The Jewish tradition of kasha (buckwheat groats)

To start with, "kasha" can describe recipes for Indian dishes for mutton or chicken, as I found out recently, but this page is about roasted buckwheat groats.

"Groats" is a name for the seeds or kernels from the buckwheat plant, what would be the individual grains if buckwheat was a grain like wheat or rye. While "groats" could theoretically mean seeds with or without the hard black hulls, when you see that term on packaged food, it means hulled seeds. And if the package is in the "ethnic " aisle next to the boxes of Shabbat candles, the jars of gefilte fish, and the Manischevitz wine, then the term "groats" means roasted (toasted) buckwheat kernels. Wolff's is the most popular brand of traditional kasha, and it comes in three textures: coarse (big), medium, and fine (small).

If you find, when you get home, that somehow you've ended up with raw buckwheat groats, you can turn them into toasted kasha like this.

Now, if you say "kasha" to the average Jewish person, they're going to say "varnishkes."  Kasha varnishkes is one of those recipes that people either love or hate. The translation is "buckwheat with noodles," and almost always it specifically means bowtie pasta. 

[Etymology Moment: People keep telling me that "varnishkes" means bowtie pasta, and I dunno about that. The Yiddish word for "necktie" is "shnips" and it's an old enough word that it probably means cravat or string tie (tied in a bow or not) or whatever is around the neck. And "noodles" in Yiddish are "farfel," one of those words that has a general and a specific meaning; farfel is little pieces of something, so needles are farfel because they're little pieces of dough. But wherever the word "varniskes" came from, in this traditional recipe, it refers to bowtie pasta, known in some places as "butterfly" pasta and in Italian households as farfalle. (Farfel, farfalle -- I'm seeing a pattern here.]

Anyway, here's a  video recipe  for kasha varnishes.

But that isn't the only traditional Jewish kasha dish. Knishes, a deli favorite, are a bit like turnovers. In the tradition of sandwiches, hand pies, and stuffed pita, knishes have been popular with working people because they are portable. The portability also made knishes a popular food at Coney Island.

The best-known type of knish is potato. . .


but knishes can have all kinds of fillings.

 

Kasha knishes come in a few variations.  There are kasha-mushroom knishes. The mushrooms are optional. Sometimes a knish has simple kasha filling, though of course there need to be onions.  And then there's a potato-kasha hybrid for those who take a step away from the center of the traditional path.

And we're not done yet with buckwheat groats in Jewish recipes. While tabouli (tabbouli, tabbouleh, taboule, tabboule, and so on and so forth forever) salad is most often made with bulgur wheat, some people make it with kasha. Here's one recipe recipe for kasha tabouli.

There's another delicious-looking version of kasha tabouli on this site's All over the globe page.

For centuries in Eastern Europe, buckwheat has grown on mountainsides (rich people had farms in the valleys, where the soil accumulated, and poor people got the rocky slopes), and it didn't require complex, expensive equipment or fertilizers to flourish. Thus kasha was a food for the people, including Jews. Besides kasha with noodles, the groats were made into porridge, bread, and other basic foods which provided protein and other nutrients.

People who haven't grown up with buckwheat find a Edittaste a little strong, but for many Jews, kasha tastes like home -- if not one's own household, then Bubbie and Zayde's home.  

This page contains a lot of Ashkenazi (Eastern European) tradition. I'm still researching buckwheat in the Sephardic cuisines of Spain, Morocco, and other countries. So far, what I've come across iare mostly articles like this one about which pseudograins are acceptable for Passover.  I'll keep digging till I find some good stuff to add to this page.