Digest: A Journal of Foodways & Culture 8:1/2 (2021): 113- 123 © American Folklore Society 2021 113 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. Digest: A Journal of Foodways & Culture 8:1/2 (2021) 115 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). Digest: A Journal of Foodways & Culture 8:1/2 (2021) 117 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 Digest: A Journal of Foodways & Culture 8:1/2 (2021) 119 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. 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