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Research Note 
 
Kasha: The Mighty Buckwheat Groat 
By: Dana E. Modell 
 

Abstract: 
Buckwheat kasha is what comes to mind when I think of food in hard times. Kasha is 
an omnifarious word in Russian food culture, describing a food category that 
encompasses many dishes that have a porridge like consistency. Eaten at and as any 
meal, Kasha can be served in a variety of ways. It is hearty, easy to prepare, filling, 
and nutritious. Inexpensive (both in the U.S. and in Russia when my family lived 
there) and easy to obtain, it has a long shelf life. In this paper I explore the role of 
kasha in my family’s foodways. Considering kasha within the framework of 
survival/survivor food and refugee food practices, I reflect on how those practices 
inform my experience/relationship to kasha.  
 
Keywords: buckwheat, kasha, survival, comfort, hard times, refugee 
 

Introduction 
During the Food and Culture graduate course offered in the Department of Folklore at 
Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador in Winter 2021, bridging the first and 
second year of the COVID-19 pandemic, we were asked to consider the question of food in 
hard times. In response to this prompt, a remarkably simple Russian Jewish food, 
buckwheat kasha, came to my mind. Wanting to understand why kasha, something I do not 
even particularly like, is so doggedly attached to my conception of food in hard times, I set 
out on an autoethnographic journey.  

 
What is Kasha? 
In its most basic preparation, buckwheat kasha is made with water and toasted buckwheat 
groats. The term “kasha” relates to any porridge type dish made of grains or seeds in both 
Russian culture, and more generally in the Yiddish language; Michael Wex specifies, “the 
‘unmodified’ word kasha refers to buckwheat kasha” (2016: 114). A staple food in Russia 
and in diasporic Ashkenazi (Central and Eastern European) Jewish cuisine, buckwheat 
kasha can be served in many ways, cold and warm, savory and sweet. It is eaten as a side 
dish or as a main dish, at any time of day, breakfast through supper. 

 
Memories of Kasha 
My family (mother, father, and grandmother) came to the United States from the former 
U.S.S.R. in 1980 when I was four years old. We were able to emigrate and were granted 
refugee status because we are Jewish. Our passage took us from St. Petersburg (then called 
Leningrad), through Vienna and Rome, to New York City. Some months later, we moved to 
Boston. I remember eating spaghetti with fresh, raw tomatoes in Rome, and our usual 
“home” foods (foods we had eaten when we lived in Russia) in Queens. My paternal 
grandmother and my mother were the main cooks in our family. In our house and in the 
houses of my parents’ Russian Jewish friends, “home foods” reigned, with occasional 
intermingling of new foodways learned in the U.S.   



    Modell, Kasha, Digest: A Journal of Foodways & Culture 8:1/2 (2021) 114 

 
My mother made kasha on the stove. She used a pot with a heavy and tight-fitting lid. After 
the buckwheat groats had been boiled briefly in water, she would take them off the stove 
and let the kasha rest. I recall her talking about this quite clearly. “Picture this'' she told me, 
“You have to put the pot in a warm dark place, a quiet place where it won’t be disturbed or 
tipped over, also where you can keep all of the heat and moisture in.  In Russia, we would 
put the kasha in a bed, under the down comforter, and leave it there for an hour or two. It is 
nice and warm there. Then the kasha is ready.”  This seemed fantastical, and the best kind 
of endorsement for making and eating kasha, which, in terms of tastes, I considered a basic 
and boring food.  “We don’t do this here?” I said. “Well, I do sometimes. Or other times, I 
just make it the whole way on the stove.” she said. I remember she made kasha right then 
and there, that same day, and we put it in the bed to steam after it had boiled a bit.  I think I 
was twelve at the time, but I felt like a little kid on a childhood adventure. The kasha tasted 
much better and reminded me of feather beds and white cotton bed linens (podadyalnik).  
The soft, nutty aroma was more enticing, and I felt a commitment to this dish that I had not 
felt before, an investment. After all, it had gone through all these journeys, from a little seed 
all the way to steaming in bed and now ready to be eaten. All the way from Russia to the 
U.S. we had nurtured it.  I suddenly wanted to eat this simple, almost boring food that had 
traveled so far, continent to continent, one bed to another. 
 
My paternal grandmother, my parents, and I all lived together until I was twelve. My 
grandmother had a big part in raising me, and still cared for and cooked for all of us even 
when we were no longer living in one place. She made kasha all the time. Mostly, she made 
it plain, and then served it with butter, or oil, sometimes milk, like a cold cereal. I do not 
think she ever made kasha varneshkes (with bow tie pasta and caramelized onions), which 
is the most common Jewish way of serving kasha in the U.S., but she and I talked about it as 
a curious recipe. Her idea was, “Why would you combine a starch with a starch?” Within 
that question was the suggestion that chubby Jewish girls such as she and I did not need 
more starches than what already made a good, filling meal. I think she was intrigued by the 
idea of the starchy extravagance but could not justify it. In my grandmother’s house (as is 
true in many Russian Jewish households) any main meal (dinner or supper) would be 
followed by something with tea (“k’chayoo”). My grandmother was a great baker, so in her 
house, something with tea would often be a homemade cake (like an apple cake or a cake 
similar to a blueberry strudel), or at the very least store-bought Maria cookies and berry 
preserves. There should be something “with tea” so, kasha, as a staple, would be on the 
healthier side.   
 
In the present day, my stepmother and father both make kasha, but it is not something that 
my stepmother serves when there are guests, even if the guests are just family. I don’t 
remember the last time I had kasha at their house, but I know she makes it on a fairly 
regular basis. My stepmother has made kasha for me and sent it to our house, because I 
have a tricky relationship with making kasha. I knew a key part of my exploration of this 
dish would be talking to her about how she makes this food and her family traditions 
around it.  
 



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In our home, my partner and I do not cook equally. I take on the role of primary cook, and I 
am reasonably good at it, but I cannot make kasha with any real success. For some reason, 
the simple preparation of buckwheat, boiling water, and salt evades me to the point that it 
either does not cook or does not taste like kasha once prepared, ending up soggy and full of 
water and grit. This failure of embodying my mother, grandmother, father, and stepmother 
really saddens me. I want to invoke this food tradition and engage with this network of 
family, of refugees and survivors, yet I cannot make this dish. This failure, and my overall 
lack of love for the tastes of kasha, left me wondering why this dish came so immediately to 
my mind when I was asked to think of food in hard times. It turns out, I had not truly 
chosen it. It had been recruited from memory (see Kasstan 2015). It came to my mind and 
stuck. I am not truly seeking this food; I am seeking its meanings.  In the words of Abarca 
and Colby (2016), I was looking for a narrative. What I began to wonder about and 
interrogate in the writing of this paper was, what meanings were I after?  What did I need 
from food in hard times?  

 
Who Eats Kasha and Who Makes It? 
Kasha is a food claimed by diasporic Ashkenazi Jews, by Russians, and more broadly by 
Eastern Europeans (see Jochnowitz 2014, Nakhimovsky 2006). My family left the U.S.S.R in 
response to oppression, systemic and individual, both historical and contemporary (at the 
time of our immigration). In this flight, my parents, especially my father, felt it was 
important to impart in me a sense of Jewishness outside of and in opposition to any sense 
of Russianness. I recall many conversations where I would report that “I said I was 
Russian” (within the context of explaining where I was from) and he would respond “You 
aren’t Russian, you are Jewish” (also within the place of origin context). This is a difficult 
thing to explain given the lack of day-to-day religious observance in my family, and at the 
same time, many people who consider themselves “ethnically” Jewish would understand 
exactly what he meant. This kind of diasporic, ethnic Jewishness is often conveyed through 
food and foodways (see Berlinger 2017, Cohen 2021, Gould 2013 and 2017, Wex 2016).   
 
Alice Nakhimovsky, in an article titled, “You are What They Ate: Russian Jews Reclaim Their 
Foodways,” writes about exactly this conflict of identities. While an in-depth discussion of 
this conflict is beyond the scope of this paper, what Nakhivosky captures best is the shared 
features between Russian and Jewish food, and the simultaneous deep divide. She writes 
that pre-revolutionary Jews kept their distance from Russian preparations due to Jewish 
food laws, while Russians kept their distance due to a “longstanding aversion to markedly 
Jewish foods and smells,” saying that (for example) you could “sniff out” a Jew based on 
their use of garlic (Nahimovsky2006: 2). In other words, each culture was positioned (in 
one case systemically, and in the other religiously) toward the other’s “otherness.” 
Nakhimovsky writes that pre-revolutionary Jews, to “join Russian high culture” mimicked 
these “sensory aversions,” while post-revolutionary Jews would consider Jewish food 
“family food, not for outsiders” because “Jewishness was something you did not advertise 
in public” (2006: 3).   
 
In her review of pre-revolutionary and Soviet cooking, Daniella Steila (2016) finds kasha to 
be a staple Russian food. Jewish foodways writers claim kasha and kasha varneshkes as a 
primary Jewish ethnic food (see Cohen 2021, Wex 2016, Silverstein 2019). But what is 



    Modell, Kasha, Digest: A Journal of Foodways & Culture 8:1/2 (2021) 116 

Jewish food?  Jake Cohen, a food writer and cookbook author, writes about Jewish cooking 
and identity in the introduction to his cookbook Jew-Ish. Cohen writes that Jewish food is 
ever evolving, yet “the only constant is the desire to hold on to the food of our people” 
(2021: x). He describes kasha varnishkes (the kasha recipe included in his book) as tasting 
like ''a big bowl of pasta had a Jewish lovechild with a grain bowl” (2021: 119).   
 
Wex, in his cookbook of Yiddish foodways, Rhapsody in Schmaltz: Yiddish Food and Why We 
Can't Stop Eating It, describes Ashkenazi food as a “vernacular food” with “slight regional 
variations on a relatively small number of themes” (2016: 118). These themes tend to be 
ones of making do, inexpensive and hearty ingredients, often chopped and combined, and 
spiced with what is at hand and easily available. In most cases, the foods are deeply cooked, 
and all possible parts of the raw materials are used (Wex 2016). Cohen calls this “old world 
food” (2021: x).   
 
Although kasha varnishkes are delicious, they feel adjacent to my experience, but not 
central to it. They feel “other” to me. I have realized (to my own shame in some ways) that 
this version of kasha, to me, speaks of a different kind of belonging.  Eve Jochnowitz, in her 
2014 dissertation titled, "All You Need Is A Potato: A Performance Ethnography Of The 
Foodways Of Russian-Jewish Immigrants In New York," explores this dichotomy of 
Jewishness. Kasstan (2015) and Gould (2013, 2017) each talk about levels of survivorship 
and types of immigration. Onions, mushrooms, pasta, time, schmaltz, committing to a 
savory dish (one that cannot also be served as sweet) and a national recognition of Jewish 
cooking (that envelopes a broad cultural fondness by those both Jewish and not Jewish) all 
speak to a certain representation that is outside my experience. This kind of cultural 
“acceptance,” visibility, and adoption by non-Jews of an overt performance of Jewishness, 
speaks to a permanence and belonging that I do not understand experientially (see Merwin 
2008, Silverstein 2019). Wex writes about Jewish food as rebellion, and yet, kasha 
varnishkes comes from a public tradition of foods. It is a deli food, and a food recognizable 
to city dwellers, both Jewish and non-Jewish, where my tradition comes from a place of 
quiet, necessity, and refugee practices (see Nakhimovsky, 2006, Wex 2016). Because plain 
kasha (as my family, and other Russian Jews, make and eat it) would not be recognized in a 
broader U.S. setting, in my growing up, it was a food that “we” ate that “they” did not eat. 
 
My kasha need not taste good. The tastes are secondary at best. It might even get in the way 
of a food for hard times. Most people writing about kasha served plain describe it as bland 
or unremarkable (see Gershenson N.D., Nathan 1998). Wex writes about Jewish food being 
first and foremost not about tastes but about the Bible, dietary law, Jewish biblical history, 
and rules and practices of observance. In talking about matzo, Wex explains that it is the 
symbolism of this unleavened bread, not the taste, that invokes Jewishness. He writes “it is 
the food of real slaves on the run, not wage slaves in repose […] (a) food to sustain you, a 
food of dire necessity […] it’s a food for the brain, not the belly” (Wex 2016: 8). In this case, 
Wex is speaking of the survival of the Jews in the desert in their flight from slavery, but this 
invocation of history is not far from what I began to understand about my thoughts of food 
in hard times. It is like the narrative Cohen (2021) invokes of these “traveling” recipes. My 
memories are about endurance, dependability, survival, and basic sustenance (see Abarca 
and Colby 2016, Sutton 2005, 2013). 



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Food, Memory, and Survival 
While interviewing my stepmother about kasha, she shared her recipe for cooking this 
dish: 
 
Combine buckwheat groats and water, ratio 1:1 
Add salt 
Boil 45 minutes to an hour 
Take off heat and let sit until the buckwheat absorbs the water 
 
She described the texture of the finished dish being variable, depending on how long it sits 
to absorb. If you eat the kasha immediately or almost immediately after cooking, it will be 
mushy, soft, and blended. If you let it sit and absorb for longer, then the individual groats 
will stand out. She confirmed my mother’s technique of putting the kasha to bed. She called 
this “under the pillow” [pad-padushkaya].  She said this was done for a number of reasons.  
First, this dish was initially made in an oven, and so would be naturally left to sit and 
absorb water. Later, in Soviet Russia, she explained that everything was limited, and you 
had one stove among many people living in a communal apartment, shared with extended 
family and with strangers as well (see Jochnowitz 2014, Nakhimovsky 2006). In order to 
“economize” on the use of the shared kitchen space, taking the kasha off of the stove as 
soon as possible and “finishing it” in your own living area (which is also likely shared with 
immediate or extended family) is more pragmatic.  Typically, this is done by boiling for the 
expected time, then wrapping in newspaper and sometimes also a blanket, and then 
putting it “under the pillow” until the kasha is steamed and finished (Rakhlevskaya 2020, 
2021).  
 
My stepmother also shared a folktale about kasha. It turns out the folktale is so common in 
Russian culture that there are children’s books, cartoons, and songs about it; a band is 
named after it.  The basic story is as follows: 
 
There is a soldier who tricks an old, greedy woman into making him a meal. The way he 
does this is by offering to cook an axe (sometimes he brings it and sometimes he finds it). In 
some versions he threatens her with it, in others not. The soldier wheedles or cajoles his 
way into having her add salt, grain or seed, (and in some versions carrots and potatoes) to 
the boiling water. Then, the pot is taken off of the stove. The axe is removed. They eat 
together. Sometimes this is looked at as a collaborative effort, but many versions focus on 
the soldier outsmarting the old woman. For example, when my father tells a version of this 
story, there is a distinctive emphasis on manipulating or even strong-arming the old 
babushka (Modell 2020, 2021). In Bonnie Carey’s translation and adaptation titled Baba 
Yaga’s Geese and Other Russian Stories, the soldier threatens the old woman with his fists 
(Carey 1973). In Carey’s version, and in my father’s retelling, the old woman is quoted 
saying “I never knew you could make kasha from an axe.” This line appears in most 
renditions1 (Ashliman 2008, Modell 2020, 2021).    
 
My stepmother tells the tale following the traditional story arc. Her telling is almost 
identical to the most common versions, but her family’s meaning-making is somewhat 



    Modell, Kasha, Digest: A Journal of Foodways & Culture 8:1/2 (2021) 118 

different. The focus is not on outsmarting the old woman, and the woman is not painted as 
greedy. In her telling, and in the context of her family’s use of this tale, the message was 
about making do, of accepting that sometimes things are on a make do basis, and that in 
those times a meal is just thrown together with what is available and what is at hand: a 
food in hard times (Rhalevskaya 2020, 2021). This narrative, these various contexts of this 
dish, is what I was looking to invoke in a food for hard times.  

 
This food sees us through survival contexts: as an “old world” peasant food, when we were 
living in the Pale of Settlement2, in the hostile and challenging environment of the U.S.S.R, 
(Jews in Soviet Russia), and finally in this new place of the U.S. In each of these locations we 
lived as a dispersed people (see Berlinger 2017, Jochnowitz 2014, Nakhimovsky 2006).  
 
In these embodiments, the dish, as well as the maker, was resilient and resourceful. These 
migrations invoke past, present, and future (see Kasstan 2015). Also, this food is simple. It 
requires very little (water, salt, buckwheat, a pot, a heat source). It is attainable. I found my 
stepmother’s story comforting because it matched my context for this dish. I needed my 
kasha to have traveled through these places and endured.  
 
I thought this would be a research note about food, but it is really about community, 
memory, and feeling. Arguably, those are key themes in almost any discussion of food. 
What I was after was a story, a narrative; what I want to remember, feel, belong to and 
connect with during hard times. I realized, when things are difficult, I do not want to feel 
soft, and I do not want to let my guard down. I want a food that brings me into a feeling and 
memory of resiliency and hardiness. I want something reliable that connects me to a 
network of people, both specific individuals, and a broader collection of peoples who have 
survived. These are communities I directly belong to, Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe, 
diasporic Jewish people, and also communities of imagination.  
 
During the COVID-19 pandemic, I think we are reaching for a memory of ways to survive by 
invoking past acts of survival: ancestral, communal, real, and imagined. The work on food 
and memory evokes a sense of love, of connection, of embodiment, but also, a sense of loss, 
of displacement, and of sorrow (see Gould 2017, Kasstan 2015, Sutton 2001, 2005, 2013, 
Tye 2010). The recipes of my grandmother are an invocation common among Jews; we are 
connecting a thread that may be continuous but is often brutally cut, or barely held on to, 
and yet, we do hold on. When times are hard, I want this sense of survival, of going back 
and going forward, simultaneously. I want the sense that I too, that all of us, will endure.  
 
In terms of tastes, I think comfort food has to do with sugar, with salt and fats, and with 
textures, like smooth and buttery, and temperatures, maybe the food usually being warm.  
In my family, kasha is eaten with butter, with milk, with oil, or just plain. My stepmother’s 
cousin eats it with honey! I imagine it may also have something to do with simplicity. 
Emotionally, comfort food relates first and foremost to love, kinship, belonging, and being 
cared for. The work on comfort food and foodways by Diane Tye, Jillian Gould, and Lucy 
Long each reflect on these elements of tastes and meaning (Gould 2017, Long 2017a and 
2017b, Tye 2010). There are elements of nostalgia and of sweetness. The emotions can be 



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fierce, but also soft (Sutton 2013). They are emotions to relax into, to wrap around yourself 
for warmth, and perhaps to be cosseted and consoled by.   

 
For immigrants, for refugees, and for survivors, the past can be complex. Nostalgia can be 
bitter more than sweet, and remembrance can be painful, or even dangerous (Kasstan 
2015, Berlinger 2017). I cannot afford this type of softening, or the time machine of loss. 
 
In the end, food in hard times, to me, means a food for endurance. It is something reliable 
and simple. As Wex describes, it is a food to travel through the desert with (2016). My 
kasha is an embodiment, and also a concept; it is a food of networks. Tastes are not so 
important. Maybe taste is even a distraction. Yet taste cannot completely be ignored. Kasha 
tastes like rye bread, like pumpernickel, like my family food, like survival, and, maybe, like 
triumph. It is such a simple food, yet it endures.     

 
Notes: 

1  The likely ATU number for this story is 1548, as it is similar to “Stone Soup” stories. 
2 The Jewish Virtual Library describes The Pale of Settlement as the geographical area where Jewish people 
were allowed to settle, within the borders of Russia, spanning the late 15th century through World War I.  This 
geographical area changed over time, and reflected an overall approach toward controlling peoples and their 
movements.  The restrictions on Jewish people in this context included where they could live, where they 
could work, and what professions they could practice. Yiddish was the common language spoken by the Jews 
living in the Pale of Settlement. 



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Wilder's Classic Stories. New York. Harper Collins.   
 
Wex, Michael. 2016. Rhapsody in Schmaltz: Yiddish Food and Why We Can't Stop Eating It. 
New York: St. Martin Press.   

 

Interviews: 

Modell, Mark. 2021. Interview with author. March 16. 
 

Modell, Mark. 2020. Interview with author. November 24. 
 



Digest: A Journal of Foodways & Culture 8:1/2 (2021) 

 

  

123 

Rahlevskaya, Veda. 2021. Interview with author. March 16. 
 
Rahlevskaya, Veda. 2020. Interview by author. November 24. 

 


	Vallianatos, Helen and Kim Raine. 2008. Consuming Food and Constructing Identities among Arabic and South Asian Women. Food, Culture, & Society. Vol.11 (3): 355-373.
	Wex, Michael. 2016. Rhapsody in Schmaltz: Yiddish Food and Why We Can't Stop Eating It. New York: St. Martin Press.
	Modell, Mark. 2021. Interview with author. March 16.

