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So every year, my wife Sarah cooks the dinner. The kids want “Mom food” and Sarah has a finely honed traditional dinner that we all love. My job is to be soux chef, smoke a turkey, make the vegetarian entree, peel potatoes, keep an eye on things, check timing and doneness, serve the appetizers. Every year, I insist on making sweet potatoes with marshmellow topping, studded with pineapple chunks and sweetened with brown sugar. Like my mom made, you know.

The crew, led by Hannah and Seth, deride the dish from reasons ranging from the “Ladies Home Journal cheesy factor” to it’s overly sugared to a simple and traditional ragging to let me know that my family loves me. The grandkids like them, of course, the boys eating the topping off of the dish like you’re supposed to. Every year, I finish them up over the next couple of days, re-marshmallowing the sweet potatoes as necessary.

This year, I went for change. Cheryl Rule, who I met at Greenbrier, (a fellow winner, actually), had a great sounding recipe for Sweet Potatoes with Pecan Streusel on her website, 5secondrule. Replacing the marshmallows with pecans (so much better than walnuts) and brown sugar, and adding something new with cardamom, vanilla and maple syrup sounded exactly right. So I made it.

My food processor wasn’t up to the task, so I used the ricer like I always do. I also steamed the sweet potato chunks rather than boiling them because I believe that the taste is better. But, unusually, I followed her recipe pretty faithfully. The top came out a little darker than I’d've liked, but it was fine.

Hannah, when told I was making a surprise sweet potato dish this year asked if the surprise was that it was edible. Somehow it sounds far crueler in print than in real life, where the smile predominated. Anyway, off and running.

It was a major hit. The sweet streusel gave some crunch to the potatoes. The spices perfumed the dish without masking the sweet potato flavor. There was almost nothing left, which, as any cook knows, is the true test. It isn’t what they say, it’s what they eat.

 Thanksgiving, like all polished traditions, needs someone new to experience it and one or two new foods to set off the traditional ones. We had it all this year. What’s more, we knew it and were grateful.

I ran into Mark Bitterman (atthemeadow.com) and, as usual, the conversation turned to salt. He had brought with him a bottle of Haleakala Ruby Finishing Salt, a top-end Hawaiian red salt. It had a strong saline and sea taste to it and was uite nice. He mentioned that a friend had made a Caprese salad and sprinkled first the Haleakala salt and then some Turkish Black salt for a very dramatic effect. Sort of mozzarella as a palette.

I asked him about the best salt for a margaria rim. We talked about Turkish black for dramatic effect, Maldon for the taste, and probably a good fleur de sel for all around use. “Finishing salt” we agreed belongs on the same shelf as “Cooking Wine” which is not a shelf either of us have in our pantries.

Still hoping someone will give me a Himalayan Salt Block for the holidays.

In the New York area, where I grew up, the corner delicatessen was a fixed cultural icon. You looked in the front window onto a griddle, usually covered in tinfoil, on which a row of hot dogs, a tub of sauerkraut and some potato knishes were kept warm. A partially sliced turkey sat surrounded by large jars of red and green pickled cherry peppers. Salamis and bolognas hung from the ceiling. Entering, you walked past a deli case, filled with cold brisket, beef tongue, chopped liver, whitefish, herring and lox, cole slaw and potato salad, sour pickles and bright green half-sours. As soon as you sat down, the waiter, usually a grouchy old man, brought menus and a bowl of mixed pickles.My family ate in delis regularly, often meeting their friends there. Every day of my senior year of high school, my friend Alan Shore and I stopped into a deli, bought hot dogs and cream sodas and argued politics with the owner.

Later on, I worked in delicatessens. I learned to slice lox in a deli on 13th Street and Sixth Avenue in Manhattan using a 14-inch flexible blade sharp enough to shave with. The mavens, of course, all requested “the old guy” for their lox. He could cut nearly transparent slices, a quarter-inch thick from one end to the other. I lost the tip of my thumb in a slicer accident at that deli, so when I say that I have contributed blood, sweat and tears to the delicatessen trade, it is no metaphor.

The great delis have largely passed into history. The Second Avenue Deli is gone. Katz’s, on the Lower East Side, is now best known as the setting for Meg Ryan’s famous scene in “When Harry Met Sally.” The Carnegie Deli has become very nearly a parody of itself; the last time we ate there my wife was served a matzo ball soup with a single matzo ball the size of a softball. Perhaps this is the way it should be. Delicatessen has passed into the American culture like a seam of ore running through the layers of European, Asian, indigenous and regional cuisines that make up our national diet. Every supermarket now sells corned beef and every sub shop seems to have pastrami subs on the menu. Bagels are now as American as pizza or barbecue.

Searching for deli counters in the Pioneer Valley, you hear about the great delis of Springfield that are no more. In Northampton, THE GROCERY, which brought in pastrami, corned beef and other delicacies from New York, has been gone for 15 years.
But deli food is still available. STOP & SHOP sells decent potato knishes and a line of good half-sour pickles. HENION BAKERY in Amherst gets full marks for baking corned rye bread, but it is not as dense or as sour as the bread on which I grew up. CUSHMAN MARKET AND CAFE in North Amherst used to have amazing potato knishes, but can no longer get them. The store still serves salami and eggs, a real home-style treat: an omelet filled with slices of fried salami. COSTCO, in West Springfield, has Hebrew National hot dogs and hot sauerkraut at its lunch counter. Even the MULLINS CENTER at the University of Massachusetts serves Nathan’s hot dogs — the Coney Island staple — with sauerkraut.

If you are in search of good, reasonably authentic delicatessen, there are two places to go. Each is a restaurant where you can find good pastrami, corned beef, chopped liver, blintzes and a bowl of mixed pickles. That there are other, nontraditional foods on the menus might bother some, but not me. Life goes on, things change, and you take your pleasures where you can.

If you are in downtown Springfield, try GUS AND PAUL’S, a delicatessen at 1209 Sumner Avenue. [The Tower Square location in downtown closed last year.] I have not visited the Sumner Avenue location, but I [used to stop] by the downtown place pretty regularly. Despite being located in a high-rise, it echoe[d] the traditional layout and boast[ed] a large counter of baked goods as well as a meat counter, not all of which [was] traditional deli. I’m never downtown with a cooler, so I usually [ate] rather than shop[ed] there.

REIN’S DELICATESSEN, on 25 Park Ave. in West Springfield, is an outpost of a popular Vernon, Conn., deli. It is large and authentic and if you are visiting the movies or shopping on Riverdale Road, eschew the chains and take the Route 20/Park Street exit just past the Yale Genton clothing store. Rein’s is halfway around the rotary. The meat counter will bring tears to the eye. Actually, it will make you hungry, even if you have just eaten. Corned beef, pastrami, tongue, salami, bologna, chopped liver, fruit salad and more fill the case. Around the corner in the fish case, Nova and the saltier “belly” lox, sable and whitefish nestle with creamed herrings and fish salads. This is better than a museum — you can take some of this home with you. And I recommend that you do.

I’ve made my own corned beef for sandwiches at home. It’s pretty easy to do. Simmer a corned beef with half a box of pickling spice, eight or nine cloves of garlic, some allspice berries and peppercorns, and a couple of dried hot peppers. After a gentle simmer for an hour or two, the meat will be ready to be sliced and laid on fresh rye bread with some spicy deli mustard.

I have recipes for pastrami and its Montreal cousin, spiced beef, but they all involve two weeks of brining and three hours of 190-degree smoke so usually I buy my pastrami when I can. New York hot dog vendors serve their dogs with warm sauerkraut or red onions, chunks of Spanish onions in a reddish liquid that I have been trying for years to replicate.

Here are some recipes for delicatessen-inspired foods. Enjoy.

Wolf Hash

Grandma Ruth’s Kukshen Kugel

Originally published in the Daily Hampshire Gazette, February 23, 2007

If all you know of beets is the vinegary purple disks that grace every salad bar in the country, you might be forgiven for thinking poorly of them. In Europe, beets were grown because they kept well over the winter and could be fed to cows, associating them with poverty. But properly cooked, they are a delight, and the new yellow and striped varieties don’t even stain.

I always liked beets, even the pickled variety. My grandparents ate borscht, which is a deep purple beet soup that turns shocking pink once you add sour cream. I have to say that the color turned me off and I never tried it. I haven’t had an opportunity to taste it as an adult, but I’d probably like it.

There are a number of varieties of beets in addition to the deep purple ones you probably know. The sugar beet is an important source of white sugar, second only to sugar cane. Yellow and striped beets are pretty common in farmers markets these days. There is an organic compound, geosmin, that adds an “earthy taste” to beets that is stronger in the non-purple varieties, making the purple ones the best for sweetness.

The most common ways to prepare beets are boiling and roasting. I’ve always boiled them: Cut the greens off the beet, leaving about a half-inch of stem. Wash the outsides well, but don’t peel them or cut off the roots or the beets will “bleed” into the cooking water. Simmer until the beets can be pierced with a skewer with just a slight resistance. This can take between 20 minutes and an hour, depending on the size of the beet and how many you are cooking. Let them cool, then slide the skin off, cut off the ends, and you are ready to go. The skin of a cooked beet can be rubbed off pretty easily. Recalcitrant pieces can be taken off with a vegetable peeler.

As for roasting, virtually every recipe I’ve seen calls for wrapping the beets in foil and baking them for an hour. To me, this is more steaming than baking. Boiling takes less time and doesn’t seem to affect the taste. Just recently, my friend Jess Thomson, a recipe developer and food writer in Seattle, opened my eyes to roasted beets. She cuts the beets into chunks, adds a little olive oil and sherry vinegar, and bakes them in a hot oven for about 45 minutes. They cook nicely, taking on a really good roasted flavor. She doesn’t even bother to peel the beets if they are small and tender. It looks especially appealing if you mix the beets, having an array of purple, striped and yellow pieces. Take a look at her blog, Hogwash, for recipes as well as some acerbic wit.

I’ve also seen recipes for raw grated beet and carrot salad. I tried using striped beets, which did not give a good flavor, so I’d suggest purple beets since they are sweeter. Beet carpaccio is also a popular item on menus these days. Beef carpaccio is thinly sliced raw beef topped with olive oil, arugula and Parmesan shavings. Beet carpaccio takes cooked beets, slices them thin and serves them with a salad and sharp cheese. The thin slices and the garnishes seem the only thing the two have in common.

When you buy beets, they usually come with the greens attached, which is a great bonus. The greens were once sold as red chard (chard, by the way, is a variety of beet that is bred for its leaves rather than its root). The day you bring the beets home, cut off the greens, leaving about a half inch of stem attached to the beet root. The greens are usually gritty so wash them really well and shake them dry. Then wrap them in a paper towel, place them in a plastic bag and put it in the refrigerator. You have a couple of days to cook the greens, either alone or in combination with any of the dozen other greens available this time of year. Saute a clove or two of sliced garlic in olive oil in a large frying pan, then cut the greens into ribbons and add them to the pan with a splash of water. Cover and let steam for 5 minutes, until the greens are wilted. Remove the cover from the pan and let them dry for a minute or two, then serve with vinegar or hot sauce. If you want to get elaborate, add them to a gumbo z’herbes, a green gumbo that typically contains seven types of green. It is traditionally meatless, but a smoked ham hock or some andouille sausage picks the taste right up.

Cooked beets last for a while in the fridge. Add sliced or diced beets to a salad or cook them into a side dish. My daughter-in-law Katie makes a great beet and spinach salad that is richly colored and easy to make year-round. In France, it seems that every open-air market and supermarket has cooked, peeled beets packed in plastic for sale with the other vegetables. They are often used in a salad composée, a plate with small piles of various julienned vegetables, drizzled with vinaigrette.

Two traditional New England beet dishes are Harvard Beets and Red Flannel Hash. Whether Harvard Beets actually originated at Harvard is something for the food historian, but they are essentially cooked beets simmered in a sweet and sour sauce. I used to make them a lot, but no one really liked them so I’ve graduated to an orange sauce that meets with approval. One food historian says that this version is called “Yale Beets” but I think that’s stretching it a little.

To make Red Flannel Hash, chop a mixture of cooked corned beef, potatoes and beets - the leftovers from last night’s boiled dinner - and sauté them together. The beets stain the hash, giving it its name. My friend Jeff, who has spent 20 years eating his way around New England, once ordered Red Flannel Hash only to be served canned hash with beets on the side. When he inquired, the waiter told him they put the beets on the side because they made the hash red.

Beets and orange have a great affinity for each other. I have made recipes that alternate beet and orange slices in a rosewater-flavored vinaigrette and they make a nice presentation. Assemble the salad at the last minute to avoid the beets staining the orange. If you have any orange dust lying around, sprinkle it on some beets, either cold or warmed in butter, for a great flavor.

Recipes:

Jess Thomson’s Roasted Beets

Beet and Spinich Salad

Beets in Orange Sauce

Originally printed Daily Hampshire Gazette, July 25, 2008

Just saw the notice that Leonard’s closed. Perhaps it will be bought and reopen, perhaps not. A breakfast and lunch place, Leonard’s was no temple of haute cuisine, but my family and I ate there often over the years. We were there with my stepdaughter and her daughter less than a month ago. Our waitress remembered my stepdaughter as a child, along with the rest of the kids. They served grits, which endeared them to my wife to no end, Georgia girl that she is.  There are better places for breakfast, but we’ll miss knowing Leonard’s is an easy walk away.

In the old days, the canning jars and cooker would be out almost from the first asparagus. Grandmother would make preserves and pickles, and can the fruit and vegetables from her garden. Or so I imagine. My grandmother’s preservation was limited to a mayonnaise jar of roasted green peppers in vinegar and a mixture she called shulatah which consisted of chopped eggplant, onions, carrots and green peppers, simmered in garlic, vinegar and water. She’d bring over a jar every so often for my sister and brother, who couldn’t get enough of it.

In the early years of her first marriage, my wife lived in Texas and Kentucky on an associate professor’s salary. She canned, ground her own flour for whole-wheat bread, even made her own phyllo dough on occasion. The dusty canning jars are still in the basement. I’d like to use them, but frankly, any food preparation that comes with warnings about potentially fatal bacteria tends to make me a little wary. I know that once you’ve done it once or twice, canning is a snap, but it doesn’t fit into my current lifestyle.

Still, in August when tomatoes are falling off the vine, the basil plants are small trees, and the corn is piled three feet high in the farm-stand wagons, it pains me to just pass them by. It’s especially hard to think about late January, when I’ll be using canned tomatoes or roasting hard plum tomatoes just to get some kind of flavor out of them. So, for most of the last 10 years, I’ve frozen enough tomatoes to last the winter and added some other vegetables when I can.

Freezing is pretty simple and pretty safe as long as you follow a few rules. First, you want to freeze foods as quickly as possible. Ideally, you should freeze foods at 0 Fahrenheit or lower. The freezer in your refrigerator is probably not cold enough, especially if you open the door a lot. We happen to have a separate freezer in the basement, which we can set to 0. If all you have is the freezer in the fridge, you should freeze the foods overnight, when you are not going to be opening the door. Second, you shouldn’t thaw and refreeze; if the frozen foods thaw even a little bit at the surface, throw them out. (The USDA says you can refreeze without recooking, but I have always heard differently.) Third, air is your enemy. Put the foods in a zip-lock bag or some other container that you can squeeze the air out of. Freezer burn occurs when the water that sublimates from frozen food meets air and crystallizes. (Sublimation is the transfer of water from a solid directly to a gas.)

Around this time of year, I’ll buy a box or two of plum tomatoes. The books recommend blanching the tomatoes: Cut a small X in the stem end, plunge the tomatoes into boiling water for 30 seconds, scoop them out and dump them into a water bath to cool. The skins slip right off. Then, you slice them in half lengthwise and scoop out the seeds with your finger. The result is beautiful. The flesh can be chopped into tomato concasse, which is the basic tomato product for sauces. Typically, I’m doing this around 8:30 at night after a long day of work, and call me irresponsible, but I don’t have time to do that with 20 pounds of tomatoes. I live with some seeds and skins and, when it is important, I’ll pass the defrosted tomatoes through a Foley food mill.

If you have a lot of heirloom or regular tomatoes, you can certainly freeze those. The food police won’t show up at your door. These tomatoes have more moisture than the plum variety and you may have to account for that in cooking, but the flavor will still be good.

My methods are pretty simple. Most of the tomatoes get washed and chopped into large dice. I fill a baggie with one cup of chopped tomatoes, flatten it slightly, and twist-tie it shut. The flattened bags are easier to stack in the freezer. Over the winter, I pull out a bag or two of tomatoes and add them to my sauces. The occasional roll of tomato skin or the seeds don’t bother me, and, when they do, there is always the food mill.

When I get tired of bagging, I dump the rest into a large pot and simmer them for about 15 minutes or until they are just cooked. I push the tomato sauce through a food mill and pour it into muffin tins (½ cup each) and deli containers (1- and 2-cup sizes) and freeze these as well. I dump them out of the containers into a couple of large zip-lock bags for those times when you want a smooth sauce without seeds or skin. No seasoning, since they could end up in something Southwestern, Mediterranean or Indian, each with different spicing needs.

You can also make your own oven-dried tomatoes pretty easily. Slice plum tomatoes lengthwise and scoop out the seeds with your finger. Lay them cut side up on a cookie sheet lined with aluminum foil and brush with a little olive oil. (Orange zest is a great addition as well. Zest the orange over the tomatoes after they are prepped and on the tray.) Bake in a 275-degree oven for about four to six hours, moving them every half hour or so to keep them from sticking. The tomatoes will get pretty dry, but will still have some moisture in them. Put into a jar and cover with olive oil and store in the refrigerator. Mine get moldy after three weeks, especially if I let the olive oil fall below the tomatoes, so use them up quickly.

Corn is next. You should be overbuying corn each time you get some and freezing the extras.

Blanch or steam the corn before you freeze it to stop the enzymes in the corn from converting the sugar into starch. Plunge the corn into boiling water for about three minutes, or steam it for about six. I have a wok with a metal steamer tray that works great for four to six ears at a time.

Removing corn from the cob is pretty easy. Put a small cutting board in a large roasting pan. Shuck the corn, stand it upright on the cutting board, and slice the kernels off. If you cut too shallowly, there will still be part of the kernel on the cob. If you cut too deeply, you’ll feel the knife hit the cob. After a dozen ears, you’ll have the technique pretty much down. The roasting pan will catch most of the kernels that fly off the cob as you cut. You can run your knife along the cobs to scrape out some corn milk, which is a tremendous flavor enhancer to any corn dish. Don’t freeze the corn milk; use it right up.

Freeze the corn in 1- or 2-cup portions in baggies or some other container that you can make airtight. It is enormously satisfying to serve a succotash or corn pudding for Thanksgiving and casually mention that you froze it in August. It will lose some sweetness, but thanks to today’s modern super-sweet corn, there is some sugar to spare.

Pesto freezes easily and it is the best way to preserve basil. The books all recommend leaving out the salt and the Parmesan cheese before you freeze it. A nice trick is to freeze it in ice-cube trays, then save the little cubes in a baggie. To use, simply defrost as many cubes as you need and mix with grated Parmesan cheese. It loses a little color and some texture and you might have to drain off a bit of liquid. When you dump the pesto onto hot pasta sometime in February, the fragrance of fresh basil will offset any minor color variations. Pesto is also great in minestrone or vegetable soups, where it is called pistou. Put a tablespoon in the bottom of each bowl before you ladle on the soup.

Here are some recipes to use now, or in midwinter.

Corn Maque Choux

Vegetable Soup With Pistou

Mussels With Marinara Sauce

Originally Published in the Daily Hampshire Gazette, August 31, 2007

CISA, the Community Involed in Sustaining Agriculture, is a Pioneer Valley organization that works to promote the local agriculture. Its Local Hero campaign, trumpeting local farms and restaurants and markets that sell their produce is one of their more well-known projects.

Several months ago, they asked me to guest chef a party they were giving in July. I was supposed to work with another writer, but she had conflicts so they paired me with Pat Shannon, chef-owner of the Side Street Cafe in Florence. Great, I remember thinking, take a home cook whose chops are not at their peak and team up with a chef. My misgivings grew since there was as much a potential downside to my participation as an upside. As with most of my cooking misgivings, it turned out fine. Pat is a good guy–easy to work with and not egotistical–and the dinner went off pretty smoothly.

CISA got a lot of the local farms to dontate vegetables, beef, lamb, cheese, and honey. Bart’s contributed some sorbet and People’s Pint some beer.

The day of the party, I went to the restaurant and helped prep. Pat did the heavy lifting–marinating the beef and lamb, reducing the marinate, baking off the pattypan squash we intended to stuff with goat cheese, arugula and roast red peppers, deep-frying the wonton triangles for the smoked salmon apps. I did a lot of chopping and prepping, though I made some mint chutney and a blue-cheese dip he liked. During the event, he put things together while I grilled, and we teamed up on the creme brulees and baked goat cheese drizzled with reduced port wine and honey.

It was a great party and since we had food for twice the number of guests, we made up gift bags of cruditees, (separate bags of) cooked and uncooked meat, and cheese for those who lingered. It pretty much cured me of the desire to be a restaurant cook, given that it was a more or less average day for Pat.

My mother once told me I’d know when I was old because I would start reading obituaries. Honestly, I just happen on these articles altho I do read obits now. Scary when more and more of the names are (were?) younger than I am.

Anyway, I saw an article about Vincenzo Marchesi’s, the owner of Amherst’s Donatello Baker, death from liver cancer last Thursday. I bought an inordinate amount of marzipan cookies and almond horns from him. He’d always call me Signore, making me feel like the transaction was happening in a small town in Italy rather than a small town in Western Massachusetts. I bought frozen gnocci and tortellini for my freezer. For small dinner parties, I’d go in, buy five or six slices of different cakes, which we later split and fought over.

Sorry to see him go. He was a good baker and a nice man and his bakery was a good addition to the local market scene.

I didn’t know Ulysses Brown for very long. Before I took a class at the CIA this April, I had my knife sharpened. Ulysses was in the book, a mile from my house and across the street from a friend. He was a compact black man, 68, who’d been a chef in California and at Smith College until he retired. He sharpened knives and small tools and we chatted about cooking and chefs. He said he was hanging a beef tenderloin for a couple of weeks. He told me he’d call me to let me know when he was serving it.

I said Sure not really expecting anything. After a couple of weeks, he called. We went over the day after my article about the CIA came out. He’d had some dizziness so a number of the guests were helping cook the different courses. I went to work on the trifle he wanted for dessert. Aside from the beef tenderloin, there was gumbo, steamed crawfish, salads, and more. Ulysses sat in the living room as we ringed the room and ate. I mowed into the crayfish, ate a couple of beef ribs, was lucky enough to get some gumbo. Everything was good. The trifle turned out well. My wife made two more trifles over the next week, she was so taken by the idea.

Ulysses was a good guy and a good cook. I kept meaning to go back, using some sharpening as an excuse. Now I can’t. Requisat in pace, chef. I’ll miss ya.

At the CIA, I made a reduction of shrimp shells and aromatics. I didn’t take it down enough to be syrupy (I couldn’t watch it and I was afraid it would burn.). I’ve been wanting to make it again. Our friend Gail is visiting and for lunch, I rubbed some shrimp with lemon and orange zest, paprika, and salt, skewered and grilled them. I took the stock down to syrupy. It got brown and sweet, with a shrimp overtone. I squeezed half an orange into the syrup, reduced it again, not as far. I served the shrimp on arugula with some tomato slices and good bread. and poured the orange reduction over it. Wonderful.

My grandmother made the best blintzes. Blintzes, for those who haven’t had them are small crepes, filled with slightly sweetened farmer cheese. My mother, a good cook in her own right, helped my grandmother for years, but couldn’t duplicate the taste. After my grandmother died, I would order blintzes in restaurants or from deli counters, but I was always disappointed.

My mother’s parents were from Romania. My grandmother left as a teenager, long enough to absorb her mother’s cooking. In between the roast beefs and roast chickens, she made the foods she grew up with. grandma made a vinegary eggplant, onion, green pepper and garlic relish she called shulatah, which I later learned meant salad. She served mamaliga (Romanian for polenta) with fried lox wings (the meaty part of the side fins of smoked salmon rolled in cornmeal and sautéed). She added helzel to her chicken soup. (For helzel, she sewed matzo ball batter into the breast skin of a chicken and poached it in the soup. It was delicious, even though you had to pay attention to avoid biting into the thread.) She fried smelts and when the shad ran in the spring, she served roe of the fish sautéed in butter. I never got to explain to her what an oxymoron was and she wouldn’t have cared. Roe of the fish what it was called. She was a good cook and let us kids raid the mayonnaise jar she kept filled with chocolate chips whenever we visited.

When you think back on the foods you loved as a child, the question is: did they really taste that good or were they simply familiar? Does the warmth of your families’ kitchens color your memories? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. All I know is that no one’s blintzes tasted like grandma’s.

While memory is a tricky thing, so are grandmother’s recipes. Grandmothers are notorious for knowing how much and how long without measuring cups or timers. My mother had many conversations with my grandmother about ingredients. They invariably ran like this: “When it looks right, you know it’s enough.” “How do I know what looks right?” “When it looks like this.”

I know of one person who filled measuring cups with flour, sugar, milk, etc. and had his grandmother make her blintzes. His grandmother poured the flour, stirred, and mixed and made her usual batch. He totaled up what was left and, voila, the recipe was his. The punch line, of course, is that they did not taste as good as his grandmother’s.

A couple of years ago, my daughter-in-law asked me to make her seafood crepes for her birthday dinner. I made a batch of crepes and a shrimp and scallop seafood filling. That night, when I bit into the crepe, through the shellfish my grandmother had never tasted, I got a taste of blintzes. Suddenly, grandma’s blintzes were within my reach.

Armed with James Beard’s crepe batter recipe and the knowledge that the local supermarkets sold farmer cheese, I set off to recreate grandma’s blintzes. I devoured a dozen recipes. They all used some combination of farmer cheese, cottage cheese, sour cream, and eggs in wildly varying proportions. I tried a few and I finally hit on a mixture that tasted familiar. So I subjected it to the only tests I knew. I made a batch for my cousin Barry and asked him whether they tasted like grandma Ethel’s. He ate six without stopping, while telling a long and involved story about my grandparents, so I still don’t know what he thought.

When I visited my parents, I made them a batch. My mother kept her distance while I cooked, repeating “that’s not how mom did it” at regular intervals. When we ate them, she said they tasted like grandma’s but grandma’s bletloch were lighter. “What’s a bletloch?” I asked “The wrapper, you know, for the blintzes.”

My mother and grandmother served them with a dollop of sour cream, which I never liked. As a child, I ate my blintzes unadorned. When I serve blintzes today, I serve them with blueberry sauce. My wife likes to sprinkle sliced strawberries with a couple of tsp of sugar and let them sit for 10 minutes before topping her blintzes. You could serve them with sautéed apples.

My grandmother left a world of horse-drawn carts before WW I and died in the world of the Internet. Her cooking changed when she reached America She found new and different ingredients. She lacked some of the familiar staples. Items that were luxuries at home were available everywhere. I live in New England now. I use the local ingredients. I’m not kosher. My generation’s cooking includes different ingredients and a different view of fats, carbs, and vitamins.

So, the question remains. Are my blintzes as good as my grandmother’s? James Beard claimed to remember every meal he’d ever eaten. I’m not that good. All I do know is that my blintzes are tasty and my family likes them.

So grandma, no one will ever make blintzes as good as you. But when I place my blintzes on the table, I hear other plates being placed on other tables in a line through grandma Ethel back to grandmothers I never knew. And watching my family eat my blintzes, I can see ahead to grandchildren I will never know. At least they’ll have my recipe, so they can change it to their own tastes.

Recipes

Grandma Ethel’s Blintzes

Blueberry Sauce