Last week, “The Bride” director Maggie Gyllenhaal and her brother Jake Gyllenhaal shared their mother’s banana bread recipe with the New York Times.
When Maggie was asked about the food that brings her back to childhood, her answer was as Jewish as her birth name (which is, fun fact, Margalit, the ancient Hebrew word for pearl). Her answer? Kasha varnishkes.
If you grew up eating kasha varnishkes, just those two words should evoke some powerful sense memory. The buttery, schmatlzy dish of bowtie pasta with buckwheat and fried onions is pure primal comfort for many of us who grew up in Ashkenazi homes, where generations of Jews have eaten the hearty dish. It’s a staple that the Gyllenhaals’ mother, Jewish screenwriter Naomi Foner Gyllenhaal, obviously passed down to her kids.
“My mom used to buy frozen kasha varnishkes. It’s basically bow-tie pasta with buckwheat groats. She used to buy it frozen in these little plastic bags, and then we used to put them in boiling water,” Gyllenhaal remembered.
The dish itself is uniquely Ashkenazi Jewish. The word “kasha” means buckwheat, from a Slavic word used to refer to several grains used in porridge, and “varnishkes” is Yiddish for bowtie pasta.
It’s a dish that’s literally centuries old, though has shape-shifted throughout the years. Food historian Gil Marks posited that it started out as kasha dumplings (varenki in Ukrainian), and later included homemade noodles. The bowtie pasta was introduced when Jewish immigrants came to America and found it a more convenient option (it was also in America that those mouthwatering caramelized onions were introduced to the dish).
Recently, Maggie had a very relatable experience at Russ & Daughters, one of the siblings’ favorite New York haunts (Jake previously collaborated with the appetizing stronghold on a fabulous smoked-fish evoking tie-dye t-shirt).
She looked at the menu and saw that they had kasha varnishkes: “I was like, ‘Oh my God, I’m totally getting that, I love that.’ And it was probably, technically, a hundred million times better than the frozen version that I grew up with, but I prefer mine. I prefer the memory of the old one. I wonder if people still make that.”
To answer Maggie’s question, yes, of course, people still make kasha varnishkes! Those people also include the writer of this very piece, because nothing quite compares to the (admittedly acquired but oh-so-comforting) taste of kasha.
Our friends at The Nosher offer both a classic kasha recipe and a wonderful recipe that includes mushrooms — and that was almost lost to the Holocaust. And if you, like Maggie, prefer your kasha varnishkes in a bag, Spring Valley still sells it in that nostalgic format.
For those looking to enjoy kasha varnishkes in New York, however, Jake mentions in the interview that S&P, a restaurant that opened in the space previously occupied by the almost century-old Eisenberg’s Sandwich Shop, serves “really good kasha varnishkes.”
We definitely trust these talented siblings when it comes to Jewish food!
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