So it occurred to me, while making my grandmother’s noodle kugel recipe to take to my friend’s Serbian pig roast last Saturday (long story), that the original version as handed down from her mother was probably not made with a mixture of cottage cheese, sour cream, cream cheese, and milk – American dairy products don’t always resemble their East European analogues, and I sure doubt there was such a thing as low-fat cottage cheese or Philadelphia cream cheese in your average Galician shtetl, and I don’t know that in Camden, NJ, in the 1910s, one could go to one’s local grocery and buy the original ingredients.
I’m guessing it was originally made with farmer’s cheese, and maybe also sour cream, but how can I reverse-engineer the recipe so that it tastes more like the original that my great-grandmother would have made in their village in southern Poland, near the Slovak border?
Here’s the recipe (or as much of a recipe as I could get my grandmother to explain; you know how grandmothers can be, well, not so precise about handing down family recipes):
½ lb. egg noodles
6 eggs
1 pint sour cream
8 oz. cream cheese
8 oz. cottage cheese
Cinnamon
Golden raisins (about 1 cup)
Cinnamon (about 1 teaspoon)
2 large tart apples, such as Granny Smith, peeled and grated
2 cups milk
Assembly is fairly simple: cook the noodles. Mix together the eggs, sour cream, cream cheese, cottage cheese, and cinnamon. Add the cooked noodles, raisins, and grated apples. Pour into a buttered lasagna pan and pour the milk over the mixture. Bake at 325 degrees for about 1.5 hours, until the top is golden brown. Can be eaten hot or cold.
Anyone want to take a crack at reverse-engineering this one?
You’re in Chicago, so find yourself a good Polish deli and they should sell some fresh white cheese called biały ser (literally, “white cheese.”) This is the stuff that’s used in Central and Eastern European dishes. It’s got a finer and drier curd than cottage cheese. Like you say, it’s similar to farmer’s cheese, but farmer’s cheese can be all over the map in terms of consistency. I’m guessing the mix of cottage and cream cheese is used to substitute for the general consistency of the Polish biały ser.
I personally would use the biały ser on its own (no cutting with cottage or cream cheese) and the sour cream. You may have to add a little more or less sour cream, depending on the moisture level of the biały ser.
There are a couple south-central European delis out by me that could probably set you up. If you still have a gall bladder don’t get one of their meat pies (“Made by our mom!”) and plan on having leftovers for a couple days. Totally delicious but huge and probably contains an imbalance of fats–plenty of pork and beef fat but if you added milkfat, like cheese, the decadence police will arrest you. If you don’t die first.
Is this more or less the same as Russian tvorog (which is usually translated as “farmer’s cheese”)? I can buy that at the place I get most of my groceries, in Skokie - no special trips needed to Polish delis (not that I am usually averse to trips to random ethnic grocery stores, but in case I am crunched for time or something)? Or Arab fresh white cheese? Or Latin queso fresco?
It’s a German fresh cheese, which can be similar to the aforementioned bialy ser. However, the quark I’ve seen ranges wildly in terms of texture: I’ve seen stuff that’s almost like sour cream in consistency to stuff that’s just right. I have no idea where one would find quark around here.
Yeah, there’s nothing that goes better with roast pig than a few dairy products!
(The choice of kugel as a potluck side dish for a pig roast was kind of an inside joke. My friend has this pig roast every year; this was my 3rd. She is a member of a Balkan dance ensemble, and I am generally one fo the few people there who isn’t a first-generation Southeast European immigrant. The first year I went, her mom asked me at the end of the night whether I wanted to take home some roast pork, and I told her “sure - just don’t tell my grandmother.” She asked, “what, is your grandmother Jewish or something?” “Umm, well, now that you mention it, yeah.” She was totally mortified - apparently she had assumed I was Italian or something, probably because I’d spent most of the evening being chatted up by an Italilan guy.)
