
Walter has given much thought to what to serve for a "typically Jewish-American" meal. Of course, what is typical depends on family history, so he has chosen dishes that he knows from his own family, which has Russian-Jewish roots a few generations back.
As a starter, raw herring, chopped liver on matzes, and Walter's home-made pickles are served. You could say these are an "acquired taste", as not everybody will enjoy the distinctive flavours. My own favorite is the pickles; nice and garlicky.

Another rule is not eating pork (a dietary rule more religions have in common). Walter actually doesn't really have a problem with eating pork, but in college the meat served was usually so disgusting, he decided to tell the cook he was kosher. In a dorm of about 50 people, only 2 people ate kosher. This meant the cook would have to pay a little more attention to the kosher meat, and it tasted somewhat better than the pork served to the other students. Walter confides another trick for surviving dormitory food is developing a taste for hot sauce and horse radish, to mask/improve the taste of what is served.
No need for that with this delicious soup. I dip the buttered challah in to soak up the liquids, then start on the cooked beet and beef cubes. Once in a while I bite on a whole pepper kernel, left in "just to make things exciting".
My dad jokingly suggests I take a photo of him peeing in the bath tub, to show how beets make your urine red, but I decide not to take him up on his offer... A discussion follows on the effect of asparagus on urine's aroma, and I am glad I already finished my bowl of borsht.
Looking forward to dessert: blintzes! These thin pancakes are a bit like French crepes, but are

There's a joke he often tells when blintzes come up in a conversation:
Moshe is a poor carpenter doing a job at a rich Jewish family. One night, he witnesses the wife making blintzes for her husband. It smells and looks so good, that when he gets home, Sam says to his wife: "Sarah, why don't you make blintzes for us? That's what they were eating at my employer's house and it looked really good!" Sarah answers: "But Moshe, we don't have any butter...you need butter to make good blintzes!" "Ach, Sarah, you are such a good cook, I am sure that you can make blintzes without butter!" "But Moshe, we don't have eggs either..." "Sarah, you are such a great cook, I know you can make blintzes without eggs!" In the end, Sarah does her best and serves the butterless, eggless blintzes. Moshe eats them and muses: "Hmmm, I really don't know why these rich people like their blintzes so much!"

We top the blintzes with homemade blackcurrant jelly (blackcurrants from Walter's garden), and after two of them, I am completely stuffed. It's especially the cream cheese inside that makes it so filling.
The nice thing about the photo at left is the plate, which used to be my grandma's: in a way the inspiration for this meal. The EKJ (somewhat deteriorated by our dishwasher) are her initials. The plate was a wedding present made by her father, who was a first generation immigrant to the USA. We even have an original photo of him painting ceramics in Russia (now Ukraine) -and another of him serving in the tsarist army with a big fur hat...
(The original post about this meal is from April 25, 2006)
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