borscht, Polish barszcz czerwony and Jewish beet borscht all start from the beet and come from the same part of Europe, yet they ended up quite different in the bowl. Ukrainian…
Skip to main content Part of our Heritage Kitchen Glossary – short guides to the ingredients and techniques behind Eastern European cooking. The short answer Kneidlach are matzo balls, the dumplings of matzo ball soup. The dough is matzo meal, beaten eggs, a fat such as schmaltz or oil, and a little broth or seltzer;…
Skip to main content Part of our Heritage Kitchen Glossary – short guides to the ingredients and techniques behind Eastern European cooking. The short answer Zakwas is a Polish sour starter: rye flour or beets left to ferment in water for several days until the liquid turns sour. Two Polish soups are soured with it.…
Skip to main content Part of our Heritage Kitchen Glossary – short guides to the dishes, ingredients and techniques of Eastern European cooking. Ask for a potato pancake in Warsaw, Kyiv and a Jewish home in either city, and you will get three different answers that look almost the same on the plate: placki ziemniaczane,…
Skip to main content Part of our Heritage Kitchen Glossary – short guides to the ingredients and techniques behind Eastern European cooking. The short answer Schmaltz is rendered poultry fat, chicken or goose, the cooking fat of Ashkenazi Jewish kitchens in Eastern Europe. Geese were slaughtered before Hanukkah so that their fat would last through…
