The very first challah from Olya Shtalberg

The recipe I use to make challah — I took a photo of my classmate's recipe at Masa. And she brought it from a Rebbetzin from the St. Petersburg synagogue. The first time we made challah together was in the dorm (it was my first challah); since then, I have been making it using this recipe, and I send this photo to everyone who asks for the recipe.

View the recepie

View all stories

Gefilte fish (Eli Schneider’s family recipe)

On the eve of Rosh ha-Shanah, I want to share with you a recipe for gefilte fish. A plain, brown Ashkenazi dish? Yes, but not quite.

View the recipe

meat

Yozhiki with the story from Dasha Tsivina

Dasha’s magical yozhiki that mend quarrels - her grandmother’s meatballs in tomato sauce. When Dasha was little and upset, her grandmother would say that the yozhiki would take all her troubles away. Now, Dasha makes them for her grown-up children, and they still work wonders, especially when served with mashed potatoes!

View the recipe

pastry

Moldovan pies vărzăre (from Sonya Kopylova)

My grandparents lived in Tbilisi (my grandfather was a Tbilisi Armenian, and my grandmother, a Jew on her mother’s side, evacuated to Georgia from Kharkiv as a teenager and stayed there). When I was little, in the 1980s, every winter, they would send us a package from sunny Georgia to our home in the Moscow suburbs.