Cheese Blintzes & Pineapple Raisin Dessert Kugel

By Jane Ammeson

Calling themselves culinary sleuths, Marilyn and Sheila Brass frequently hit 20 garage sales or even more on a Saturday morning. Their quest? Old recipes, old cookbooks and antique kitchen equipment. Turning their hobby into a cookbook, they wrote “Heirloom Baking with the Brass Sisters: More Than 100 Years of Recipes Discovered from Family Cookbooks, Original Journals, Scraps of Paper and Grandmother’s Kitchen.”

It’s a great cookbook, easy to read and the photos make you want to start cooking. But talking to the Brass sisters, which I did by phone last week, is equally enchanting. Enthusiastic, one of their best finds came from a garbage dump—an old handwritten cookbook that one of their followers found in a heap of trash in Maine.

“It had a recipe for the best banana cream pie we’ve ever had,” said Marilyn (or was it Sheila?).

Recreating old recipes isn’t easy. Sometimes they’re hard to read. Oven temperatures are often left out as women using wood burning stoves just kind of knew from experience what the right temperature was for baking a cake or a pie. Each small town along a river usually had its own flour mill, so flour was different from place to place.

“We tested each recipe many times,” said Sheila (or was it Marilyn?). “Some we tested ten times.”

The sisters, who live and work in Boston, also included many of their family recipes including one for their mother’s blintzes.

"We remember our mother making blintzes in the early summer," the sisters write in their book. "The ritual was always the same—the clean white bed sheet on the kitchen table, the battered little frying pan, and the crumbled piece of wax paper dipped in melted butter for greasing it. After each blintz was fried, she’d flip the pan onto the covered table, lining them up on the sheet. We’d rush to eat the filled blintzes with sour cream and applesauce."

Another favorite is Aunt Ida’s poppy seed cookies.

“Aunt Ida died when she was 93 and we bought these to the Shiva,” said Marilyn. “That was our tribute to her.”

Cheese Blintzes
For blintzes:

2 eggs, beaten
6 cup water
5 cup flour
4 tablespoons butter, melted, plus
extra for frying
1 teaspoon sugar
Pinch of salt
1 teaspoon vanilla

For the filling:
6 oz. farmer cheese or pot cheese
4 oz. (5 package) cream cheese
1 egg, lightly beaten
2 teaspoons sugar
5 teaspoon vanilla
Pinch of salt

1 9 4 0 s

Makes 8 to 10 blintzes.

1. Coat an 8-inch frying pan with vegetable spray. Set aside sheets of wax paper or parchment paper to place between blintzes.

2. To make the blintzes: Combine eggs and water in a bowl. Add flour, butter, sugar, salt, and vanilla and whisk until smooth. Strain batter to remove any lumps.

3. Heat pan on medium-high heat. Pour one fourth cup of batter into pan, swirl to cover bottom of pan lightly, and pour excess batter back into bowl. Fry until blintz comes away from pan and is opaque in color. Loosen edges of blintz with a butter knife and flip with a spatula onto wax paper or parchment paper. Place each cooked blintz between sheets of wax or parchment paper. Continue to fry
blintzes, spraying pan before each one, until the batter is used up.

4. To make the filling: Combine farmer cheese, cream cheese, eggs, sugar, vanilla, and salt in a bowl. Beat with a wooden spoon until combined.

5. Place a blintz on a work surface and spoon some filling onto the center. Fold in two opposite edges, overlapping in the middle, and then fold in ends, to make a neat package. Repeat for each blintz, dividing the filling evenly among them.

6. Melt 1 tablespoon butter in a frying pan or on a greased griddle and add blintzes. Fry until golden brown on both sides, turning once. Serve at once with sour cream and applesauce.

Store leftover or unfried blintzes on a plate, loosely wrapped in
wax paper in the refrigerator.
Sweet Tip
You can also fill your blintzes with fresh blueberries mixed with sugar and a little cinnamon.

Pineapple Raisin Dessert Kugel

Makes 16 servings.

1 9 3 0 s

"We love kugel," the Brass sisters write, "especially sweet dairy kugel made with butter, cheese, sugar, eggs, and sour cream. Some argue that kugel is meant to be served as an accompaniment to a main dish. We disagree. We think kugel can be eaten for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, in between meals, and even as a dessert!"

F o r k u g e l:

1 12-oz. package wide egg noodles
2 cups cottage cheese
5 cup brown sugar
1 cup sour cream
4 eggs, beaten
5 cup butter, melted
4 teaspoon salt
4 teaspoon nutmeg
5 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup canned pineapple chunks,
drained
1 cup raisins

For topping:

3 tablespoons butter, melted
4 tablespoons brown sugar

1. Set the oven rack in the middle position. Preheat the oven to 350°F. Coat a 9-inch by 13-inch ovenproof glass baking dish with vegetable spray.

2. To make the kugel: Cook noodles according to package directions and drain thoroughly.

3. Place noodles in a large bowl. Mix in cottage cheese, brown sugar, and sour cream. Add eggs, butter, salt, nutmeg, cinnamon, and vanilla and mix to combine.
4. Roll pineapple in paper towels to remove excess moisture. Chop
coarsely and fold into noodle mixture. Fold in raisins.

5. To add the topping: Turn noodle mixture into baking dish. Pour melted butter over top and sprinkle with brown sugar. Bake 50 to 55 minutes, or until kugel bubbles and noodles on top turn golden brown. Place on rack to cool. Serve hot or cold with sour cream. Store covered with wax paper in the refrigerator.